Sydney Freeland

            On Tuesday after midnight I put fresh carpet tape on the edges of my mattress where it had gotten less sticky. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow and picked up a few bedbugs from the curtains. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck. I turned the heat on before going to bed at 1:50. I got up to pee at 3:30, turned the heat off and went back to sleep until 5:00. After yoga I found a few bedbugs crawling around the baseboards. 

            I searched for audio containing the song “Yes Man” by Serge Gainsbourg but it was not by itself. It’s on a Zizi Jeanmaire album called Bobino and I downloaded that with Clip Grab. Then I converted it to AVI with Win X Video Converter and imported it into Movie Maker. I isolated track 5 and deleted the songs before and after. Tomorrow I’ll publish the “Yes Man” audio file. I think I’ll also upload it to Turboscribe because I’m not sure I have the right text. 

            I weighed 90.35 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the first of four sessions and it went out of tune all the time. 

            I sorted through the storage container where I’ve been keeping all my Christmas decorations. Since my daughter moved out years ago I haven’t put up a tree and I know she doesn’t do it in Montreal. So I put all the lights, the garlands, and everything else but some of the nicer ornaments in two Christmas gift bags and later I put them out on the street. It didn’t take long for someone to grab them. Now I can use the container to store the rest of my university notebooks and the hard copies of my essays. 

            I weighed 91.4 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I picked up my Raleigh from Metro Cycle. The new tire cost $119 but I didn’t have to pay the tax because I gave them cash. I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 90.85 kilos at 18:05. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast beef while watching season 4, episode 9 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            The Enterprise stumbles across a flat planet that travels through space. It has breathable air and life. Pike, Spock, Pelia, and La’an beam down. They see a Medieval castle in the distance and what looks like fairies are flying all around. Pelia wonders if she’s having a flashback. They are confronted by a sword wielding warrior version of M’Benga who thinks La’an is the princess and that they are her captors. They contact the Enterprise to talk to M’Benga and he tells them about the Elysian Kingdom adventure they experienced four years ago but that only he remembers. In that story they all were made by a higher consciousness to think they were part of a fairy tale from a book belonging to M’Benga’s terminally ill daughter. The sentient nebula was helping M’Benga’s daughter and he suggests that now it is helping La’an work out her recent inner conflict. This time however the characters they thought they were are now separate individuals and the crew are themselves. 

            Pike’s cowardly and foppish chamberlain Rauth is there, as well as Spock’s wizard Pollux, and La’an’s princess Thalia (but she is in the castle dungeon.) Pelia is the only one without a double because she wasn’t there in the first season. Uhura’s evil witch queen Neve and her handmaiden Lady Audrey (who looks like Chapel) are in the castle where they hold Thalia prisoner. 

            The Enterprise is visible above the planet and mistaken for The Iron Dragon in the prophecy that states whoever controls the iron dragon controls the Elysian Kingdom. The queen’s favourite spell is to imprison people inside of paintings and that’s what happens to Pike and Spock. Pelia is saved because Neve thinks she’s a fairy tale author who can write the story in her favour. 

            Rauth and Pollux realize that their doppelgangers come from the dragon. They find Pike’s communicator and allow themselves to be beamed onto the Enterprise where they comically try to imitate the real Pike and Spock. 

            La’an fights off Neve’s soldiers and is somewhat helped by the arrival of the dashing Prince Dashing who looks like Kirk and is Thalia’s boyfriend. La’an needs to get into the castle to rescue Pike, Spock, and Pelia, but she pretends to Dashing that she is Thalia and needs to enter the castle to retrieve a necklace that contains her memories. They run into Sir Adya (who looks like Ortega) who agrees to help them. She leads them to a cottage where she says lives a monster but it is really where she lives with her lover Z’ymira the Huntress (who looks like Una). Z’ymira happens to have a key to the castle and gives it to La’an. 

            Inside the castle they are confronted by Neve who creates a full moon on a flat planet that has no moon just to reveal that Dashing is really a werewolf. Thalia arrives and knows about this side of Dashing but accepts it as part of who he is. Neve puts the werewolf in a painting and steals the essence of both Thalia and her shadow self La'an, which gives her the power to turn into a fire breathing dragon, which attacks the Enterprise. 

