The Daily Dose

Today, which is the third day the new year, The ever-aspiring-and-always-failing-to-be Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words gets a fresh start by meandering for a bit. I might have a point, but chances are I don’t. I have a hunk of junk muddle of notions to dig through, a scrap box of imaginings to plunder, a kitchen full of half baked ideas to serve. I wanted to start the new year off with a bang of writing right on the first day. But life has been complicated, full of the quotidian odds and ends, Sturm und Drang drama and hours and hours and hours over the past month and a half busting ass on a major project while feeling guilty about not working on this and other projects.

After much frantic activity last summer, The Daily Dose rested for a bit. I did write a little, small scribbles, but I didn’t post them here. I’d like to think it was marinating, soaking up some delicious sauciness that will make your mouths water, but it might have been stewing in its own juices- six mouths of stale sweat. I will let y’all taste it and decide.

I needed to re-evaluate what it is I am doing with this particular practice of musings and scriptural interpretation. As I have mentioned before, I define scripture broadly and find inspiration where and when I can. Admittedly, I got frustrated because it seemed that only spambots read my writing, writing I spent a mighty long time on. Hours and hours and hours. People who were supposed to care or dare I say were obligated by the nature of their relationship to me and this practice didn’t read my writing. I know all the complicated reasons why my words were not read but is wounding. Being an adult means I get to suck it up. I hope to follow Badiou’s adage to “keep going” despite the difficulties, despite the various responses, including the lack of response, despite my insecurity about the usefulness or skillfulness of my work.

I finally installed the plugins that should rid me of the spambots’ pesky pestilence, but with their absence, I have to confront my sometimes overwhelming uncertainty about what it means to send out these eMissions (the writings, the Vermons, the live online events) to save the whole wide world and little old you into an electronic landscape mired, bogged, swamped, flooded, drowning in text and images and ideas and emotions. I am not assured that the world needs my works of words.

I keep doing this project because every once in a while, people will tell me how much it means and what it means to them. They may respond emotionally or intellectually or somehow a mix of both-ly, but it did something for them that they appreciated.

A part of me really does want to save the whole wide world and little old you, but because I realize that my vision for a better world is as imperfect as the next, I content myself with more the bittersweet pleasure- the joy of putting words together on a page or stage (live or electronic) to make a train of meaning, which may very well jump the track and crash, but also occasionally makes people feel less lonely in their emotional, intellectual, social, political, economic, artistic, religious, theoretical, psychological skins, now and again.

Today, I have a great urge to write The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words, but my purpose for writing, beyond wanting to write something to sustain, sooth and/or shake my faithful readers- most of which are spambots, though a convincing case could be made that they do not really read The Daily Dose and thus should not be counted as part of my readership, and yes, I know, I have mentioned this fact before; I’ll just warn you now, I am known to be obsessional, so I will probably say it again and again- my purpose in writing is uncertain. Today, I find my way word by word, which makes it appear to be a linear process. While the linear does play a role in how the words are laid down, how they line up, how you read and evaluate them, writing, my writing, seldom is straightforward.

Today, I want to share with y’all just how much I love words and their all kissing cousins- sentences, paragraphs, essays, stories, plays, songs, poems, novels, novellas, scripts, dialogues, monologues, banter, quips, jokes, puns, riddles, limericks, bawdry, schpiels, rants, sermons, speeches, etc and so forth. I love “take no prisoners” words; precision words that would shoot the cliche I just used on sight as they shear themselves of any padding to get to the point. I love overblown floozies that flop all over the page, spreading their legs wanton, crass invitation. I love serious, bookish, quiet words. I love silly, loud, common words. I love words that lay down an argument; that build a case letter by letter. I love words that sink their claws into the body of an idea, rending its flesh, snapping its spine, breaking its bones, so we can suck out the marrow. Despite the writers’ adage “show don’t tell,” I’ll gladly listen when words tell me something, though I also like it when they show me a good time.

