The Daily Dose

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.

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).

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

So my faithful readers are aware that I asked y’all to help me brainstorm a lovely list of possible topics/subjects/themes for my off the cuff editions of The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good Words). This is to help me reach my goal of writing and posting Daily Doses every dang day. Besides which, it is a form of call and response with my online congregation, and I love call and response.

I got a, one, only one, just one, one suggestion. Someone suggested I write a Daily Dose about amputee porn. Now, you might think that person was being a smart ass, trying to trip me up by offering up a potentially shocking recommendation, but s/he wasn’t. No, the suggestion was made with a fairly straight face (or at least I assumed s/he had a straight face, since I couldn’t actually see the face in question).

Now in order to keep my writing time to 45 minutes or less (the major thing that makes a Daily Dose off the cuff is that I don’t spend hours and hours writing it), I will focus in on one key idea. I will not go into the complex, thorny, knotty issue of fetish porn that focuses on people’s body parts or lack thereof. No, I will follow one thought trail.

I think how someone responds to hearing the word “amputee” before the word “porn” tells us a lot about where that person is at. Again, I won’t go into all the possible reactions, since looking at just one reaction is enough grist for the mill. If the reaction is to snigger and try to make a (bad) joke out of it, then it is unlikely that s/he can imagine someone with physical disabilities or “non-standard” bodies having beautiful, hot, amazing sex with partners that- really and truly- find that particular someone attractive.

This is an extension of the shame of and hate for our imperfect, not always controllable bodies (with or without a significant disability) that most of us carry with us. Many people shudder at the idea of seeing their aging parents naked, not only because of the taboo most middle class American families have about parental nudity, but also because they assume that their parents’ aging bodies are ugly. And if you dare suggest the aging, wrinkled, sometimes fat bodies of our parent’s and grandparent’s generation and, depending on how old we are, our own generation can be beautiful fucking, you might have to deal with other people recoiling in disgust.

This makes me sigh.

I send this prayer out to you:

May we create a world where “amputee porn” is not the butt of jokes made to diffuse people’s anxieties about their own imperfect, sometimes out of control, bodies. A world where our first reaction to images of old, fat, wrinkled and/or physically handicapped bodies having sex would not be disgust. May we make a world where we could admit that we found those images beautiful and yes, even, arousing.

Amen.

Awomen.

Pretty please with sugar on top.

I move closer and closer to my goal of writing and posting The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words daily. I am not there yet, but I am closer. And one of the things I have figured out along the way is that if I want to administer Daily Doses to y’all every dang day, I have to find ways to speed up my writing.

Generally, any given Daily Dose takes me quite a long while to write. I’m more than a little bit persnickety. And arranging and re-arranging words is one of my all time favorite things to do. Combine those two traits together and you’ll understand why it can take me way longer than an hour to write a Daily Dose, though it will leave you puzzled over how I still manage to make so many typos and spelling errors.

I have decided to speed up the production process so as to reach my goal of giving y’all The Daily Dose daily sometime this century. One or two times a week, I still will slow cook The Daily Doses, until the meat of the matter is tender and falling off the bone. But most days, I will mix up quick, breezy, strawberry daiquiris flavored Daily Doses. These doses will be more off the cuff, more improvisational, written in 45 minutes or less.

I will write a bunch of possible subjects/themes/topics for future Daily Doses on scraps of paper and drop them into a bowl or bag or some such, mix them up, and then on short and sweet helps the medicine go down Daily Dose days, I will pull the living in the future tense dose’s topic out of my hat, set my timer for 45 minutes and see what Good (and Not So Good) Words I can pull out of my ass.

I need help. Send me subjects, themes, topics, words, concepts, names of colors or objects or places or people, images, ideas, etc. It can be as broad a concept as “the economy” or as specific as “tax resisters tea party.” It can be as serious or silly. It can be political, religious, artistic, academic, sexual, social or some strange combination.

Send your grist for my mill by commenting on this post or by emailing me, TheBishop (at) bishopbishop (dot) com.

Take care and keep on keeping on.