            La’an and Thalia are unconscious but Thalia’s dog Runa comes to La’an and wakes her. Thalia wakes, jealous of La’an and they fight. They are feeling each other’s emotions and not liking it. They decide to stop fighting. They each drink from the potion that Neve made from their essences and achieve balance. 

            The ship’s weapons are useless against magic and Neve in her dragon form is winning until Pollux uses the last of his power to defeat her. Neve turns back to her human form and Una beams her into the brig. Rauth and Pollux are returned to the planet. The spell of the paintings is broken and the prisoners emerge. Dashing is united with Thalia and La’an is envious. 

            It turns out the planet is a ship and Pelia decides to stay there to study its engineering but she’s also hooked up with Neve’s master chef Max who has charmed her with his culinary skills. 

            Thalia gives Runa to La’an because Dashing is allergic (I think Runa is Christina Chong’s actual pet). 

            La’an goes on a date with Kirk and they begin dancing. 

            This episode was directed by Sydney Freeland, a transgender woman who was raised on a Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. She attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Computer Animation followed by a Master of Fine Arts in Film. She is a 2004 Fulbright Scholar. She worked as a production assistant, a writer, and a camera intern. Her directorial debut was the short film The Migration in 2008. She wrote, produced, and directed the short film Hoverboard in 2012. She directed the web series Her Story (for which she won an Emmy). She wrote and directed Drunktown’s Finest (her feature film directorial debut), She directed Deidra and Laney Rob a Train. She directed and co-wrote Rez Ball, She was a staff writer for the show Reservation Dogs and directed two episodes. She was the executive producer of the TV series Echo and directed 4 episodes. She directed two episodes of the new Little House on the Prairie series, two episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, two episodes of Nancy Drew, four episodes of Rutherford Falls, two episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and two episodes of Resident Alien.

October 28, 1996: Since I got fired from my gig I stayed home

Thirty years ago today 

            On Monday I was supposed to begin a second week of posing at Northern Secondary School but that was all canceled because on Friday I’d told a vice principal that I didn’t appreciate being treated like a fucking criminal. So I probably just stayed home and did some writing.

Joe Morton

            On Monday after midnight I put fresh carpet tape on the edges of my mattress where it had gotten less sticky. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow and picked up a few bedbugs from the curtains. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck. I turned the heat on before going to bed at 1:30. I got up to pee at 4:30, turned the heat off and went back to sleep until 5:00. After yoga I found a bedbug stuck to the tape on my mattress but a lot more were crawling around the baseboards. 

            I published “The Enchanted Island”, my translation of “L’île enchanteresses” by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog and posted the lyrics on Facebook. I searched for the next not fully translated Gainsbourg song on my list and found “Yes Man” in the Gainsbourg 1977 document. A quick search didn’t find audio for the song. It was sung by Zizi Jeanmaire in one of her cabaret shows and maybe there’s a full recording of the show from which I can extract that song. I’ll do a deeper search tomorrow. 

            I weighed 90.65 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since last Monday, though not as heavy. 

            I played my Kramer during song practice and it stayed in tune almost the whole time. 

            I called up Bylaw Officer Jamal Logan to find out if the landlord responded to his order to treat my place for bedbugs. He said the landlord sent him a report that Orkin came to my building on a certain date and inspected some of the units but I didn’t open my door. He says they came from 10:57 to 11:11 so they were here for 14 minutes. I would have been home any day at that time and would have heard a normal knock. They certainly couldn’t have had the time to even inspect one place in that time. My upstairs neighbour David says they never came to his place. 

            I weighed 91.25 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I got ready to go out and vote. I went through the list online of the mayoral candidates. There was one guy who wants to make Toronto into a province, which could not legally happen unless Ontario agreed. I decided I’d vote for Amy Rosen who wants to take the electric bikes off the bike lanes. I rode up to 20 West Lodge and voted. There was still time for a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor so I did that. 

            There’s been a wobble in my back tire for a while so I stopped at Metro Cycle and was told the tire is worn out and that’s what’s been causing the wobble. I left it with them and ordered the more expensive and supposedly longer lasting tire, which will cost me $119. It’s ready to pick up but I’ll get it tomorrow. 

