Journal of Francis Connegor
From jayphailey Wed Jun 08 19:44:33 2005
[notes below]
Personal Journal Stardate 57884.9
Francis Connegor
I don't even know the date on the real calendar anymore. Not that it really matters. I am assured that time flows a little differently in all places.
Today has been a hell of a day. I'm caught in a three-way throw down between idiot factions of places I can't even pronounce properly, trying to get someplace I am not even sure it's a good idea to go to.
It's that time when you look yourself in the face and ask "What the Hell am I doing here?" I last had one in Viet Nam in 1972. A place and a date I can point to as real. At least then I had some answers. They weren't good answers, but they were answers.
So I look around me with people I don't know trying to kill me, again and think, "What the hell am I doing here?" I am a pilot on a Starship. That sounds real neato, especially to someone who had his application to NASA rejected. And that's why I took the job.
But this isn't at all like NASA. This is a freelance garbage scow that can't get out of its own way. This thing can move at speeds that make me dizzy and make F4 Phantoms look like tricycles in the driveway. But compared to the ships we just faced, it was a DC-3 in a jet dogfight.
And that's just a normal business day on the free trader, Ochre Pleasure. Free trader. Yeah, my aunt Fanny, more like a "perpetually broke and scrambling trader." The Captain/owner has this thing mickey moused eleven ways from Sunday. I don't know what 80% of the doo-dads and devices on this tub do, but the 20% I do recognize are wrong.
So what am I doing here? I was very nearly not here, except the bogeys were more interested in doing dirt to each other than to us. But why did I come along?
I guess I wanted to prove that I could do it for myself. Hailey and the Aneilogs treated me like a charity case, and it bugged me. I guess I found their concern and support a bit. cloying. Besides, the Anelilogs still bother me. It's not fair. I was an intruder on their slap-happy little paradise. But the fear turned into a little tiny lump of disquiet and heartburn. It never really went away.
So I find myself on a comic opera space galleon trundling from world to world, somehow managing to become slightly more broke each time we do a transaction. I tried to talk with the Purser about it, but he wouldn't hear it. These Youn are a bunch of stuck-up bastards. We have a hodgepodge of people from all over this end of the galaxy here. The Vargr are cool. They remind me of the stories medieval cartographers told of people with dog heads living in far away places. Could there be something there? Could that Erich Von Daniken idiot be on to something?
At least these people deal in money. It's weird money, but it's money. The Aneilogs and the bellhops of Starfleet can't be bothered.
I am an idiot. I don't care about money except as a means to an end. And what's that end? My own life on my own terms out here centuries later in space.
Madeline, I miss you. I guess I always will. The records told me you'd remarried and had a long and happy life. That our son went on to serve his country.
And here I am playing Buck Rogers.
Why? Hailey offered to transfer me laterally into Starfleet. I could be training now as a Starfleet officer.
But I didn't. They all look a bit soft to me, and they look like some gay bellhop's idea of a military service. So here I am with "The Pirates of Penzance" in space. But those are live weapons firing at us.
On some level, I guess all this is happening for a reason. I am a god-fearing man. He put me down here in a frankly looney tune place. Maybe I am hallucinating from oxygen starvation? No, I have hallucinated before. That time with Archie out in the desert and those damned mushrooms. Hallucinations don't have mundane things in them like "who's turn at the
dishes is it," or dirty underwear.
I don't want to live on Starbase six hundred. I suppose because that means I'll have to admit that I am not ever going to go home.
I miss the United States of America. I miss drive-ins and hamburgers and numbskull crap on TV. I miss a movie with Madeline. I miss cocktail parties where we can argue about Richard Nixon's next term. I miss baseball.
I have to either accept what has happened or start taking real, concrete steps to do something about it. Taking this job and running away from Oz, (I still can't believe they named their planet that) was an evasion. A Cop Out as the kids used to like to say.
After this run is over I'm going to go back to Oz (Back over the rainbow) and start living my life like I mean it.
I have been avoiding the idea of going back to Earth. I know that if I step foot on Earth and it's as weird as Oz, I'll finally have to admit to myself that I am not going to get home.
Maybe I need to do that. Maybe I need to find your grave, Madeline. Maybe I need to get over being homesick and get on with my life.
Or maybe it's a bad dream and I'll wake up soon.
Either way, this "perpetually in-the-hole trader" isn't cutting it. I am better than this, primitive aborigine that I am.
I need to get some sleep. Time for lights out.
- End Journal Entry -
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This is a story of Epiphany Trek.
Connegor appeared on Oz, wandering out of the brush and approaching human residents of that world babbling incoherently about the Alien invasion.
The man was an Air Force Pilot from Earth, North America circa 1972.
He didn't know he'd been moved some 700 light years and 500 years into the future.
And he's had a bit of a hard time dealing with it.
This is his journal while he's serving as a helmsman/pilot on a Youn free trader. Connegor sought his own training and his own career because the socialist overtones of Oz and Starfleet made him uncomfortable.
But he's discovering that working life in the space lanes isn't as romantic as the Classic Science Fiction authors made it sound.