Star Trek: Stories

Since the Trek franchise has gone buck-wild and is currently airing 3 live-action and 2 animated series, with at least 2 more in the works, I thought it's time to publicly air an idea for a show I've been thinking about for years.

This show would not focus on a ship or a space station.  It wouldn't really even be about Starfleet at all.  It would be an anthology series, each episode independent of the other, with an arc in the background vaguely tying all the stories together.

There would not be any recurring characters, although a featured character in one episode could reoccur as a background character in another.

So, if not Starfleet, who would be the characters?  Let's imagine a ten-episode series, like 2/3rds of the current crop (Strange New Worlds, Picard).  Just off the top of my head, episodes could feature:

1. An autistic student

2. A teacher

3. A homeless person

4. An artist

5. A stay at home mom or dad

6. A robot repair person 

7. A (ocean) ship's captain

8. A miner

9. A con-artist

10. An underwater archeologist (uncovering sunken Florida)

These are just ideas. Any other ten ideas could be just as valid.  I was thinking it could take place on Earth, or anywhere in the Solar System.  Or galaxy.  But I like the idea of the long-term effects of space exploration and alien contact on the human condition.

The background story could be an impending invasion by a powerful species, a rift in space-time, a reversal of the Earth's poles, or predicted devastating solar flares.  Whatever, actually.  It could be meaningful, or it could be a Macguffin.  This would be the background as each story played out.

The autistic kid could feature in episode one, then segue into the teacher's home life. She or he often passes a homeless person and the next episode begins when the teacher gives him or her an apple.  The artist might come in as a flashback....maybe the homeless person was an artist?  Who knows?  One story would flow into the next based on one character's minor role in an episode.  The ship captain has a reserved archeologist on board.  The following episode takes place underwater as the archeologist uncovers....what, exactly?

Meanwhile, ominous PSA's warn of what to do if the sun starts shooting flames.  Or how to detect space-time unraveling in your dining room, or if, if, if....

Starfleet might enter the picture, sometimes sympathetically, but maybe sometimes as self-righteous busy-bodies some characters resent.  Not all main characters have to be human, and episodes could take place anywhere in the Solar System:  Luna, Mars, Enceladus, Titan, Europa, Ceres.

The miner might be the stay at home dad's sister, seen briefly as a holo-mail or on a screen saying happy birthday.

The characters can be linked very tangentially, if barely at all.  

Endless possibilities. Basically, no starships, Starfleet, alien battles, or great villains.  Just everyday life in the Utopic future.

So, whaddya think, Trek fans?  Green light this sucker and let's see what it means to busk outside a transporter pad in 24th-century Paris....

Terror Below -- The Sea

In my previous posting, I suggested that we are especially terrified by terrors below because we are instinctually programmed to expect attacks from above and beside, but never below. Yet as descendants from tree-dwelling monkeys, we carry genetical programming that does anticipate attack from below ... In other words, there’s this residual fear of attack from below, but that residual has been buried (so to speak) -- until it necessarily arises.

I suggested that this argument is especially pertinent to the sea. On the land we might presumably safely assume that nothing can attack from beneath us, but on the ocean, we ought to expect it, right?

Yet we find terrors beneath the surface of the ocean especially horrifying.

There’s this whole sense of the impossibility of boating, for example. “My God!” one ought to reasonably realize, "I’m barely suspended above miles of depths full of horrors, held barely in suspension by surface tension!" It’s the same terror that so many people feel when flying: "Wake up!" we scream inside. "My God! Falling is just pretend! We’re going to fall!"

Vertigo, that dizzying horror we feel on the edge of cliff, ought to be present in every trip on a boat. I suspect that it is there, but shoved back into the back of our minds ready to be reawakened as soon as something surfaces.

Compound this with the true horrors of the deep: sharks, giant squid, whale so big that they should see us as mere squashable gnats…

No wonder, then, that so many horror films and Greek legends have picked up our terrors from below when skimming the surface of those great unknown seas....

Anyhow, in the next couple of postings I want to first examine the more unexpected horrors of terrors beneath us while we are land, followed by an examination of related mythology.

