The Colonel’s Plan – Clearing out for Christmas

Janury 11th, 2018

Dear Daddy —

The Christmas Tree from People’s Drug. Why the circle of chairs, you ask? There was some concern about how the dogs would react to the tree. In days gone by, it was kept in a playpen, to protect it from the cat. The cat loved laying in the playpen under the tree. The dogs were indifferent, chairs or no chairs.

Let me tell you about Christmas. Our first Christmas without you. The first Christmas the world has had without you since 1921. And, in 1921, Christmas would have been celebrated—at least in Pensacola, North Carolina, without streaming music, without CD players or vinyl record players, even without a radio. Your Daddy owned the first radio back in those hills, and neighbors came to visit in the evening just to listen to it. But that was years later.

Christmas would have been celebrated without electric lights on the tree or the house, without telephones so that out-of-town loved ones could call. Your Grandpa and Grandma Rathbone would have had to come through the woods or around the bend in the road to visit the log cabin where you were born. (Although I think your Grandma essentially lived with you anyway. She delivered you.) Your Grandfather Jake Wilson was five years dead, and his wife had married for a third time.

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Enterprise Lost – Chapter Three

USS Phoenix Log, Stardate: 8223.4 

Lieutenant Aer’La commanding in the absence of First Officer Hadley. 

Phoenix has been called out of maintenance in spacedock and ordered to follow the path of the USS Enterprise, stolen by a band of Starfleet renegades led by Admiral James Kirk and including former Phoenix commander Sulu, to the Genesis planet in the Mutara sector. 

It was truly the most bizarre order she had ever been given: pull the ship out of dock in the middle of maintenance work and reassemble what crew she could to track down and arrest six of the most celebrated officers in the fleet—the former command crew of the Enterprise. Two thirds of the crew had been available, and, despite their grumbling, the repair crews had had the ship ready to go in six hours. 

Aer’La had looked at Admiral Morrow as though he were mad when he had called her, a simple lieutenant just off of border patrol, into his office and put her in charge of the most delicate mission the fleet could ever dream of undertaking—the arrest of a band of heroes for mutiny. No diplomatic undertaking could ever be so sensitive as this. Starfleet would not be popular when it hauled Jim Kirk in for court martial. Why her? And why Phoenix? 

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“We Don’t Serve Their Kind?” or “The Advanced Trait of Mercy?”

Few fans of science fiction do not remember the moment in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker enters the cantina at Mos Eisley, accompanied by C3PO and R2D2 and is told “We don’t serve their kind.” Luke is confused, and the barman explains that ‘droids are not wanted in his establishment. So the ‘droids glumly go to wait outside while Luke and Obi Wan meet Han Solo.

Nothing else happens related to this incident. The hateful behavior of the barman is not addressed. We’re left to assume, I suppose, that someone is always at the bottom rung of the social ladder, and such people are always discriminated against. In the Star Wars universe, those disenfranchised people are ‘droids. The moment stands that hate is a fact of life.

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The Colonel’s Plan – A New Year Without You

January 3rd, 2018

Dear Daddy —

This is the third day of my first year without you. I want to tell you all about Christmas—not that you had time for such things—and all that’s been happening otherwise. But, before I do that, I had to tell you—

I get it!

In one of my favorite Monty Python sketches, Graham Chapman wants to do something about the noisy church bells next door, and he opines, “If only we had some kind of missile!” Well, I DID have some kind of missile… until we gave them to museums.

All those late, endless nights that we spent working, when I was yawning, my eyes were closing, and it was usually cold—because we were usually working outside—I never understood what it was that drove you to work so hard. We worked on cars, we worked on the house, we worked on building shelves to hold the stuff that you kept bringing into the house, we went and picked up the stuff and brought it into the house. And, might I remind you, the stuff included B-52 gun-sights, half-ton antenna mounts, giant darkroom enlargers and 12-foot long gas lasers. Oh, and missiles. Five missiles, At least their noses. Those, at least, you wired up and used for your actual, paying work.

But I never understood how it was that you kept going until all hours. You never seemed tired. You actually seemed cheerful, for a change. Cheerful, that is, until something didn’t go the way you wanted it to. But you were especially cheerful when the rest of us told you that we were tired, bored, cold, and just wanted to stop.

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Enteprise Lost – Chapter Two

Pavel Chekov was seated at a table in the back of the lounge, looking quite haggard, when Scotty came in. In front of him was a huge stack of tapes. He exhaled heavily, ran a hand through his hair, and inserted one of them into the viewer.

After stopping to order a glass of scotch from the selector, Scotty went to join him. “Whot are ye up to here, lad?”

