I suspect this list shall bear witness to the fact that I can be both obsessive and compulsive. In first grade, my dad received a quarter-end report card with a note from my teacher saying, “Gene1 could be a fantastic student if he could just not fixate on Batman all the time.”
It’s true. I was obsessed with the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman series, and it wasn’t even on TV anymore! I got banned from all things Batman over that one.
I switched my attention to Star Trek.
Younger readers may not be able to grok the concept that when I say Star Trek, I mean Star Trek proper — the series that the young’uns today improperly refer to as “TOS.” There was no other.
As Star Trek reached the point where it was airing every single weekday, I was there for it every single time. I have no concept of how many times I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek. A hundred? Maybe. Maybe more.
I knew them line for line and word for word, backward and forward.
Star Trek was more insidiously invasive on me than Batman. It showed me what the world should be. In many ways, particularly in my pre-teen years, I think I believed it was the way the world really was. If nothing else, I thought it was what everyone was striving to achieve.
Star Trek indelibly imprinted my baseline moral compass on me without me realizing it. It may be simplistic and pollyannaish, but I believe that science and exploration are good, the search for knowledge makes us better and more prosperous, wars are bad, violence is only justified in defense, men and women and people of all colors and races (even Scotsmen!) can live and work together without prejudice, bad laws should sometimes be broken (I’m looking at you Prime Directive), and that you should never turn weapons over to a super-computer.
Looking back on Star Trek from the 21st century, there are still many problematic things in its depiction of the world that were a product of its time, but that’s true for everyone’s view of things if you live long enough. We must all grow, but I think Star Trek provided me with a pretty solid foundation.
Oh, and sideburns.
I am oblivious to fashion unless it rises to the level of the absurd. I don’t see it, and I don’t care; however, I would be lying — no, I would be deluding myself — to say I am not, at least subconsciously, influenced by the things around me.
In the mid-80s, I was quite poor, languishing in my ambitions to work in the computer field, and surviving by working manual labor as an electrician. I’d been on the job for six months to a year (and had learned how to curse really fucking well by then), and one day, we were sitting on a job site, having lunch from the roach coach, when one of the guys made a light-hearted crack about my “pointy-assed Star Trek sideburns.”
I had no clue what he was talking about until I looked around at everyone else there and, indeed, every other man I saw after that point. None of them had neatly trimmed pointy sideburns. Clearly, the world was mad.
When I started shaving, I had just simply adopted what I had seen and normalized a thousand times before and trimmed my sideburns like the crew of the Enterprise. I had no clue that was an affectation for TV to show that hairstyles in the future were different.
I didn’t go home and shave them off that day, but I did, slowly over the course of a couple weeks, continue to trim them at a less rakish angle until they were “normal.”
A little bit of joy and individuality2 died in the world that day.
1My name of record is Eugene. My parents called me Gene, so the schools and whatnot also called me Gene. I always disliked it. When we moved to Oracle, AZ, in 1975, I just started going by Eugene from that point forward.
2Arguably, that’s not individuality since I was copying someone else. You decide.