The Ballad of the Singing Loo # 5

There's now a suit from the FBI who stands in the bathroom all day long till the library closes. He never sits, not even to shit, not even to eat. I couldn't figure it out until I realized that there were actually two of them and some unseen changing of the guards.

I recognized them both, of course, from their earlier assignment, checking various patron records. This was even before the RNC was officially set here. On rainy days or spring thaws, scraggly hooded boys from the Urban Explorer's Action Squad used to come in and pore over the old sewer maps down in the subbasement where I worked ("when it's rainin', don't go drainin'"). The two suits would drop into the shadows and emerge the next day to examine the same maps.

Kevin, before he was laid off, had fun turning the tables, pulling the records of the two Feds to see what they were reading. He tried to chat them up, offer some reading recommendations, and he claimed that one of them was really into Daniel Clowes, that he'd actually caught the guy walking out of a bathroom stall with our copy of Like a Velvet Fist Cast in Iron. But of course you couldn't believe half of what Kevin said, even when it was true.

Anyhow, the two suits were older and must've resented this crap assignment, guns holstered and standing in the john all day being mistaken for queers. You could just imagine their younger bosses with their promising carreers and their blonde wives. These two were, in short, dangerous. I took to shitting at home.

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Previously on Laws of Silence:
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo

The Ballad of the Singing Loo # 4

Part 4: When You Piss in a Toilet

Two things are certain: I hate that toilet, and I miss Kevin. Fucking lay-offs.

A typical day now: I tell 20 people, “The bathrooms are that way.” Then I alphabetize some books.

A typical day then? Me laughing as Kevin expounds, “When you piss in a toilet, dude, it sounds like a creek. You know that babbling sound, right? Think about those monkeys typing Shakespeare. If you piss and I piss and everybody else fuckin’ pisses long enough, well tinkle, tankle, bubble, babble, and *whamo!* the vocal ambulations waver just so and a real word emerges from babbling toilet water like the burning bush. And then they lock you up for saying so. Trust me, man. Lock ups.”

When the Hinckley library burnt down we had a field day. I know that’s bad, but we both hated their RFID catalog, which worked so great they fired two librarian assistants (new-found efficiencies, etc.). But something went awry when Harry Potter # 4 started to register as Harry Potter # 3. Then Harry Potter # 2 did the same. Manual systems kept up with the errors for a bit, but the problem spread to neighboring works in the stacks, the Rowleys and the Rowlinsons, and on down the line. Soon the library was threatened with the prospect of holding nothing but Harry Potter # 3. Kevin claimed that the actual books themselves began to change, a word or two at a time, that the physical collection itself slowly morphing into Harry Potter # 3. On top of that, he said that people were getting confused and returning personal copies of Harry Potter # 3 instead of whatever actual book they checked out. It was, in short, getting to be slim pickin’s at the Hinckley library.

Well anyhow, Kevin’s theories, man, that bullshit made my day roll. An RFID virus written by the FBI? The FBI convinced a “Harry-Potter-is-a-witch” wacko to burn down the Hinckley library?

“But … why?” I puzzled.

“A couple months before 911” Kevin looking shifty-eyed, “and someone in the Hinckley library is Googling all this crazy shit about the melting points of steel, the speed and fuel size of various planes, the physics of collision. The Feds found out, somehow got access to Google queries and traced it back. They were all over that place.”

“Seriously, dude,” he drolled, “Our library director’s ass-kiss thing with the Feds? Seriously, dude? Come on. What the fuck? What’s she so scared of, man?”

Silly stuff. But what the hell? Listening to Kevin’s theories sure killed time better than smuggling guitar tuners into whistling potties. And now he’s gone and the toilet coughed up that hairy hand and the Feds are all over us, and every time that toilet whistles—Phewwy eeeee!—I feel alone.

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Previously on The Laws of Silence:
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo #3
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo #2
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo

The Ballad of the Singing Loo # 3

Thus continues The Ballad of the Singing Loo:

Chapter 3

As luck would have it, I have one of the world's largest beards (I've check Guinness' World Records). At 9 it was fuller than most men's. I shaved it once: age 7, the day my dad died. By 10, they assumed I was a dwarf and I had my run of the bars.