            I weighed 91.45 kilos at 18:00. That’s the meanest I’ve been to the scale in a week, but not as mean. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 20:39. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast beef while watching season 4, episode 8 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            Pike, Una, Uhura, Chapel, and A’Sha beam down to a moon to investigate a distress call. The signal is coming from a cave that blocks communication with the Enterprise.

            Lieutenant James Kirk is on his way back to the USS Farragut and stops on the Enterprise for a medical check-up after having been stabbed by La’an on the Griffin, the inexplicably haunted ship that caused everyone to go psycho. While he is there the famous Admiral Reeger arrives. He is the hero of the battle of Zeta Reticuli when he was captain of the USS Constitution and defeated 4 Klingon warships. James Kirk’s father George Kirk was the First Officer on The Constitution. 

            Reeger commandeers the Enterprise to use it to track down a cloaked ship that has attacked a Federation colony and killed 5 million people. They have detected the cloaked ship and it is moving away so there is no time for Captain Pike and his away team to return so they leave behind a communications probe to explain and then leave orbit in pursuit. Even though he is only visiting briefly, Kirk happens to be the highest ranking officer on the ship, so Reeger makes him his First Officer for this mission. The Enterprise follows the cloaked ship to Argus II and sees the raider ship enter the atmosphere, which has dispersed its trail, so it could be anywhere on its surface. 

            Meanwhile, Pike’s team finds enough weapons to equip a small army and realizes that the distress signal was a trap by Andorian pirates to lure Starfleet officers and force them to adjust their communications equipment in order to take over the Enterprise. Pike offers to pay the pirates double what their buyers are offering rather than give them the codes. Their leader stabs A’Sha with an icicle shaped crystal formation from the planet. The crystals are highly toxic and A’Sha will die without medical treatment but the pirate leader won’t allow Chapel to have her med kit to help her until he gets the Starfleet codes. 

            Reeger tells James Kirk that combat was not his father, George Kirk’s strength. That’s why he never got his own ship. James finds that hard to believe. Reeger tells James that based on his service record he is not afraid of battle and not his father’s son. 

            James talks with his brother Sam about their father. Sam doesn’t care about whether or not their father was a hero. He’s just bitter about the fact that he was absent. He tells James he should talk to M’Benga, who was the doctor on The Constitution. 

            On the bridge, Reeger concludes that Argus II is the cloaked ship’s home base. Kirk says it is not established that Argus II is their home base. Reeger says they travelled directly there and met with no resistance. Kirk suggests that they were not resisted because they are invisible. Reeger says it’s highly probable that the ship was made visible by atmospheric friction. Reeger says they must make certain the cloaked ship never leaves the planet and so they have to kill all 5,000 inhabitants on the planet. Reeger argues there may be many shielded enemy ships and combatants and killing 5,000 lives is worth it to save a thousand times that many (I’m getting the impression that this story is a veiled commentary on the situation in Gaza and Israel’s justifications for killing innocent Palestinian civilians). Kirk says there must be a middle ground. Reeger says war has taught him that the middle ground is where most people die. He dismisses Kirk for arguing with him. 

            Kirk does some research and then goes to talk with M’Benga. He asks if he knew that Reeger had a wife and two daughters. M’Benga says Reeger’s family was killed by the cloaked ship he is pursuing and that some say Reeger was made an admiral because he was too dangerous to command a ship. 

            Back on the bridge Reeger orders La’an to go to engineering to oversee the phaser upgrades before they attack the planet. Kirk suggests that La’an might be needed if the ship appears and he volunteers to go. Kirk asks Scotty if phasers can be controlled from alternative locations. Scotty says they can be controlled from engineering and from the phaser power junction, but the latter would be highly radioactive. Scotty asks if Reeger is bluffing or if he really is planning to wipe out an entire planet. But Kirk is gone before he can get an answer. 

            In the cave, A’Sha’s tissue is undergoing crystallizing necrosis and Chapel needs a cellular regenerator to have any hope of reversing it. Uhura tells the pirate leader that she can configure his equipment to mimic Starfleet frequencies. Pike says, “Ensign, what are you doing? You are to do nothing to help these mercenaries and that’s an order!” “I’m sorry captain, but here my orders don’t matter. A’Sha is my responsibility and I won’t let her die!” 