I love spoken words. I love written words. I love the subtle and shifting differences between the spoken and the written. I love the ways that repetition and fillers amplify spoken words in interesting, necessary ways. I love the way that those same devices must be used sparingly when writing words, unless deliberately trying to mimic speech. My attempts at writing Southern Hyperbole (a specific rhetorical style that should, as far as I am concerned, have its own Wikipedia entry ) plays with the ornate, dramatic, tangential, digressive patterns of Southern speech, but it is not quite the same when written instead of spoken. There are differences. I love those differences.

I love the words unsaid, the ones on the tip of my tongue, the ones held in cheek in check. I love words stuttering and stumbling, unable to explain, inadequate to express. I love babbling words, never stopping streams that overflow every available channel, breaking dams, subverting lexaducts designed and dug to move all those water like words in an efficient and effortless streamline of meaning. I like trash heaps of words, junkyards of broken down scraps and parts and potentials. I love the wrong words at the wrong time. I love muddy words that track dirt all over a page, staining and constraining that page’s bright white possibilities.

You may wonder what the hell all this lexaphillia has to do with my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you. All these words about words are an extravagance; a kind of hedonism that in my role as your spiritual advisor I heartily recommend to you. Some religions advise moderation, suggest that you walk the middle path. I find I only walk the middle path on my way between one extreme or the other. I aim for it, but I always overshoot, and so my sojourns in the middle never last long because my momentum always carrying me past it. So I embrace my extremes, my extravagances- at least the ones that cause little harm to others. Lavishly, foolishly, earnestly, over-the-top-ly loving words is not a walk down the middle path, though it can be spiritual (though let me assure my faithful atheist followers that it doesn’t have to be).

Today, I wear my heart on my sleeve as an offering. My love of words pushes me to the edge of words, asks me to sacrifice no small amount of words as I attempt to find the words for my love of words. And because I can find no other satisfying way to summarize the ragtag bunch of words, I’ll let these last words have the last word.

Well, it has been a mighty long while since I even attempted to write an entry for The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words. I won’t go into all the reasons that I haven’t written- I’ll just say that not all of them were ones that would make you feel sorry for me, some of them would make you green with envy, though admittedly most of them would make you shake your head and tsk tsk. Instead, I will, sing it with me, “pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again.” I only have twenty minutes before I have to go do something involving being away from the computer, but I decided to mix my determination to write with an imminent deadline in order to reinvest myself in the goal of writing The Daily Dose everyday. How else can I save the whole wide world and little old you? Don’t answer that question; it is without a doubt rhetorical.

I am ashamed to admit that due to being in a public place while trying to write this damn Daily Dose I was interrupted too many times, often agreeably, don’t get me wrong, and so I did not finish within the allotted 20 minutes. Ah, well, the road to hell just got a brand new blacktop courtesy of my “Men at Work” intentions. And since then, new information and ideas that can somehow be threaded into this Daily Dose have come to my attention. This may or may not be a blessing. Everything does not happen for a reason, but we sure as hell can scrounge one up, if we try hard enough.

Please sing to the tune of that Simon & Garfunkle song. “Last night I read the strangest thing I ever read before. I read that Ludwig Wittgenstein was sad and sore.” I, per usual, am overstating things just a wee little bit, though Vitter-gitter was quite, quite sad. Now I can in no way profess to know much of anything about Wittgenstein, but I have become interested in his life and work through the writings of others. For those of you with an appreciation of theatrical and filmic scripts as well as what happens to ideas as they are filtered through a collaborative processes like making a film, I highly recommend Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, The Derek Jarman Film. Van Choojitarom, whose work is full of wonderfully witty words worthy of your investigation has studied Wittgenstein extensively and admitted to me that he was disappointed by the film. In his words, “Wittgenstein is ideally adapted as a silent movie, starring Buster Keaton: they had the same ethic.” Despite Mr. Choojitarom’s censure, I will forge ahead.

I only have nine minutes left, so I will not go into much, just give y’all a long quote to ponder. I like this particular quote because it is in both the original Eagleton script as well as the one re-worked by Jarman and Ken Butler. John Maynard Keynes is telling a story to Wittgenstein.

Let me tell you a little story. There once was a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. And when he’d finished his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon. So the clever young man looked around the world he had created, and decided to explore it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he had forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears. But as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They’re what make the world turn. He wanted to run and dance. And the words and things scattered upon this ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous, and the wise old man saw that that was the way things were. But something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he had come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.

