Fast and Date Rant

Fast, Day Three; Date Rant

By John Taylor; 4 March, 2006

We had a delayed Feast of Ala on the first fast evening, and since few
were committing to come, the venue was moved to Anne's house. The kids
have learned to anticipate such small Feasts wherein they can easily
wangle their way onto the program. Silvie started off their impromptu
children's section by reading a comic book version of Rumi's fable
about the four blind men, as portrayed in an older Brilliant Star
Magazine. She then went on to her own little play, "Millie and Flavie
Return to the Land of Magic." Since this was a sequel, Silvie read her
script of the original play. Millie and Flavie, you see, are two cats
who find a magic carpet and go to a land of magic and adventure. Since
they are kittens, nothing too dangerous or traumatic happens and the
ending is happy. The audience got is amusement from her stage whispers
to her little brother, who did not always agree with the line he was
being prompted to say. If we left these two to their own devices, they
would spend the whole weekend, every spare moment they have, going
through these plays; these are a happy combination of plays and play
for them.

Unfortunately, there was a faint smell of wood smoke at that Feast. It
went straight to my head, gave me minor pain and pushed me parlously
close to a full blown migraine attack. Then, the next fast evening, I
did get a migraine. Strangely, I was still able to beat Stu five games
to one at table tennis; I was weakened and from the start could not
find my rocket serve. However, that hour of daily training in my
garage has made my shot placement quite deadly. Then even more
unbelievably, I beat him at chess in spite of the head-splitting
karaoke music in the background. When I told him of my migraine woes,
Stu gave this advice:

"Ask yourself the question `Why am I getting these attacks?' before
you go to sleep at night. You will then have a dream that will reveal
the reason, and once you know that, they will go away forever."

I fail to see the logic of that. What if God, while explaining the
reason to me in a dream suddenly realizes that I need more, not less,
affliction in my life? Then where would I be? No, I prefer to let
splitting heads split and not try to reason why. Mine is but to
screech and writhe.

Nonetheless, it looks like I will have to give up fasting for this
year, since it is pretty clear that it is pushing me beyond my narrow
physical limits. My main defense against migraine is to drink water
constantly, to hit the water bottle worse than any alcoholic ever hit
a booze bottle. Whenever it occurs to me, especially when an attack
seems imminent, I down water until I feel that I am going to burst,
then I pace up and down a few minutes and then force myself to down
another two or three more big water glasses. It seems strange but it
works, and I cannot complain that this medication is too expensive or
has any side effects, other than the obvious.

You know.

All day I feel like a runner in that old Monte Python skit, "The
Incontinence Race," a marathon of incontinent contestants who must
stop running and rush off into the bushes to relieve themselves every
few seconds. Really, wherever I go now my first thought is, "Where is
the bathroom?" But compared to the alternative, having your head
tightened by a band while at the same time being split apart by an ax,
this is a minor inconvenience. I find that I can even pump myself to
bursting with water during the nausea stage of a migraine, when even
the thought of food or drink intake makes me want to puke. I tell
myself then, it is only water, so what if it comes back up again? So
far the water gets past the gates and does its brain irrigation;
unlike coffee, it has not once been upchucked since I hit upon this
ploy.

Whither the Badi' list now? I was planning on publishing a 51 page
brochure on Oneness of God, first in a series on the Baha'i
principles. But next Thursday our Philosopher's Cafe in Wainfleet is
discussing suicide; maybe I will revamp the series of essays on that
topic that I wrote a few years ago. I have had time to grow detached
from the suicide essays and going over them would be good preparation,
since Stu cannot make it and I will be facilitating the Cafe alone,
for the first time.

My publishing plan is to semi-self-publish these little tracts on
lulu.com. No annoying middleman publisher to suck away the profits,
or, as his publisher did to Jules Verne, swindle me out of the income
from the most profitable item, the illustrations. In any case, it
takes months if not years to get these things reviewed by the NSA (the
Baha'is, not the NSA spies, who review everything anyway, without our
knowledge or consent), so do not expect anything soon. I would like to
be able to predict what I am going to do from minute to minute but I
cannot, so who knows what I will publish first, if anything.

I read recently the last novel Jules Verne published in his lifetime,
The Invasion of the Sea, as translated, heavily edited and published
by the Westlayan University Press. I kept asking myself, why am I
getting through this obscure and rather insipid novel when I have lost
interest in so many others, including Verne's most popular and exiting
works? It was packed with footnotes and was about a proposed, long
abandoned project to flood a large section of the Tunisian Sahara
which happens to be below sea level. Then I realized that it was the
footnotes. They are not a drawback for me, I actually like my novels
full of footnotes. Back in my school days I recalled that I was
thrilled with GM Frazer's Flashman novels, replete with fake footnotes
explaining the historical background of the events in question. Last
year I came across a new Flashman novel by Frazer, and though I never
read novels these days I devoured that one. Eureka, it was the
footnotes! My essays are nothing else but long footnotes to the
Writings, that is how they keep my interest up.

One of the questions occupying Verne scholars about this last novel
is, "Was Verne fer or agin' this flooding of the Sahara?" Some say he
was on the side of the Berber tribes in opposing it, others say he
liked the idea of a technological improvement on a huge scale. Well,
allow me to interpose my own little footnote.

In my opinion Verne would have been all for the flooding except for
one crucial factor. Like me, he must have been a date lover. He points
out early on, and not even in a footnote, that this part of the Sahara
produces the finest dates in the world. One variety, he lovingly adds,
is completely transparent, a sort of ghost date. This wonderful
quality is because of one thing alone, the Berbers believe, the
extremely dry desert climate. If the Sahara here were flooded it would
be goodbye delicious date crop. Furthermore, he says, there are no
fewer than one hundred and fifty varieties of dates grown in this
region of Algeria and Tunisia. I had no idea. I call myself a date
lover and here I was imagining that there is just one kind, the
Iranian Parnoosh dates that have become my staple, my one and only
snack food ever since I read that that was `Abdu'l-Baha's favorite,
that He often had a handful of dates instead of a meal.

Last year there was a study that found that most Americans get most of
their anti-oxidants from coffee, even though there is a tiny amount of
anti-oxidants in a cup of coffee compared to a handful of dates. The
researcher commented, "We ignore the dates because they are not a part
of the American diet, coffee is." That made me jump up and down and
scream in frustration. Why not make dates part of our diet, or at
least inform people of the reality of the choice so that they can make
changes that have to be done sooner or later anyway? Do we all have to
die of cancer and heart disease before someday somebody says, hey why
not make some easy dietary switches? Switching to dates is like
switching to chocolate bars, only tastier and sweeter. Why is it so
bloody inconceivable that Americans will have the intelligence to make
dates a major part of their diet?

You see what I mean about not knowing what I am going to write next.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com