The Occasional Solipsist

There has been no larger cultural influence on my life than Star Trek.

Its as simple as that.

My very first movie experience was with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an experience that I have blogged about in detail before.

I have in fact written fairly extensively about how Trek has influenced the course of my life. If you search my site for entries containing 'Star Trek', you'll get over 40 posts, so if you intend to read your way through my life long love affair with the show, go make yourself some coffee first.

Over the course of keeping my blog, I have mentioned before about some of the shittier experiences in my early life, and I don't need to go into them again, because everyone has a history and you choose what to do with the marks the past has left on you as you make your way through life.

I will say though, that whenever I retreated from the events of my childhood, I found refuge in the universe that Star Trek inhabited. I remember making trips to this fantastic old bookstore in my home town where I would spend hours scouring the new arrivals of remaindered and used books, just standing in the aisles and inhaling the heady scent of all that old paper just to find a Trek novel that I hadn't yet come across. I remember watching every episode of the original series I could over and over, committing them all to memory. And I still remember where I was the night TNG premiered, and how momentous it felt, even then, to know that I was watching the first new Trek made in my lifetime. And even though I never came to appreciate the next three series' the same way, I remember where I was when each of those premiered as well.

Now that I'm (kind of) an adult, I still stop and check out every rerun of the original series when I come across them on tv, even though it is a guarantee that I've see the episode many, many times. Even now, I still feel a connection with a show that was imagined over 40 years ago by a man whose impact on world culture will survive him far better than most people have a right to expect.

And it was with a bigger helping of regret than I would've liked that I was unable to go to the 40th anniversary convention in Vegas this year. And by unable to go, I mean to say that I thought about it, realized that between me being the bread-winner at home, and my family having to eat, I dismissed the idea out of hand.

But still, it would've been nice.

I've collected a few links to help commemorate the 40th anniversary, written by individuals better equipped than I to do it proper justice:

Remembering 40 years of Trek, courtesy of StarTrek.com

A perspective from the only Star Trek alumnus not to get invited to the 40th anniversary convention | Updated perspective here

MSNBC discusses the Star Trek phenomenon

Toronto Star interview of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner

Happy 40th Anniversary Star Trek.

Labels: star trek