This may not have spoken to all of y’all, but I’m sure it spoke to a few of you. And sometimes that is all The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words can be, a dish that will be tasted and savored by a select (not in the sense of elect or special, more in the sense of small number burdened with a particular set of taste receptors) few.

Of course, these days, I’m mainly being read by spambots. The part of me that dreams of electric sheep hopes that somehow, someway, these words might reach through their Zeros and Ones directives and free these programs from their boring, fruitless mission (fruitless because I moderate all comments) to convert my followers. Though perhaps the mission of spambots is much like the mission of a philosopher as understood by Wittgenstein as filtered through the art of Eagleton and Jarman. “The most important part of my philosophy hasn’t been written. I can’t write it. It can never be written.”

Today, The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words will indulge in a little popular culture indulged in this morning and mix it with a quote from Terry Eagleton read last night topped off an anecdote heard this afternoon in the hopes of making some sort of meaning. I will start with the last item on the list, the story told.

So while standing outside chewing the fat with my father, Daddy informs me that Florida is top of the class when it comes to new cases of HIV infection. Daddy painted a vivid picture of red dots representing new cases of HIV infection freckling Florida. We ain’t talking a light sprinkling across the nose of Florida, no Florida is speckled with thousands of freckles of infection. Daddy learned this during a training for work. Why he, a computer hardware man, had to go to this training is unclear but be grateful that he did, because soon you will be in command of a scintillating bit of infotainment to pass on to your friends and loved ones.

What to know where the some of the highest concentrations of new cases of HIV were on the map? You might think Miami or Key West, with the gay male population in mind, and perhaps the rates in those areas are rising. But Daddy thought that the most interesting highly freckled place was The Villages. For those of my faithful followers who do not know the Florida landscape well, The Villages is a series of “communities” planned with the swinging (as in Golf) senior in mind. Well, turns out that golf is not the only hole in one game in town. Unfortunately, these elders are not taking precautions when they score. Rising sexually transmitted infections rates (STI) show that randy seniors are not alone in ignoring or being ignorant of STI risk factors. Daddy said that offers to do workshops in The Villages about STI’s have been turned down. And HIV isn’t the only handicap that might affect their swing. Chlamydia and a super bug strain of gonorrhea also are playing 18 plus hole games.

Tangentially, I doubt anyone is creating abstinence only education with the senior set in mind. I suppose this is because the horse not only is out of the barn, it has been running round the fields for so long that no one would ever in a thousand years buy an elderly born again virgin. Oh, I forgot, abstinence only education is all about the purity (and control) of young women, and no one cares if old bags, I mean broads, I mean women much less their purity.

I am happy to hear anecdotally that seniors are still in the game; that they have stayed the course, so to speak. This bodes well for me though when I am an old woman I will not be playing anything even metaphorically connected to golf. But despite all my humor, I desperately wish they were not being so damn stupid about it. I am sure that most people do not want to spend their golden years taking even more medicines than they already do to keep the specter of AIDS at bay. For these vigorous (and prosperous) seniors- the kind most likely to be following the Prevention magazine check sheets and seldom having to choose between medically necessary procedures or prescriptions because they have enough money and insurance to cover the costs (at least for now)- to not be as well informed about their sexual health strikes me as foolish and regrettable. Making informed choices about one’s sexually health seems to me to be key to a long and healthy life.

Which leads me to the next piece in this muddle of a mess of a Daily Dose, Star Trek. I’m not going to go into much except to say that I left the movie feeling hopeful about humanity in general and my own life in specific. I left feeling that we might find a way to reach for the stars, perhaps not the actual stars in space, but some of those star like dreams of a better world for all, not a perfect world but a world that is a lot closer than we are now. I believed for just a moment that we, that I, might live long and prosper. Now, I am not mistaking that hope for reality, and the anecdote about the The Villagers is a reminder of just how damn far we’d have to go, but I think we need moments of starry eyed hope, which brings me to the quote from Eagleton.