Paradoxically, I have some of the neatest eyebrows you'll ever see on a man. Plucked daily, searching out the grays, the unruliness. It stings, and I rub my left index and middle finger on my thumb rapidly, which somehow relieves the pain.

I've been injured twice. Once while rollerskating. Didn't know how to stop but loved going fast, 10 year-old beard flapping in the breeze. Slammed into a wall and my wrists killed. Three hours later my neck tensed up. I forced it left and a taught string grew tighter and tighter and focused into a globule on the back of my head. It gave way suddenly like a deep pimple, gloppy, feeling oozy and warm inside.

Second time was on a bike, hauling through a parking lot. A cable strung waist-high split the lot in two, but gray day, gray lot, gray cable ... and too late. The right-hand shifter caught me on the hollow spot by the balls. For several years, whenever I lifted something heavy I felt all warm and woozy there and thought about my grandfather's hernia, like a grapefruit that he'd stuff back inside wincing. Eventually I just stoped lifting heavy things.

The third time was when I saw that severed hand in the toilet. You'd think it'd look like a joke, floating in the toilet.

Nope.

I fuckin' flipped out, nailed my head on the stall door and nearly broke my thumb slamming out the bathroom door. But that wasn't what hurt. The flashbacks started that night.

Next day, nearly everyone laid off with the merger, I was left alone with a couple of Feds in town for the RNC, deep in the sub-stacks, shelving books, retrieving the books. "My God," I thought, "will no one help the widow's son?" and every 15 minutes like Old Faithful that toilet screamed.

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Previously on The Laws of Silence:

* The Ballad of the Singing Loo #2
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo

How to End the World # 4: Killer Worms

Worms are not native to Minnesota's Great Northern Woods.

They were eradicated about 10,000 years ago when the glaciers scrapped off the top soil. If nature ran her course, they would find their way back, for worms migrate 5 to 10 meter per year.

Enter the fisherman and his cast off bait.

Today, the Great Northern Woods of Minnesota are dying. Why? "Scientists slowly gravitated to the 'killer worm' theory in the mid-1990s."

And if that doesn't frighten you, check out this babysitter:


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Previously on the Laws of Silence:

* The Tale of the Lambton Worm
* How to Destroy the World # 3: Existential Angst, or OK by Me
* How to Destroy the World # 2: Asteroids
* How to Destroy the World

The Ballad of the Singing Loo, Part 2

Thus continues The Ballad of the Singing Loo:

Chapter 2

I was reading Boloña’s 2666 last night, ending section 2, when I hit two datum I wanted to store: 1) the name of a book, Bouvard and Pécuchet, that sounded interesting, and 2) a curious word, Adkintuwe, which sounded like a friend, "akin to me," and which meant “sending messages by the movement of branches” (221), reminding me of the internet, collaboration, projects. And I thought about “projects,” which were, it seemed, a projection of one’s thoughts and efforts, a projection of oneself, encapsulated, a snapshot in time. I thought of a lone oak on a hill, widespread branches swaying in the breeze and wondered what it meant to communicate by collaborative projections.

“Store the data,” I thought, and I reached behind a pile of books on my nightstand and found a scrap of paper and a pen, which were exactly the kind of paper scrap and pen I keep on my nightstand for these situations. On the scrap I found a note, obviously my handwriting, though I couldn’t remember writing it:

I saw something behind the mirror today. It was like looking out a window at night, mostly reflection, but something dark and unseen was clearly out there.

I picked up the pen and wrote these words. My wife was snoring. I turned off the light. I closed my eyes and I went to sleep. I dreamed. A hand in the toilet, floating a slow circle. Left hand, male, swollen, purple. A gold band in the bursting ring finger. The toilet flushed but without a sound and the hand spun and the fingers splayed and seemed to grip the edges of the drain. It wouldn’t go down. The water slowly filled and the hand rose, bobbed. Gray hairs, black hairs curled on knuckles. Was he Greek? The toilet started its whistle and I couldn’t look at the sound so I woke, half awoke.

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Previously on Laws of Silence:

* The Ballad of the Singing Loo