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, 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.