Toward the end of The Meaning of Life, after arguing that “the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way” Eagleton riffs on the image of an improvisational jazz ensemble making music together as a possible model for this certain way of living. He continues:

Is jazz, then, the meaning of life? Not exactly. The goal would be to construct the kind of community on a wider scale, which is a problem of politics. It is, to be sure, a utopian aspiration, but it is none the worse for that. The point of such aspirations is to indicate a direction, however lamentably we are bound to fall short of the goal.

In closing, I offer up this hope that soon you set your sights on the stars, even if it is just for a little while, and that you- my faithful readers, and your family and friends and their friends and family and their family and friends, and on and on- live long and prosper in a improvisational jazz combo sort of a way.

Take care and keep on keeping on.

Tonight, I aspire to whip The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words out in record time. Short and sweet. Like the number 42. Which as the answer to the question of the meaning of life is short or perhaps, I should say small, but as the number of years one has been alive on the planet earth- excluding ridiculously long lived trees and tortoises- is not such a small number. It is not short at all. It fact it is long and full of meaning that number when related to a human life.

The reason for going on for some length about 42 is not because I am anywhere close to turning 42 years old (though it is five and a half short years between now and 42 for me). No, it is because I have been reading The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton, an enjoyable little book by the English professor famed for writing a book on literary theory that every wanna be critical theory thinker cuts their baby teeth on and then for slowly becoming a bit of a cantankerous old curmudgeon about the excesses cultural studies and the misuses of critical theory.

Most of that is hearsay since I haven’t read most of his books though I do have the book on literary theory sitting on my shelf. It was given to me by a well meaning friend. This will all get back to 42 in a moment or two, maybe 42. While searching for After Theory, because I have high hopes to spend a short little while this summer pleasantly entertaining myself with his understated, restrained, passive aggressive prose about how theory is used within the halls of Academe, I came across The Meaning of Life. As a tangential aside, I also am very much looking forward to his new book attacking atheist crusaders like Dawkins and Hitchens, or whatever the hell their names are, they are all mangled together in my mind because a review of Eagleton’s new book mentions his gorgeously catty smashing their two names into one.

I may be overstating the understated passive aggressive nature of his prose, since I am all about the overstatement as a rhetorical device, but I’ll willing to go toe to toe that he’s catty from time to time. If I wasn’t too damn tired, I’d find the quote about dreary Marxists that is just one example of his now you see them, now you don’t claws. Now, I don’t particularly have problem with this, I am a fan of the Algonquin Round Table after all, even if sometimes, when referencing popular culture, he begins to sound like a querulous, old man shaking his fist at the whippersnappers of the world. My off the cuff ramblings have lead me to focus on his acid drips (never baths that would be entirely too much).

It would be a mistake to characterize this book by my oversized enjoyment of the small flashes of tooth and claw. It really is a lovely, well written book that invites us to explore with him the question, “What is the meaning of life?” through some of the various ideas presented by philosophers, writers, theorists and even a few theologians. His discussion of Samuel Beckett, a playwright that I am finding to my chagrin more and more people have not heard of, is nuanced and useful both as a bit of literary/theatrical criticism and a piece in the puzzle he is trying to put together.

Unlike many academics, Eagleton writes well about difficult ideas. I am not suggesting that there are no problems in his arguments, though I often find myself agreeing with him, but I do think that it is argued well. Eagleton deals with complex ideas without letting his sentences become a mass of overwrought, badly written jargon slop heaps. This is a refreshing change of pace.

42 comes up because he takes a moment to look at Douglas Adam’s bit of humor about the supercomputer programmed to find the answer to the meaning of life spending eons churning to spit out the number 42. And I don’t have much to say about that now. 42 was just what got this particular bit of writing started.

42 made me think of meaning. What I like about Eagleton is that he believes all those intense ideas and theories might actually have something to say about our lives inside and outside of academia. Those of you who have read my longer, more involved Daily Doses about theory as a form of scripture know that that idea is right up my alley. I am sure that some of his writing about cultural studies will bug the hell out of me- the best writing does, making me think and question and talk back. But I find I am willing to be annoyed, if it means I get to believe, at least for a little while, that something I love, wrestling with theory, may possible be meaningful.

Today, The Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words will not be profound, long or involved. There is no moral to the story. No heart warming snippet. No peeks into the inner workings of my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you.