            Back on the Enterprise bridge, Reeger tells Kirk to step back from the comm. he has caught Kirk trying to send a comms packet to Starfleet that says, “Need immediate authority to relieve Admiral Reeger of command. The fates of many innocent lives are at stake.” Kirk accuses Reeger of being on a personal vendetta against the cloaked ship. Reeger promotes Spock to First Officer and tells La’an to arrest Kirk. In the corridor Kirk takes La’an’s phaser from her and stuns her. 

            As Uhura works, the pirate leader says, “At their core the one simple truth that drives humans is their fear of death. You fear it so much you’ll betray your beliefs and your sacred promises”. 

            James goes to Sam and tell him he’s disabled the ship’s internal surveillance. He needs to get to engineering to disable the phasers. Sam says he’s accessed the declassified comms their father sent home during the war. The log ID for the last communication reads, “Acting captain of the Constitution”. The date shows it was sent right after the Battle of Zeta Reticuli. 

            La’an recovers and gets a lock on Jim’s biosignature. But it leads her to Sam, who has a black eye and appears stunned. Jim tweaked the bio sensors to send them after his brother. 

            Kirk goes to sickbay to see M’Benga and tells him he has searched the medical logs from the Constitution during the war. Reeger suffered a traumatic brain injury at the start of the Battle of Zeta Reticuli and needed emergency surgery. But the log says he was still in command. La’an arrives but Kirk beams away. 

            Uhura says she’s finished configuring the equipment. But when it’s switched on it generates a sonic burst that is painful to Andorians and Uhura is able to gain a plasma rifle. 

            La’an has corrected the bio sensors and located Kirk but he’s in the phaser power junction. They beam him out and he appears, covered in radiation burns. Reeger has Kirk brought to the bridge rather than sickbay. he asks him if it was worth a court martial. Kirk says, “To save innocent lives? Yes”.

            Uhura has taken out all the pirates except for the leader. He says this will be a duel to the death but she shoots the top of the cave and sends crystal spears down to impale him. She frees the rest of the away team and it turns out that Pike was in on her ruse and she wasn’t really disobeying an order.

            Reeger orders La’an to fire on the planet but Kirk says if she fires, the Enterprise will be destroyed because he changed the power distribution codes. Scotty confirms that a power imbalance could rupture the core and blow up the ship. Reeger orders Kirk to give him the codes. “No sir!” Reeger tells Spock to mind meld with Kirk and rip the codes out of his head but Spock tells him, “I respectfully refuse!” Reeger points a phaser and Kirk’s head and shouts, “Give me those codes!” Kirk says, “My father fought the Klingons at Zeta Reticuli and saved the military base. Not you. But you altered the logs and took the credit.” Reeger says, “I’m killing those bastards who murdered my family!” M’Benga says, “Admiral Reeger, I am certifying you as unfit and immediately relieving you of command!” The battle stations stand down and then Kirk admits he was bluffing and hadn’t really changed the power distribution codes. 

            The Enterprise returns to pick up Pike and the away team and the pirates have been captured. Reeger says he was drugged. M’Benga confesses to have drugged Reeger to declare him unfit. 

            A’Sha has recovered. Uhura comes to see her. A’Sha says her experience has taught her that she does not belong in Starfleet. Uhura feels she has failed A’Sha as her mentor but A’Sha tells Uhura that her feelings of inadequacy are irrelevant. “I have come to this realization logically.” 

            Kirk confronts M’Benga and tells him he can’t let him take the fall for him since it was really him that spiked Reeger’s coffee with cordrazine. M.Benga says, “This is my choice. I won’t let Reeger ruin your career like he did your father’s”. He tells Jim that George Kirk would not allow his crew to tell the truth because it would compromise Starfleet morale at a crucial point in the war. Chapel has overheard this and she’s angry at M’Benga for ruining his own career. 

            Sam tells Jim that he did some digging and found out that whenever their father asked for family leave, Reeger assigned him to a new mission. 

            Uhura goes to see Pike and Una. Pike says, “For courage under fire and for exemplifying the best qualities of Starfleet, I am promoting you from ensign to lieutenant junior grade. 

