Hope and Fear
Well, this is a fine mess.
I was out of the country for the past two weeks in Greece. We voted early and planned to be away during the U.S. election, and upon reflection that turned out to be, if you’ll pardon my language, a fucking fantastic idea.
Now I’m back, of course, and talking about my wonderful and inspiring and highly stressful trip abroad seems pretty darn off key.
As they say, read the room. And the room is pretty darn bummed.
It’s easy for me to feel helpless when things are going in the wrong direction and wonder what the point is of trying to do anything. I’m sorely tempted at times like that to throw up my hands and say, “Fuck all this shit.” And sometimes I do.
I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go with this month's letter, if I wasn’t going to focus on my two weeks spent exploring the ruins of the world’s first democracy and eating the best tomatoes I’ve ever had in my life.
But then, as it usually does, Star Trek saved the day.
My title is a callback to an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the season 4 finale “Hope and Fear,” in which an alien named Arturis helps Voyager decrypt a Starfleet transmission that leads them to an incredible gift: the Dauntless, a Federation starship with a quantum slipstream drive that will get them home in three months—but only if they abandon Voyager, the starship they’ve called home for the last four years that they’ve been stranded in the delta quadrant.
Of course, it turns out to be a trap.
Crewmember Seven of Nine is suspicious, of course, and notes the Borg were never able to assimilate his species. Captain Janeway is similarly suspicious, and when the message is revealed to be a fake, the real motivation comes to light: Arturis’s people have been assimilated, he’s among the last of his kind, and he blames Voyager for not destroying the Borg when they had a chance.
Arturis was driven by anger and revenge; he wanted to punish someone for his own pain and refused to listen when Janeway tried to tell him that as long as you’re alive, there’s hope.
This sounds familiar.
I’m not an optimistic person by nature, but I do believe this: as long as you’re alive, there’s a chance, whether that’s to just plain survive, to make things better, to help someone, to eke out a little corner of happiness in an indifferent universe, or make your voice heard. Even if only one other person hears it. Even if only you hear it.
Voyager was stranded seventy thousand lightyears away from home. They could have been home in three months, but that prospect turned out to be an illusion. All they got for their troubles with Arturis was three hundred lightyears closer to home. They still had three more years in the wilderness before (spoiler alert) another encounter with the Borg finally got them home. But they didn’t know that at the time they escaped Arturis’s plan for revenge. They thought they had decades.
But they also had hope. And they had each other.
What I’m Reading
While I was away, I managed to start and finish three spectacular and completely different books (thank you, long layovers and 10-hour international flights). I highly recommend checking out The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware (atmospheric and tense mystery/suspense), Rogue Community College by David R. Slayton (fantasy set in his White Trash Warlock universe at a magic community college for mystical misfits), and Showmance by Chad Beguelin (musical writer goes home to rural Illinois when he thinks his would-be Broadway career is washed up).
See? I told you they were wildly different.
Housekeeping
Since it’s already well past the middle of November and we’re dealing with (waves hands) all this, not to mention the holidays closing in like a threat, I may skip the December newsletter. Don’t worry, you’ll probably be so busy you won’t even notice!