Nope, just a brief little blip to leave you with a quandary. In the past few Daily Doses, I kept salting my prose with catch phrases and cliches with and/or about salt. I am not sure why salt keeps coming up in such un-salient ways, but some thing are, and will remain, a mystery to me and by extension, to you.

All this salty (only on my punning tongue) language made me think of Lot’s saline statue of a wife.

What I want to know, is if they couldn’t look back, for fear of becoming pillars of salt, how did they know for sure that she did? I’m not really in search of an answer, if I was I’d go look it up in the bible to make sure I was remember the passage about her passage into a pillar correctly, but every once of while I entertain myself with these sorts of scenes.

Did they know for sure that she was a pillar of salt? What if she had fallen, twisting her ankle and laid in a heap praying for someone to notice her distress and come back to help her up? Or when she looked back was she even with one of her daughters, who watched her mother’s transformation out of the corner of her eye? Perhaps an invisible wave of salt air blew across all of them as she was transformed, leaving a residue on their skins and at the corners of their mouths, like they had been for a swim in the ocean.

Or was she in the lead, and did she, Orpheus like, look back to make sure her loved ones really and truly were following? Did she hear one of her daughters stumble and instinctively look back? Did Lot and his daughters watch her turning turn her? This is my favorite re-visioning. It makes her story tragic instead of god-told-you-so-and-you-did-not-listen-so-look-what-you-made-god-do-to-you-stupid.

I leave you with this image: her turning turned her into a pillar of millions of dried out tears.

Tonight, I cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye promise me, myself and I (and you, too) that I will spend less than 45 minutes writing (and editing) this off the cuff dose of The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words.

The reason for this obsession with time is that I am trying to create a sustainable practice of writing a dose every day, thus finally living up to hype of the name. The problem is that I’ll start writing and next thing I know hours have passed, and I have produced the passable prose that I pass on to you. This wouldn’t be a big deal ‘cept spreading the Good (and Not So Good) Words is not a profitable enterprise, and I am more than a little conflicted about any moves to make it profitable. I have to have time to earn my bread and butter, do my chores at The Bishop Family Compound, experience life (my own and others’, vicariously) and do enough reading and research to have something semi interesting-useful-entertaining to say.

Since I’ve given The Daily Dose its very own spot on the web in the form of an elegant Word Press blog on my still needs much improving website, it seems only the Spambots are “reading” the Good (and Not So Good) Words. This can be a mite discouraging. But I count my work on any particular Daily Dose worth it if only one person reads it and finds some small scrap of something to savor. That said, I salt my romantic idealism with more than a pinch of pragmatism. I want my time to be well spent. I know the spambots will love them no matter what. Some Daily Doses are marathons and take a long, long time to write (regardless of how long they take to read) and some are wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am’s.

The utopian vision that is seen but never quite reached is an important part of any dream worth its salt (I seem to be obsessed with the saline, though right now that isn’t a salient point). Sometimes, we let the pie in the sky fly in our eye, blinding us to the small tweaks and compromises we could make to make it (whatever it is) realizable. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Between the marathon and the quickie, I might find a Middle Path for most of these (e)Missionary missives.

And so I will continue to aspire. And so should you.

(Unless you are a spambot programmer, then you need to stop aspiring so much. I won’t mind the loss in my readership. Not one little bit).

Tonight, The- sing it with me Judy Garland style, “Someday over the rainbow, some day soon”- Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words is about time. As in time in a bottle, time won’t let me, time is on my side, time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, time is winding up.

(Brief pause as I send a probably dying anyway but even if it wasn’t I’d probably kill it Palmetto Bug to the great insectadise up above).

Where was I? Oh, yes, I was subjecting y’all to snippets from all sorts of songs with catchy lines about time. Perhaps, it isn’t time that I wish to examine or only in part. What I really want to get at, and only seem to be able to get at by going every which way but loose, is the question of how we let time shape our lives.

Despite how much I enjoy an old fashioned heated to the point of shouting not in anger but caught up in the excitement of thoughts ping ponging back and forth going no where fast taking the scenic highway intellectual skirmish, I will not take up the debate about whether time really and truly exists following realists like Newton or is a cleaver monkey concept that helps us make sense of our world but does not actually exist following Leibniz, who invented binary in case you did not know.