            Reeger was played by Joe Morton, who studied Drama at Hofstra University. He made his Broadway debut in Hair. He made his TV debut on Bracken’s World in 1970. He was nominated for a Tony for his role in Raisin in 1973. He made his film debut in Between the Lines in 1977. He starred in The Brother from Another Planet (that was a great movie), Lone Star, He co-starred in Stranded, Tap, The Inkwell, The Walking Dead, Executive Decision, Badland, Wherever You Are, Home, What Lies Beneath, Paycheque, Stealth, He appeared in 88 episodes of Scandal (for which he won an Emmy). He co-starred in the series Eureka, the sitcom Grady, Under One Roof, and God Friended Me (of which he also directed three episodes). He made his London West End debut in Stuff Happens in 2004.

October 27, 1996: My daughter and I played on the roof

Thirty years ago today

            On Sunday my daughter and I played on the back roof of my place. In the evening her mother came to pick her up.

Deidre Hall

            On Sunday after midnight I put fresh carpet tape on the edges of my mattress where it had gotten less sticky. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow and picked up a few bedbugs from the curtains. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck. I turned the heat on before going to bed at 1:33. I got up to pee at 3:15, turned the heat off and went back to sleep until 5:00. After yoga I found a few bedbugs stuck to the tape on my mattress but a lot more than usual were crawling around the baseboards. 

            I memorized the chorus of “C’est ici (It’s Right Here) by Boris Vian. 

            I weighed 90.45 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and it stayed in tune pretty much the whole time. 

            I finished going through the images on paper I’d collected in two storage containers and threw out about half. So now one of the containers is free to store my university notebooks and essays. 

            I weighed 91.25 kilos before lunch. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back stopped at Freshco because on Saturday I’d forgotten to buy bread and milk. I got five bags of red grapes, a loaf of multigrain sandwich bread, and a pack of Sponge towels. The lineup was long. I did a price match on the grapes with Walmart’s price of $6.48 a kilo. I was about to unlock my bike when I realized I’d forgotten to buy milk and so I went back inside. The lineup was a little shorter and someone let me go ahead of her without my asking. 

            I weighed 90.75 kilos at 18:30. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:45. 

