Dear Federation Personnel:
Kirk here. Listen, I know I signed on for a five-year mission to boldly go where no man (or woman!) has gone before, but 34 weeks into this I’m on the verge of self-transporting into the sweet, deadly embrace of the Murderous Vacuum.
Not sure where you assembled this menagerie of thin-skinned, self-important dandies, but the only one on this boat who doesn’t come across as an imbecile is my science officer, Spock. He’s level-headed, rational, doesn’t reflexively post nonsense on Spacebook. He thinks things out before he says them.
Crewmembers are protesting because the ship’s controls are only in English. I told Spock I love Vulcans because he’s responding rationally. Next thing you know, the rest are accusing me of being “Romulist.” That’s actually the word they used.
My engineer? He mistakes yelling for winning an argument. With no salient point to make, he just shouts—then looks at me all confident like “I rest my case.” In what world (and there are many) do you win arguments by increasing your volume? None! You win by defeating the other person’s argument with facts and logic. Who teaches debate at the Academy? “The View”? My god.
Oh god, that reminds me. A few weeks ago we’re engaged in mortal combat with the vile Dahundi. In the middle of the firefight, half the crew demands I call the Dahundi by their original name, the Volkari. Others are telling me to call them Barna’hey because it means Dahundi in their language or something. Whatever. The fact of the matter is the Dahundi/Volkari/Barna’hey are firing lasers at us. Lasers!
But that’s beside the point. Our shields momentarily drop to zero. I say “Oh my god!” The shields pop back up again. I say, “Thank god!” Everyone’s relieved not to die, right? No! They’re not! I get lectured by a second officer because she feels “pressured into a belief system by those words.” I tell her even Richard Dawkins might use such an expression under such circumstances. Does that placate her? No! For the rest of the battle she lies on the floor in protest.
So far more than 1,200 crewmen (and women!) claim to have a gluten allergy. Spock tells me that statistically the actual number is 8.2 crewpersons. That’s what I like about Spock. You can’t have 8.2 people, but he’s going to stick with it because that’s what the facts are. No bullshit, this guy.
Anyway, I tell them all that the easiest thing to do is to simply not replicate gluten. So, they ask what foods contain gluten. I tell them to figure that out by themselves. Then they ask if the replicators might be tainted with peanut residue.
Had a run in with a guy, Khan. He’s bad news. In the middle of me dictating the event to the captain’s log, some moron piped in, “It could just have easily been a Smith or a Davis! Stop the profiling!” All I was doing was recording the events that had transpired. Khan wanted to kill us and steal my ship! I argued with the guy. He stuck his fingers in his ears and chanted, “We are one.”
There were complaints that I wasn’t inclusive and only sent Red Shirts on missions. So I mixed it up and now I can report that we’ve had casualties across the shirt color spectrum. Hooray.
Last week, Ensign Chekov announced he was a beautiful lady named Miss Delicious. I made the mistake of saying, “Oh my god, what are you talking about?” Immediately, he set off the “Bias Alert” klaxon, which I never knew even existed. Please thank your designers for coming up with that.
By the way, there’s a Planet Kochbrothers we couldn’t explore. I don’t name the planets we find. The natives do. They named it Planet Kochbrothers. Yes, it’s weird, but trillions of planets—bound to happen, right? Spent four days circling it while crewmembers protested that the name was “discomforting.” I finally said “Jesus, never mind!” prompting the second officer to lie on the floor again.
Came across Tribbles. Cute, fuzzy things who were escaping the Klingons. There are tons of them. Tons. Everyone but Spock is demanding we let all of them on the ship right now. I do the captain thing and suggest that we maybe not rush into things. Next thing you know there’s “Kirk = Hitler” graffiti all over the gender-neutral restroom.
As you can imagine, with all this nonsense, there’s a lot of arguing going on. The crew declared that the bridge is no place for “offensive” speech. By popular vote, Spock and I now have to make our points in the Free Speech Zone, which is in the back of engineering. Between the warp drives and the Bellowing Scotsman, no one can hear a thing we say. At least I can tell him how much I love Vulcans.
On the bright side, the Occupy Transporter movement ended when I activated the transporter.
Coming back Thursday.
JTK