Besides, anyone who has been a faithful reader of The Daily Dose for any length of time can probably guess that- folksy, plain speaking, practical as dirt, “I’m a living in a material world, and I am a material girl” (More Marx than Madonna) mannerisms aside- I’m going to “root, root, root for the home team” that goes to bat arguing that time is a story we tell ourselves. It very well may be a necessary story, but still it is a story that is re-told in many different ways over a Thousand and One Nights. It is a story we all lose our heads over, now and again.

Lately, I have been re-reading the stories we tell about time. The chapter I am most interested in has the White Rabbit running, compulsively pulling his watch out again and again to check the time, fretting “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.” Recently, this section of the story has been revised, introducing the co-joined twins 24/7- the slimmer, hipper and thus even more annoying cousins of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum- and adding an exhaustive description of the all access, all the time, never off work, never disconnected from your friends, never time to focus on one thing, very unmerry multi-tasking landscape.

I wouldn’t want you to think that this is is the chapter where we meet the bad guys in black hats. There is much more to the story than White Rabbit racing, hoping to keep his head. Sometimes, racing around like a chicken with your head cut off is mighty fun. I mean that both sarcastically and seriously. Sometimes, a time crunch focuses you on what you most need/want to do. Racing the clock can be damn good time. And 24/7 internet access has been a boon to my writing projects. The library is always open.

I have been writing for over two hours. Two hours after I started, I have a bit less than 600 words, not all of them good. Still, I would say that those were two hours well spent, spent not racing to meet a deadline but doing something I love- writing, reading, re-arranging, writing some more, re-reading, fixing, erasing- words. It is one of my favorite ways to pass the time.

It took me 2 hours 25 minutes to write this; I was hoping to dash it off in 45 minutes. It won’t you take much more than a minute to read it. Our time is winding up. And after a few more words, it will be gone.

Now some of my faithful readers might think an off the cuff Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words about Kaddish lacks a necessary sense of gravity. But the truth of the matter is that some things are so awe-ful that even dump truck load of words cannot capture them.

Death by suicide is one of those awful things that words cannot capture.

You throw out the words in a game similar to 52 card pick up. The words falter and fail and fall. You get down on your hands and knees, searching, praying for some meaning. Sometimes the only meaning to be found is that this game is for keeps, and you lose again and again and again. You are at a loss for words. You thought you knew which game you were playing, but the rules shift as you play. You have no choice, you must play the hand dealt. You pick up the cards and hand them back to the dealer. It may be a long while before the cards come back into play. You can be sure that sooner or later you will be dealt another hand of “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

And once again your words will falter and fail and fall.

And once more you will get down on your hands and knees, searching, praying for meaning.

And once more you find that this game is for keeps.

And once more you lose again and again and again.

And once more you are at a loss for words.

And once more you thought you knew the game.

And once more the rules change.

And once more you have no choice, you must play this hand.

And once more you pick up the cards and hand them to the dealer.

And once more you wait for the next round of “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

I will leave explanations of what it means to say Kaddish to those more qualified. It is enough to know that it is a ritual of words to say when words fail. Today an email dealt me back into the game of grief. This particular multi-round game started last October when a loved one shot and killed himself. Not having a minyan handy (and technicalities like not being Jewish), meant saying Kaddish was not an option. I turned to Sumi Jo’s rendition of Maurice Ravel’s Kaddish, the first song of his Deux melodies hebraiques. While not strictly the Mourners’ Kaddish, it carries enough of its phrases that it served my needs.

l’ella min kol birkhata

I wept.

v’shirata tushb’chata v’nechemata

I pick up the cards. I hand them back to the dealer.

da’amiran b’al’ma

I wait for the next hand of “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

v’imru amen

Today, The (not quite) Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words is, oddly enough, about words, specifically one word. Any student of scripture (scripture broadly defined) worth her salt is going to examine closely how words are used (and abused). I am as salty as the Dead Sea when exploring a word’s buoyancy.

