The Daily Dose

My readers might be surprised that I often draft The (who knows if it will ever live up to its name) Daily Dose of the Good (And Not So Good) Words by hand, with a fountain pen. Writing longhand is a sensual, sometimes mystical, experience for me. Sometimes it is close to a religious rite. Ideas flow as my hand slides the instrument across the page. My wand makes a magic of letters strung together into words strung together into sentences; sentences that have strung up a little bit of meaning.

The nib of my fountain pen is broken, and I cannot get into the groove. To misquote a Bo Carter blues song, “my pen won’t write no more.” I had to switch from the frustrating fountain pen to a pencil, and while I know it is good to not caught in ruts; that I should be able to work some magic with any number of instruments, I must admit that it isn’t quite the same. I want my pen to work. I want my words to flow.

The broken nib of my pen makes me think of George Alan Rekers, the anti-gay ex-gay gay scholar and “activist” recently caught traveling with a “Rent Boy.” In true Southern Hyperbole round-about storytelling style, I won’t come back to the image of the broken nib until (much, much) later on. Many of you know the details of the story: Rekers goes on a trip with a “Rent Boy,” claims that he hired “Lucien” to carry his luggage and when Lucien comes clean about what he was hired to handle- “the long stroke” is not in the porter handbook, though we could argue that Lucien is a type of pullman- Rekers is caught with his “liar, liar, pants on fire” down.

I encourage any readers who are not up on male escort services to give the Rent Boy website a peek. I think there can be no doubt that Rent Boys are expert baggage handlers.

Though jealousy may be a sin, I’m jealous as hell. I want some Rent Boys to join my ever growing (I wish) Army of Alter(ed) Boys. Why should preachers who are against hot bi and homosexual men get to hire them?

Let us pray.

(On your knees).

Please god-that-we-may-or-may-not-believe in, pretty please with sugar on top, send a sugar daddy or momma (or multiples in any combination) Bishop Bishop’s way so she may hire hotties to carry the metaphorical luggage of Bishop Bishop’s Mission to save the whole wide world and little old you.

Perhaps, I should pull an Oral . . . Roberts and claim that god will suck me (excuse me while I fan myself) up to heaven if y’all don’t give me enough money to hire a couple of Rent Boys to go on tour with me. Operators are standing by. (Seriously, y’all give me enough money, I’ll finally go on a super-fantabulous revival tour, and I promise- cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my . . .- I’ll hire some Rent Boys).

But enough about me, back to Rekers. With a slew of abbreviations for academic degrees behind his name, Rekers is a co-Founder, with the infamous James “Focus on the Family” Dobson, of the Family Research Council, an organization known to be pro-beat-your-children-to-prove-you’re-the-boss-and-‘cause-god-gets-off-on-it and against anything and everything about homosexuals getting married, having/adopting children, having rights, breathing.

Rekers also is an officer of NARTH (National Association of Research & Therapy on Homosexuality), which has a gay old time trying to turn the gay into the ex-gay and trying to take the Les out of Bos. He has testified in court against gay adoption in Florida, against gay Boy Scout leaders and published lots of articles about how to correct “gender disturbance” using what some have called aversion therapy.

Rekers is up to his armpits in that famous river in Eygpt, the one that you can, without a doubt, step into twice, denial. Rekers is quotes in a Salon.com article saying,

If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called “Lucien,” you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.

Of course the old saw “Jesus spent time with sinners” is, in this case, more of the plaintive whine “Jesus made me do it.” It is easy to be angry about the hypocrisy of this man who has done so much harm. It is easy to mock him as Stephen Colbert did, which, truth be told, I found laugh aloud funny. And I think that the George Rekers Luggage Carriers, Inc. Facebook Fanpage is genius.

It is easy to be angry; it is easy to mock. I have done both. I’d like to suggest that we also let ourselves see and feel the heartbreak of his fucked to hell life.

The Family Research Council, motivated by the unsurprisingly unChristian desire to not be associated with anyone “tainted,” promptly put up a message disavowing any connection between Rekers and the Family Research Council. And NARTH, while not as cold blooded as Family Research Council, is awkwardly shifting away from the splash that Rekers has made “falling on the baggage carrier.” As of May 11th, Rekers has resigned from NARTH.

