FanStory.com - Space: The Final Frontierby Tom Horonzy

It is two thirty a.m. I stir in the dark. Unsure, I ask myself, why are you stirring at all? Most folk's minds are fast asleep, but no, Alice (Kramden), you wake me in the middle of the night. I hear a voice. It's William Shatner. "Space, the final frontier... blah, blah, blah. To boldly go..." You likely know the rest. How sure can Jim Kirk be to assert... "The Final Frontier?"

I commence arguing within my subliminal thoughts: What about the ocean's depth? Has man ventured to the center of the earth? (Jules Verne) How far does space extend? What would happen if it ends? Is the crew of the Enterprise thinking like Magellan's men on the five-ship fleet named Armada de Molucca? (Samuel Coleridge -Rime of the Ancient Mariner - what's a rime, anyhow?) And then there is the bowels of hell, not that anyone would sign on to venture there. And what if it isn't down at all but is in a parallel universe?

Kirk had that experience in episode four of season two, entitled Mirror, Mirror. That is when the Enterprise becomes a ship of the Terran Empire, a conquering and murdering organization in which officers are assassinated as punishment and as a means of promotion.

"Maybe now you can agree how demented my mind can be" (this line quotated is mighty poetic for a man half awake) by remembering such minutia as when I forget my wallet when the wife asks me to run to the grocery store.

Anyhow, any chance to rest peacefully has been shattered, so I arose at five forty-two a.m. and began typing this literate translation of my thoughts for the world to read how mystifying a mind can be at any time, day or night.

Released on paper, I return to where I hope to restore the rest I sought when I went to bed at eleven-thirty-eight p.m.