Of All The Souls…

Today, a great man has passed.  A man who led an entire fleet of men, women, and children towards a new frontier.  Leonard Nimoy, who most famously portrayed Lt. Commander Spock in the groundbreaking Star Trek series, and then again in the subsequent movies, has departed from this realm.  As Spock, he taught us that logic and reason can take you far in this universe, but there is no greater power than friendship.  Real friendship.

The kind of friendship that keeps you sane when you want to go mad.

The kind of friendship that challenges you to take one more step.

The kind of friendship that reminds you that, even in life’s darkest moments, you are never truly alone.

Throughout his life and career, Leonard Nimoy expressed a passion in encouraging others to question, wonder, and explore.  He was the host the documentary series, “In Search Of”, wherein he guided viewers through some of history’s great myths and mysteries. Throughout the show, he would always provide the known facts about the case, then pose questions, rather than theories, to the audience, allowing them to draw their own conclusions.  In a way, this reinforced the idea that scientific progress lies in the questions rather than the answers; that the destination is not nearly as important as the journey.

In the entire history of the Star Trek franchise, no moment is more powerful, poignant, or gripping, than the final scene from The Wrath of Khan, where Captain Spock sacrifices himself to repair the damaged warp core and save the Enterprise from certain annihilation, but absorbs a lethal dose of radiation in the process.  Spock is afforded one last opportunity to speak with his friend, James Kirk, an exchange preceded by Dr. McCoy’s ominous statement, “Jim, you better get down here.”  With his dying breath, Spock says to Kirk, “I have been, and always shall be, your friend.  Live Long, and Prosper.”  To all the dreamers, the ponderers, nerds, and geeks of the world, he was a friend.  We always shall be his, in this life and in the next.

Nimoy offers a heart-wrenching performance in this scene. A truly talented actor.

“Of my friend, I can only say this: Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most…human.”          -Jim Kirk

Popsicle

Rufus Johnson loved his ice cream.
He’d eat it for every meal, and every snack in between.
One day, he woke from a sleep so sound,
To find he’d ballooned to 500 pounds.
This realization was short-lived, however, when the shock of his weight caused him to have a MASSIVE heart attack. Doctors tried to save him, but the defibrillators couldn’t make it through all the fat, and by the time they were able to cut through the fat down to his heart, he’d been dead for 2 hours.

Torque

Johnny Kilutis was kind of a dork,
So he bought a sports car with lots of torque.
He’d always floor it – the tires would burn,
But he found he could not handle the turns,
And his car flipped at 107 MPH & rolled over 27 times into a tree. Fortunately, Johnny was wearing his seat belt, and he walked away relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, he had an aneurism two days later, which killed him instantly.

Derrière

Captain McGavin lived in the air
Flying from the seat of his derrière.
But his craft flew too low;
Into the Rocky Mountains it did go,
And he crashed & killed all but 5 passengers. Destitute, He spent nearly a week eating each passenger one by one. They weren’t even stranded; they crashed literally a mile outside of Denver. Captain McGavin just really wanted an excuse to eat people. His divorce did a real number on him.

Finagle

Lindsay Nagle loved to Finagle
She would argue for everything from beans to bagels.
She tried to haggle over a used car
With a fiendish man with a suspicious scar.
The man’s name was Bill “Break-Neck” Sorentini. He removed her brake pads & drained the brake fluid. Within an hour of leaving the lot, Lindsay’s shoddy car caused a 6-car pile up, resulting in dozens of injuries & several deaths. She is now paralyzed from the waist down, and Bill Sorentini is nowhere to be found.

onomatopoeia

Suzy Spatchella was quite the fizzle.
She’d make and break plans, which made people’s heads sizzle.
She said to her friends, “Let’s go ride bikes!”
But she failed to show, which nobody liked.
Unbeknownst to her friends, though, she had been hit by a car while biking her way to the meet up. Both of her legs were broken and she was rushed to the hospital. She called and told her friends this, but they didn’t believe her. No one has visited her. She’s all alone. She may never walk again.