Pavel looked up with a frown. “I em going through the log tapes—or helf of them, if you believe thet—for Uhura. The executive reports hev to be ready tomorrow, and she’s supposed to review all the logs. She got me to do these,” he explained, his frown growing more pronounced.

Scotty swallowed a sip of his drink and laughed. “When I was second officer, Spock took care of all thot.”

Popping another tape into the viewer, Chekov said, “I suppose thet’s vhy you wanted me to hev the job?”

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Heinlein’s To Sail Beyond the Sunset – Inventing your own morality

As with all of my blog series, the FIAWOL blogs are written weeks in advance. But I was a day late posting this week because the online science fiction world was exploding with news about Chris Hardwick and Chloe Dykstra. I have thoughts about that news, and about the #MeToo movement at large. So I took a day out and tried to write about them. This was the second time in recent months I’ve tried to do so. And, just as with my first attempt, I wrote about 2500 words, re-wrote a second draft… and then decided I wasn’t ready to share my very personal thoughts on the subject with the world. Maybe I’m a coward, and maybe I have good reason to be. You see, my morality doesn’t work like most peoples’.

Which is a good segue for this piece that wasready for publication yesterday…

This was Robert A. Heinlein’s final book, moodily (and prophetically) titled with a quote from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about old age and death. But this book is not at all about old age or death, it’s about life, about living it wisely and passionately, about defying death, and about maintaining youth.

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The Colonel’s Plan – The Pre-Christmas Break

November 29, 2017

Dear Daddy—

The Chocolate House in 2015

I’m going to stop writing for a while, and go back and read what I’ve written. I’m not sure what all I’ve talked about, and I need to take stock. There’s so much ground I need to cover, it’s hard to hold it all in my head. I guess that’s the point of putting it in writing.

Did I talk about the plumber’s first visit, or the day I realized you had not actually run any supply lines through the house? Did I talk about cleaning out your rented storage space? I know I talked a little about how we came to move in here, but did I tell the whole story? How many rooms have I touched on?

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Enterprise Lost – Chapter One

Jim Kirk tossed his report board and pen down on the desk and sat back, picking up the Saurian brandy he had poured earlier. No, that report wouldn’t be written tonight. He was too tired. Taking a long drink, he pondered for a moment over the number of reports he had filled out and submitted to Starfleet Command in all his years. He couldn’t count that high.

Somewhere, in a case of software buried deep in the bowels of Starfleet headquarters, were the complete files of the USS Enterprise—no doubt untouched since the day they had been submitted. And Enterprisewas just one of hundreds of other ships, each of which took a week out every few months and had its poor, downtrodden senior officers fill out a set of reports on efficiency or the lack thereof. God, that storage room must have been a crowded place! He wondered if anyone at Fleet command could honestly explain to him the difference between that room and the station’s waste disposal tanks.

Probably not.

But he hadn’t been complaining, not one bit. This was the first time in ten years that he had filled out one of those mundane things which were the bane of every ship commander’s existence, and he had enjoyed every minute of it. The Enterprise was coming to the end of its first thirty-day mission with Kirk in command, and naturally the bureaucrats at HQ wanted reports filed. After all, the ship was up for a new commander now.

Wouldn’t they be surprised?

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Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations includes Republicans

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s intolerance.”

Back during the glory days of the Moral Majority—the one led by Jerry Falwell, not the current crop of holier-than-thou leftists—my friends and I used to make that joke a lot. I guess it was our way of reminding ourselves that, liberal though we were at the time, there was such a thing as reverse intolerance.

It’s a powerful sentiment, and one that I think would benefit a lot of people in today’s world to think about—science fiction fans especially.

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The Colonel’s Plan – Thanksgiving

November 27, 2017

Dear Daddy—

I’ve allowed another long break in writing to happen. It’s been a very busy time, and, of course, it’s been Thanksgiving—our first Thanksgiving without you. Mother’s first Thanksgiving without you in 66 years. It went well. There were irritations. There were arguments. I think that’s the definition of a family holiday gathering.

We ordered a turkey from Maple Lawn Farms. As long as we’ve lived in Clarksville, just around the corner from them, we’ve never done that. I think I was three or four the time, just before Thanksgiving, that Mother drove by and I saw all those turkeys on the lawn and asked, “Are we getting one of those turkeys?”

For some reason, we never did. But this year we did, and my whole family spent the night before in your house. Renee brined the turkey the night before, and got up at four in the morning to start cooking it, so that dinner could be ready by noon. Susan had to work the afternoon shift.

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