            I digitized a cassette recording of a performance by Christian and the Lions at Fat Albert’s open stage. This time the band consisted of me on vocals, Tom Smarda on electric guitar and Steve Lowe on acoustic guitar. We did “The Next State of Grace” and “Sixteen Tons of Dogma”. The next tape I’ll digitize is also from Fat Albert’s with Yehuda on cello. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, a chopped New Zealand beef burger, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching season 4, episode 7 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            Captain Pike wakes up in sickbay and is told that he was in a terrible shuttle accident. He notices that everything looks different. It’s bright and somewhat hazy. Dr. M’Benga asks for the last thing he remembers. He recalls hosting a captain’s table after returning from the Kiriaki mission. M’Benga says “That was two weeks ago and it can only mean one thing. You have … cosmic amnesia (the statement is accompanied by a dramatic burst of music)”. Pike asks, “Did you hear that? Are we back in the musical?” Nurse Chapel says they have an update on Spock who was with Pike in the shuttle accident and suffered severe blunt force trauma to his torso where his heart is located and went into cardiac arrest. M’Benga says, “To save him I had to…” Pike asks, “What’s with the dramatic pauses?” “…induce a coma!” (This statement is followed by another musical sting). He’ll need a heart transplant from a living donor. Chapel says La’an thinks she’s found a donor and has taken a shuttle to get them. Pike asks the computer if he’s in a simulation. The computer responds that no simulation is detected but because of Pike’s question M’Benga says he has no choice but to relieve him of duty until he’s had a complete cognitive evaluation. Pike says this is going too far. M’Benga says he’ll set up an appointment for Pike with the ship’s counselor Dr. Chivers. Later Pike is in his quarters and tells the computer to scan for any anomalies on board. Dr. Chivers arrives. He asks her what could cause someone to behave melodramatically. She’s frustrated with him and says he needs to focus on these tests because if he doesn’t pass he could be permanently removed from duty. Then we hear Trelane’s voice saying, “Like chronitons through the hourglass so are the days of the Enterprise”. Then we see Trelane watching everything on several screens as he says, “Cue credits!” and snaps his fingers. We see La’an in the shuttle telling the Enterprise she’s on the way with the donor. She has a person tied to a chair with a bag over their head. She removes the bag and it’s Spock’s brother Sybok. He asks why she broke him out of prison. She slaps him and asks if she’d told him he could talk. Back in Pike’s quarters Chivers asks Pike if he believes his duties take precedence over his well-being. He says of course they do. That’s part of the Starfleet oath. Uhura interrupts the therapy session and announces that DNA results show that she’s his daughter. Pike asks how that would be possible when she had parents. She says she was adopted and never knew her birth parents. Pike tells her he’s read her file and she wasn’t adopted. Pike says, “I’ve seen this before. Our lives turned upside down by a higher dimensional being. This fancy coated god guy.” Trelane says, “Could Captain Pike please stick to the script?” Trelane appears and everyone but Pike is suspended in time and Pike asks why he’s torturing his crew again. He says this is nothing like his previous visit. “This is my great human experiment. I’ve been formally studying your breed and during my erudition I fell in love with an artform that explores the raw and unrepentant beauty of human emotion.” Pike realizes that Trelane has turned the Enterprise into a soap opera. Trelane says humans have high potential and he’ll be defending that thesis to his proctors. “You’ve turned us into a soap opera for a school project?” “It’s more of a dissertation with the premise that space adventures leave little time for humans to deal with their inner struggles.” Pike demands that he return them to reality. He says he can’t until his assessment and also there’s that other hiccup. He tells Pike that for some reason he realizes he’s in an experiment and isn’t playing along. Until Pike figures out his inner struggle the experiment can’t end. “So I’m supposed to help Uhura with her parental issue?” “That would be a start.” Suddenly he’s with Chivers and Uhura and being asked to sit down for a family session. He tries to leave the room but Trelane keeps on bringing him back. he realizes that the only way out is through so he sits down. Uhura asks Pike why he abandoned her. “I always thought my real father would have the decency to be honest with me!” “You want honesty? A child-god-like being has come back to the Enterprise and turned us into a soap opera, which is why you think I’m your father.” “You’d rather pretend we’re facing some reality shiftin anomaly than accept that I’m your daughter? If some part of you didn’t want me to find you why dod you leave me this?” She shows him a cookbook with the recipe for coq au vin circled and a not reading “A perfect meal to make with a perfect daughter.” Pike looks at the book but every page is blank. “If you want to pretend I don’t exist I’ll show myself out!” She leaves. Trelane says, “They were supposed to hug and reconnect, but this is better. You can’t plan for this type of drama!” His supervisor asks, “Did you not plan for this?” He lies, “Of course I did! The layered emotions of humans is what this is all about!” On the shuttle La’an tells Sybok that she’s giving Spock his heart even if she has to tear it out herself. Sybok has taken La’an’s phaser and now points it at her. He challenges her to a game of kal-toh and says if she wins he will give his heart. She wins but he lied and says he’s taking the shuttle. he is being very seductive and asks her to come with him. Back on the ship Pike approaches Uhura and apologizes. He suggests they can make that recipe together. Sybok changes his mind and decides he wants to be good. Uhura agrees to work on the recipe but suddenly Pike leaves the room. The transplant is a success and Spock lives but Sybok dies. Pike finds Chivers at the bar and asks how something can be both real and not real. She asks if this is still about the ship being trapped in a soap opera. She says, “What if it is? Even in the most unusual twists of fate there is truth.” Pike returns to his kitchen where Juliet is waiting. She’s the daughter he had with Marie Batel when they lived an entire life together in moments before she ascended into a higher being. “Your mom is gone. The life we had with you isn’t real. It was all just a cosmic hallucination so you can’t be here.” “Yet here I am. Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t real. We forget the details but not the feelings. I’ll always be here, dad.” Juliet leaves. Trelane says he didn’t see a real daughter coming. “How imperfectly perfect!” His supervisor thanks him for bringing the ants to their attention. They are more complex than expected and perhaps worthy of more careful observation. She gives him a solid B minus for his assignment and he’s happy with that. I would have protested a mark that low. The spell is lifted and everybody remembers what happened. They are left to reckon with what was real and what was a play. The emotions it forced them to confront are very real. There is no such thing as a living heart transplant. Pike invites Uhura to make that recipe with him sometime and they can talk over dinner. Sybok is still in prison. Pike meets with Chivers and talks about loss. He says he’s already let Marie go but he’s mourning the loss of a future with Juliet. He begins to cry. 