I imagine that right now, in between spates of self-righteous sputtering of denial, he feels lonely and ashamed.

Part of me grieves for how twisted up with hate and confusion Rekers must be. He has put a nib on his life that won’t let his ink flow. The ink still is there but all he gets from his pen are ugly scratches and jagged words. He marks up his life page, he marks up our collective pages with poor penmanship.

But he is not solely responsible for the broken nib on his pen. There were/are forces beyond his control that screwed on that broken nib and make it difficult for him choose a new one. He is a 61 year old Southern Baptist. When has it been safe for him to be who he is?

I am not absolving him of responsibility, but I think it is important to remember just how fucked up we still are about anyone who does not follow the straight and narrow. I knew people, back in the early 1990’s, who tried to commit suicide when they realized they were gay. Many young people, because life unfortunately isn’t an Ugly Betty dramedy, don’t have a Marc St. James in their life to help them accept who they are. And considering how many LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning) youth still try to commit suicide, too often successfully, specifically because they are afraid of what it means to be LGBTQ, perhaps we can, for a moment, be sad that the combination of a cruel culture, a lack of supporting allies and something in his personality meant Rekers hated himself enough to write that hate in big bold letters on other people’s lives.

George Alan Rekers cannot flow.

I mourn for the man he could have been. I mourn for the man he will not be. Perhaps he will find some redemption. Perhaps he will realize that his pen doesn’t write, that his ink doesn’t flow, that it is time to put a new nib on his pen.

Replacing his broken nib would not erase all the marks against him. It cannot erase all the harmful marks he has made. We write our lives with indelible ink. We cannot erase our pasts, but we can make new sentences for ourselves. If he chose to fix his pen, if he chose a new nib, it might set an example for other young men and women poised to take up pens with broken nibs with which to write their lives.

He could help write a new story for all of us. I doubt that he will, but I pray that his does.

Please god that I may or may not believe, please let George Alan Rekers accept who he is, in all his horrible and wonderful complexity. Give him and us a new, never completely clean slate to write on. Help him repair the awful damage he has done to others. Heal the awful damage done to him. Give him the strength to take off the broken nib, to put a new nib on his pen. Let him right his life. Please let his life flow.

Amen.

Awomen.

Pretty please with sugar on top?

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.

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.

Confederate Jasmine blooms. A white star of a flower on a trailing green vines, it smells sickly sweet. To me Confederate Jasmine smells of decay. It evokes Strange Fruit as sung by Cassandra Wilson or Nina Simone. This delicate white flower has a penetrating on the edge of death smell that dominates any space. It smells guilty. The fact that I detest the potent perfumes of white flowers might be coloring my depiction, might be causing me ascribe a florid history to an innocent flower.

Flowers are neither innocent or guilty, being outside the human framework of morality. Any corruption we lay at their feet can only really be of a physical nature, when actual plants actually die and decay. Anything beyond the stink of real live, perhaps I should say real dead decay is a flight of floral fancy.

Flowers cannot be innocent or guilty, but we can.

Let’s pull the next two petals off my floral fancy singing a “he loves me-he loves me not” chant of “innocent-innocent not.”

For a long while, I was sunk up to my eyeballs in activist work. I noticed before becoming a super crispy burn out that many folks invested in the utopian but necessary fantasy that “another world is possible” often spend a fucking lot of their time trying to prove to others that they have been cleansed of their sins. Now these are not sins you will find laid down in traditional scripture, no they are the sins of racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, insert ism or obia here.

For some folks it is so important that everyone else knows they are among the saved, they- because of all their hard work- are newly innocent, that the slightest hint that they have sinned, the barest suggestion that they might have done wrong, wrecks their worlds. A few folks spend so much time trying to show that they are cleansed of sin, often by pointing out all the ways others are guilty, that they never get around to actually doing any work. Those sorts of people are some of most draining and demoralizing idgits I’ve ever come across, and I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. On second thought, I most certainly would.

