The Daily Dose

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, 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.