Star Trek had played huge in my ADHD youth, as detailed above. My first ADHD tribe, the guys at Franklin County High, had all been Trek devotees. We had bonded over it, we had met Gene Roddenberry together.
Then – the impossible happened. In 1987, Star Trek – which had been relegated to the cinema since 1979 – was suddenly back on television. A version of it, anyway.
Gene Roddenberry had created, along with veterans David Gerrold, Dorothy Fontana and Bob Justman, Star Trek: The Next Generation, a new Trek that occurred a century after the original, with all new characters.
The new show premiered in September. I don’t remember how on earth we managed to track each other down and arrange it, but Womp and Bob and I gathered at Bob’s Frankfort townhouse, where he now lived with a wife and small child, to watch the premiere.10
It had been 11 years since we had first become a tribe, going to see Roddenberry in Louisville and making our own movies and getting our ADHD on in the most creative zone we’d ever known. That doesn’t seem like much now, as the decades stretch like taffy, but back then it was an eternity.
We watched the new Trek and loved it and just had a ball.
But while all of that was going on, something else important was happening that I didn’t know about at the time.
As the personal computer era had gotten underway, Bob had discovered dial-up bulletin board services before the rest of us – not surprising, given his engineer’s mind. He’d discovered the very earliest iterations of AOL, and the various chat groups. He’d joined some of them, and a Trek board in particular.
And he wound up with a remote friend on the east coast, a young woman who likewise loved Trek and all things nerd, and who remained his friend as the Internet appeared and email emerged and the world grew more connected. Years stretched into decades and this friendship persisted as Bob moved through various eras of family life and fatherhood, and she became a career woman, devoting her energy to profound causes.
Though Bob and his friend never met in person, they would frequently talk, and he would mention his Trek-loving tribe, regaling her with stories of our shared nerd youth. She heard a lot about me and Womp over the years, though we had no idea she existed.
I mention this because it will become important later on...
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