so i picked up the two day registration ticket pack thing to this year’s northern voice. some people asked me if i was going to go last year and i thought about it but i hummed and hah’d and had no real idea what it was anyway so i let it slide. but then this year i figured, why not get a shirt out of it? and because it was mentioned that i should go. and because by the time it rolls around i’ll be sufficiently whacked in the brain by hammering out the last draft of my thesis and class work that i think i’ll need a weekend of hanging out with people who are geeks and probably also not so closet star trek fans and take pictures and have fun and relax before the tide comes in for the defense. i used to have a captain picard t-shirt. i think i was in grade 3. that shirt was fucking cool. sometimes i wish i still had that shirt.

i also had an Alf hat once. or was it two… i cant remember. one for sure. anyway, it was an awesome hat and we used to go on vacation to Mara Lake. at least i think this happened there. it was either there or somewhere in idaho. anyway, we went on this boat tour of the lake one time. it was this big ol’ paddle boat that all the tourists go on. i think this was the time where my sister disappeared ad my parents were going fucking nuts and it turns out she’d wandered up to the cabin of the boat and had convinced the captain to let her steer. we have pictures of that. we went on a lot of boats on lakes, so i could be mixing them up. anyway. i had on my alf hat. k, so, you know how it gets windy on a boat sometime? well it got windy. and my mom told me to take my hat off and give it to her to hold so it wouldn’t get blown off my head into the lake. so like a darling little son i did. and then im not sure what happened but she was sitting or leaning over the railing and then all of a sudden there’s an ‘OOPS!’ and im left with no hat leaning on the rail going ‘no that’s my alf hat!’ and seeing it hit the water and get sucked under. i dont remember what hat i wore after that. probably one of the many dayglo ones we always had lying around.

those dayglo ones were cool. they had this kind of mesh thing that was attached on the inside of the hat to hold the top up and you could flip it down like a visor over you eyes. course you couldnt see shit through it but whatever. i used to play at Geordi LaForge doing that. and there’s this log pile behind my parents house that’s been there forever and i’d go look for a small one that had a sort of handle to it and that would be my phaser cause i never had the phaser toy. but you could turn a log phaser into a bazooka any time you wanted and you couldnt do that with the phaser toy so really, who got the better deal there?

i dont think i have a point here. but im pretty sure that among the entire attendance of northern voice someone will have lost a hat and someone will have played star trek as a kid. point ME.