            Dr. Chivers was played by Deidre Hall, who in her late teens travelled from Florida to LA where she started modelling and working in commercials. In the late 60s she posed topless for various men’s magazines under the names Glenda Cole and Heidi Dorrington. She made her TV debut on San Francisco International Airport in 1970. She was in the premier episode of The Young and the Restless in 1973. She starred in Electra Woman and Dyna Girl on the Krofft Super Show in 1976. She starred as Dr. Marlena Evans on Days of Our Lives for 5,414 appearances from 1976 to 2026. She co-starred on Our House.

October 26, 1996: My daughter and I spent the weekend together

Thirty years ago today 

            On Saturday I began another weekend with my daughter. I don’t know if I picked her up from Scarborough or if Nancy dropped her off at my place. We probably played out on the back roof and later played video games.

Bianca Nugara

            On Saturday after midnight I put fresh carpet tape on the edges of my mattress where it had gotten less sticky. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow and picked up a few bedbugs from the curtains. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck. I turned the heat on before going to bed at 1:32. I got up to pee at 3:30, turned the heat off and went back to sleep. I peed again at 4:30 and went back to sleep until 5:00. After yoga I found a few bedbugs stuck to the tape on my mattress but a lot more than usual were crawling around the baseboards. 

            I ran through singing and playing “The Enchanted Island”, my translation of “L’île enchanteresses” by Serge Gainsbourg. I uploaded it to my Christian’s Translations blog and started preparing it for publication. I might have it posted on Sunday. 

            I weighed 90.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune all the time. 

            I was listening to a download of Spanish Train and Other Stories by Chris DeBurgh and started hearing a weird hiccupping sound coming out of the speakers. I was worried that my stereo was malfunctioning again but it was only on three songs. When I started listening to the next album I didn’t hear it. 

            I rode to Vina pharmacy to order the renewal of a prescription. I then went to No Frills where all the grapes were too soft. I bought a bag of oranges, three packs of Peruvian blueberries, some bananas, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of chicken legs, tomato pesto, a large box of Earl Grey tea, a box of spoon sized shredded wheat, a jug of lemonade, a jug of orange juice, one container of 0% skyr, one container of 4% skyr, a bag of potato wedges, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. I forgot to buy milk and cinnamon-raisin bread I think because I was distracted by trying to make it home for my lunch date with my upstairs neighbour David. I was five minutes late. 

           We went down the street to Boba Tea and I had smoked chicken panini and a taro latte. The panini was okay but it tasted slightly burnt and a little waxy. I wanted to pay because it was my turn but David insisted it was his turn so I gave up. 

            I got home at 15:00 and went right to sleep. I took an extra long siesta and got up at 17:45. I weighed 90.8 kilos at 17:55. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 20:06. 

            I digitized a cassette recording of a Christian and the Lions concert at the El Mocambo featuring Tom Smarda on electric guitar, Steve Lowe on acoustic guitar, Mike Martin on drums, and Beverly Ross on bass. We did “Megaphor”, “Calendar Girl”, “Me and Gravity”, “Tropic of Ulcer”, and “Angeline” but the recording didn’t capture the beginning of “Megaphor” and the tape ran out before the end of “Angeline”. At first I didn’t have two tracks but got the second when I turned up the right gain. The right gain also came with a hiss and so I had to do noise reduction a couple of times in Audacity. 