Today, I embark on a pragmatic study of the word shed. The old saw “context is everything” will be our watch words as we drop “shed,” as used in two articles in today’s edition of The New York Times, into the English channel to see if it sinks or floats.

“A child can shed flu virus for 10 days, Dr. Imperato said, an adult for 5.” Donald McNeil, Jr., Containing Flu, Is Not Feasible, Specialist Say.

“Mr. Pestronk’s group estimates that local health departments lost about $300 million in financing and 7,000 workers in 2008, a year when more than half of all agencies shed employees.” Kevin Sack, Local Health Agencies, Hurt by Cuts, Brace for Flu.

My first impulse, due to reading one article right after the other, was to be slightly miffed as associative leaps lead me to the conclusion that this writer thinks of employees as an infectious disease spread by sick health agencies’ sneezes and wheezes, which other business can avoid catching if they take preventative measures. While this may (or may not) be a flight of fancy, there is something about this use of the word that is important. So let’s dig a little deeper.

Are writers, tired of the more commonplace words for job loss- firings, fired, termination, terminations, terminated, layoffs, losing your job- and barred from slang- canned, shown the door, given a pink slip, axed, getting your walking papers, sacked (ironic that the author’s last name is slang for to fire)-, stretching their vocabulary muscles? Should we applaud Kevin Sack for using the thesaurus to bring out an oldy but goody?

Two quick Google searches reveal that shed and shedding as euphemisms for layoffs and firings have shed all over the internet. Google turned up 321,000 instances of “shedding jobs” and 7,960,000 of “shed jobs.” All those sheds are kindling for an awesome (in the old time religion sense of that word) funeral pyre of lost jobs and dashed hopes. Ironically, this Daily Dose will put more sheds on fire.

This shedding of the word shed got me to thinking about the meaning of the word shed and why it might be used to talk about firing people. Shed is a powerful little verb. It means to part or divide, to pour or make flow (as in bloodshed), to radiate or cast/give off, to allow to flow or fall (as in shedding tears) and the less emotive, more passive to let fall or be divested of.

Bloodshed and tears may be the result of some of this casting off of employees, but looking back at the parallel use of shed for an infectious child spreading the possibly pandemic swine flu might shed some light on why shed is being used by Sack and so many other writers. In both sentences the use of shed makes the subjects less responsible for what is shed. The sick child does not mean to be infectious; the health agencies did not want to cut their staffs. In both cases there the use of the word shed implies forces beyond the subjects’ control acting on and through them.

“The economy made them do it” is the excuse hidden out back, behind the shed. I understand why writers shield their subjects from blame by building sheds of sheds. But it diverts us from looking closely at what is happening. Yes, often the angry gods of the economy demand sacrifices. The throats of hundreds of thousands of jobs are cut each month. The Labor Department’s Employment Situation Summary reported that 663,000 jobs were lost this past March.

Yet, the excuse of forces beyond our control, this shed of shed, is a faulty construction. Employers are to blame for firing so many people, regardless of why they made that decision. They are not the only ones to blame, but they must be made to bear some of the responsibility for these firings. As businesses and governments shed jobs like a dog shedding its winter coat, we must not let their excuse of the “economy made us do it” blind the rest of us to the unnecessary firings, the ways that particular choices of which jobs to cut exacerbate existing inequalities and how the economic crisis is used as a feint to cover flagrant abuses of power and sheer stupidity.

Did that corporation really need to fire so many people or could it have cut its lobbying budget? Why did that university president get a $200,000 plus bonus when whole departments with tenured faculty were axed, and will he get another one this year when even more jobs will be “shed” by the university? Why aren’t more in upper management losing their jobs? Keeping in mind that payroll generally is any organization’s largest expense, could state governments and local businesses find other ways to tighten their budgetary belts? If asked, will employees agree to a voluntary per cent cut in their pay so that everyone can keep their jobs? Have our state and federal senators and representatives cut their own pay? Why the hell did presidential staff spend $35,000 dollars on a photo- op that scared the bejesus out of people in New York?

Writers’ sheds protect business from scrutiny at the time when we most need to look closely. Let’s shed the sheds (at least in this context), cast them off and let them sink deep in our sea of words.