Let Bishop Bishop save y’all some worry. Every single one of you is damned, at least in any black and white ideology where some are saved and others not, some innocent, others guilty. Even in my shifting shades of grey world view, I must tell you, we all remain guilty. The tainted perfume of Confederate Jasmine clings to every body in the United States, regardless of the color of our skins, regardless of when or how we or our ancestors got here.

Some people wear just the faintest whiff. Others have on a tad bit more than what’s welcome in polite society. A few try to cover the smell up by wearing a stinky pine tree shaped car freshener as an activist merit badge. Some smell like they spent a long while soaking in a bathtub full of its perfume. Others reek so much of this scent that we choke and gag on their odious odor.

And that is just one of the scents of which we are not innocent. We all are, in various degrees of closeness, embraced by flagrant fragrance.

I cannot save you from what it means to be an individual situated within shifting systems of power and privilege. Power and privilege shift around you, changing moment to moment. Sometimes you have more. Sometimes you have less. Sometimes you are innocent. Sometimes you are guilty. Sometimes, you are coated in such a muddled mix of innocence and guilt that you cannot tell which smell is stronger. Much of it is beyond your control. That ain’t an excuse to do nothing.

The next time you are tied in knots about whether or not you guilty of one of the various isms or obias- whether or not you have oppressed another in some way, shape or form- I hope you remember this mediations on innocence and guilt. I am not trying to get you off the hook; I am not suggesting that you ignore any wrongs you may have committed or the ways you have been privileged. What I am suggesting is that if you assume that you got squirted with all sorts of scents as you walked through society’s noxious perfume section, you will spend less time trying to prove your innocence and more time sniffing out the complex bouquet of your particular flagrance.

That understanding might, no promises but it just might help you figure out how to not spray your stink on others. That understanding , will not, cannot make you odorless. The scents of these sins are always with us, all of us, every single body. There is no fragrance free option.

Sometimes I long to pull an Oral Roberts, to claim that Jesus is going to suck me up to heaven if I don’t get mega-millions donated to me, I mean to my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you, within in the next month.

I rather like the image of Jesus sucking me up, but that is the sort of comment that will have me writhing in the hell of some dang uptight-no-sense-of-humor-Christian. Ooh, I rather like that image as well, Jesus sucking me up followed by my writhing in some Christian. If hell and Jesus exist, and if Jesus is made in the image of your average fire and brimstone preacher, then I’m going there for sure. Betcha bottom dollar, I will have hell to pay.

I digress. As I was saying, sometimes I want pull an Oral Roberts. But while it is true that more money would help me spread the Good (and Not So Good) Words to a larger cross section of the whole wide world, and that someday, I’d like to cobble together a way for the faithful to donate some cold hard cash in the form of 0’s and 1’s flashing from their online bank accounts to my, I mean my mission’s, online bank account, it also is true that I dream of Oral’s trick when all the nifty things I could do on the cheap to spread the Good (and Not So Good) Words just ain’t getting done because life is full of too many things I think I need to do.

I fantasize about millions from heaven when I feel tired and cranky and overwhelmed by all the tedious little to do’s to do to make this particular dream come true. I envisage telling y’all that the god I may or may not believe in wants y’all to send me enough money to fill up my bathtub (ooh, that is another enticing image, me in a bathtub full of money that y’all have all touched), not because I need that much money to do what I’ve got to do, but because I want it to be easier than it is. I do not want to have to work so hard to find the time and energy to do the work that this extravagant (e)missionary movement requires. Of course, more money would help, but it cannot take away all the real world vexations stirred up when I attempt to (wo)manifest my dreams in a world constrained by material conditions.

There are times to shake the money tree. We should shake the shit out of all those corporate capitalists and politicians; we should make sure to spend our money to pay for education and health care and housing and the other basic necessities that ensure that all of us can contribute to our economy, not spend every damn dime bailing out the folks that fucked it all to hell. We should organize and unionize and agitate to make sure folks get paid a living wage.

My challenge to y’all, in this time of real economic trials and tribulations, in a time when some are paying a very high price for the sins of our financial fathers, my challenge to y’all is to suss out the difference between the money that you/we really need to live, hell the money you/we need to thrive, and the money you/we hunger for because y/our daydreams of millions from heaven magically taking all y/our troubles away. It won’t. It can’t.