Feeding Vol
This year I got an outdoor wood-burner which turned out to be a
good investment with the price of home heating oil
sky-rocketing. It's less so because the Winter here in the
Midwest has been unseasonably warm - until now that is. February
chilled down very nice and the woodburner has been getting much
use now. The woodburner has to have wood put into into it twice
dailey, in other words: It needs to be fed. As with most
important devices in my life I have given the woodburner a name.
He is Vol.
Vol, my woodburner, was named from a crappy third season episode
of Star Trek the original series. If you were alive back then,
or if you are a latter day fan of the series you know that most
of the creative minds behind the series had departed that season
and NBC was getting stingier and stingier with the money. The
actors, too, I think were starting to phone in their
performances. The main star, Bill Shatner, you could tell had
stopped doing his sit-ups so you could see his velour shirt
getting tighter and tighter around his waste. He didn't care so
much. Already he was shopping for his curly hairpiece for his
next series, T.J. Hooker. (By the way, I'm still a fan of this
under-celebrated series)
In the 'Vol' episode the crew transports down to an idyllic
planet when they are unexpectedly attacked seemingly by the
planet itself. Every crewman with a red shirt buys it in the
first two minutes; One is struck by lightening, another steps on
an exploding rock and one is shot by darts from a big poinsoned
sunflower. I can't remember if there were more killed off before
the first commercial or not, because nobody on the Enterprise
bothered to even learn the names of their red-shirted colleagues
since they were goners anyways.
The remaining crew is stranded on the planet where they run into
the inhabitants who are sort of blond haired Polynesian
innocents. The episode, it turns out, is strong on allegory. The
simple and pure natives worship Vol, who is a planetwide machine
who takes care of them and provides them with food, pleasant
weather and everything else good. Vol is personified as a big
green dinosaur head thrusting up from the ground with a massive
open mouth. Several times a day a gong sounds and the natives
gather up fruit and gourds and such in big baskets and throw
that down Vol's mouth.
He is their God.
The allegory is clear. This is paradise, maybe even a biblical
sort of paradise. Of course, on this planet nobody has sex and
they don't even know what it is, so I got to wonder what kind of
Paradise this is supposed to be. Oh, wait. Christian paradise.
Unfortunately for the Vol-ians part of the crew that got
stranded there is that Russian sex machine in a bad wig,
Checkov. Checkov just can't help himself and before you know it
he's teaching one of the simple native girls how to - gasp! -
kiss. All hell - mataphorically, allegorically - breaks loose
from here.
Vol can't have his worshipers kissing, you know, so he instructs
the head blond to have Kirk et al. slaughtered. Heavens knows
why he doesn't have a sunflower spray darts at them, or a
explode a rock or have a lightening bolt strike them from the
sky. I don't know, Vol must have run out of exploding rocks,
lightening bolts, and sunflowers. The crew turns the tables on
Vol's disciples and stops everyone from feeding Vol, while the
Enterprise phasers him into submission and Vol dies because he's
too weak from hunger. While this is going on and Vol's gong
sounds insistently as the pathetic leader whines: 'But Vol
hungers.'
Kirk and Spock end this dreadful episode by musing on the
similarities to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and Satan
getting them thrown out of the garden of Eden - in case it
wasn't friggin' obvious enough already. That was pretty much the
whole last season of the series, really simple minded
allegorical stories.
Here's how my woodburner is like Vol: He's big, and he's green
and he sticks up out of the ground with a massive open mouth. I
need to feed him multiple times per day.
Oh, and he's my God.