            I made two burgers from the New Zealand beef I bought on Thursday. I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, a cut up burger, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching season 4, episode 6 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            There is a wormhole filled with neutrinos moving at warp speed. Scottie cuts all power to warp engines before they get caught in the slipstream. Pike calls red alert and says to brace for impact. They lose communications and every system is fried. All of the equipment is electrified. Neutrino radiation is at a lethal level. M’Benga’s body is crushed by a table as it pins him to the wall. On the bridge, Pike is unconscious. The ship is bleeding fuel and all systems are down but one. Spock says they are caught in a slipstream wormhole with extremely rare neutrino currents moving at warp speed and suctioning anything that crosses its wake. Like a vacuum cleaner that spans countless light years and flows with lethally radioactive dust. M’Benga has suffered trans lumbar severance and cardiogenic shock is imminent. Only the pressure of the table is holding his internal organs in place. Scotty had to tap into emergency backups to keep the dampeners going. In the bar where Una is the gravity-plating is malfunctioning and all crew has to move to the exit. There are reports of gravity malfunctions all over but G-forces are lower by the exit. The manual controls are on the far wall but that’s where the G forces are the most intense. Una slowly and excruciatingly crawls toward the panel. As she reaches the wall and tries to stand to reach the panel some of the bones in her feet crack. She hits the switch and normal gravity returns. All of the fuel is irradiated. The Vulcan cadet suggests shutting down life support in areas where it isn’t needed. Scotty tells everyone in the ship to move out of the corridors so they can shut down life support there. Dr. Boyce, the new second doctor contacts Chapel and tells her he needs her. She sends him M’Benga’s condition and he concludes that he can’t be saved then orders her to come to him. She pretends that communications are breaking up and ignores his order. The ship only has one functioning sensor and it is being scrambled by radiation. The cadet says they need to extend the sensor’s reach. Scotty tells the bridge they need to deploy a probe just to the edge of the warp bubble to boost their signal to finally get a read on the slipstream. The probe melts but they got some data. The slipstream is like a warp slingshot. The longer they are in it the faster they will go to push them beyond the warp threshold and cause them to disintegrate into hurling fragments of space time. The temperature is dropping in sick bay. Scotty finally gets through to Pelia in her quarters. She suggests sending someone outside the ship to the ion pod whose purpose is to take readings when sensors fail in ion storms. They will have to recalibrate it for neutrinos. Someone will have to do a spacewalk at warp to reach it and if they maintain a stable warp bubble the person will have a chance of surviving. But because of radiation, before anyone could complete a full scan their skin would be oatmeal. Pike has regained consciousness. Pike asks Spock to volunteer and he agrees that a Vulcan has the best chance of survival. Scotty transports to the Jeffries tube to recalibrate the ion pod for neutrinos. Chapel looks at one of the experimental treatments M’Benga worked on when his daughter was terminally ill. It involves using neutrinos, one of the strangest particles in nature and one of the hardest to study because normally one would need an accelerator 300 kilometers long to detect a handful. But now that they are in a neutrino slipstream they’ve hit the motherlode. For every 10 billion collisions one particle is created. One type is a strong force neutrino that can theoretically interact with organic matter and heal the molecular structure of damaged tissue. A super particle that prints complex molecules should be able to churn out a simple isotope like deuterium, which could also solve the fuel problem. Scotty says if he uses the Bussard collectors to drink up neutrinos they’d mix with residual deuterium and make more of it. Spock goes through the airlock and crawls along the hull with magnetic hand and foot grips. The energy currents are intense and it’s exhausting all of his strength but he makes it to the ion pod and descends inside. The radiation is cooking him and the pod is absorbing too much radiation. The neutrinos could spark a fusion reaction. They have to jettison the pod and try to tell Spock to leave but can’t get through. La’an goes out on the hull to try to save Spock if he’s still alive. Pelia says harnessing strong force neutrinos from the slipstream is turning lemons into lemonade. But then she adds that lemons are a hybrid that didn’t exist before humans and so life didn’t actually give us lemons but rather we demanded them. When Chapel opens the lab door the temperature will drop and M’Benga will freeze to death. That will hold his organs in place while she pushes the table away. Then it’s time for surgery. She’s programmed a bio-bed to link to an intake conduit on the hull. That will draw in strong force neutrinos she will use to stitch him together. Then when the heat comes back on she’ll restart his heart. La’an climbs into the pod housing and finds Spock alive. She also has the data chip from the pod. La’an brings Spock back into the ship but to retrieve the data from the radiation damaged chip would take hours and so she mind melds with Spock to get the information. The data is sent to Scotty and he reviews it, then confirms that strong force neutrinos are real. Hull integrity is failing as they approach the warp threshold but Scotty declares the Enterprise will hold. When they cross the warp threshold Scotty can turn on the Bussard collectors and convert the neutrinos to power. After two explosions the power returns to the comms, sensors, life support, and impulse power. The ship escapes from the slipstream. M’Benga’s body is repaired and he is brought back to life. 

            The Vulcan cadet A’Sha is played by Bianca Nugara, who made her film debut in Mariposa in 2018.