Because there are plenty of touching, well-written tributes to Leonard Nimoy, who recently passed away, I’ll keep my own short.
Nimoy became synonymous with “Spock”, a character he portrayed as part the Star Trek franchise.
He was my first favorite, and still highly regarded, sci-fi character because he was a nerd’s nerd, and if you attended a math & science high school as I did, you could appreciate this.
At this high school, the dynamic was different in that “the cool kids” weren’t athletes or cheerleaders. We didn’t have sports teams. In fact, we didn’t really have any “cool kids”.
However, we did have cliques in a very loose sense. The clique I ran with was known as “nerd power”.
You didn’t have to really do anything to “belong”. All you had to do is flash the hand signal to show you were down.
The hand signal? The muhfuggin’ Vulcan salute.
And maybe I’m overstating this, but I’m sure a healthy majority of Americans know that two sets of fingers parted revealing a “V” stood for “live long and prosper”. And even if you were a hata of some sort who thought the idea of bespectacled kids flashing a pseudo gang sign was grounds for hatin’, how the fuck you gonna hate on that message?
Depicted as an emotionless, know-it-all who advised Capt. James T. Kirk on life and death matters using probability and odds, it annoyed me to see Kirk save the day by doing the opposite of whatever-the-fuck Spock advised. Like logic and rational thinking were some sort of fucking weakness.
“Oh no, don’t do that. It makes too much sense” is what the characterization implied.
But of course, Star Trek was smarter than that.
In the end, although Spock was given as much personality as a pizza box, it was he who made the most sense of any science fiction character ever created by uttering four words.
To “live long and prosper” is perhaps the most logical thing you could wish upon someone because it makes sense that the better off a person is, the less inclined they are to want to fuck up your day.
Of course, people are inclined to fuck up your day for no reason at all, which is some illogical shit. But in an ideal world, how much more sense can be made than that?
Rest in peace Mr. Nimoy.
therapzuckerberg 