Category Archives: distributio

Distributio (dis-tri-bu’-ti-o): (1) Assigning roles among or specifying the duties of a list of people, sometimes accompanied by a conclusion. (2) Sometimes this term is simply a synonym for diaeresis or merismus, which are more general figures involving division.

Most people believe living and dying are different. Actually, they are the same: living is dying, dying is living. Sure, there’s infancy, toddlerhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age, nursing home, death. Maybe there’s an afterlife where you spend eternity in a diner or a really well-run library, or clog dancing in the sky on a perpetual Irish holiday. Don’t scoff. Anything you can imagine about the afterlife is just as possible as anything else—it’s a matter of faith, not facts or even plausibility.

What are the foundations of faith? You can give me a list 500 miles long and reflect on what you have faith in, in a staccato burst of reasons read off the list, that are themselves are taken on faith—in matters of faith, there’s no escaping faith: it may be a pylon pointing nowhere, erected by hope and fear.

Faith turns on narratives projecting pathways to a range of destinations—from Truth Town to Cloud Cuckoo Land. All destinations have arbiters: from scientists, to jurors, to hard-boiled lunatics resting in their cells. But then, the arbiters may have arbiters who affect the community with faith that putting immigrants in detention centers will cleanse the community of evil, or a pain relief medication is harmless when administered to pregnant women. Historically, the list of truth-catastrophes is pretty long. So yes, one of the hallmarks of truth, as far as it is taken on faith all the time, is that it can be wrong. The comforting image of the cure it may project can be shattered, and vice-a-versa.

So anyway, as I eat my breakfast, I reflect on the brevity of life. At any moment, any day, I may succumb. We can’t predict it. We can’t control it. Now could be the time!

POSTSCRIPT

His cereal bowl clattered to the floor. He was dead. The Grim Reaper looked in his kitchen window and shook his bony head and said, “He talked himself to death. What a joke.”

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.

Distributio (dis-tri-bu’-ti-o): (1) Assigning roles among or specifying the duties of a list of people, sometimes accompanied by a conclusion. (2) Sometimes this term is simply a synonym for diaeresis or merismus, which are more general figures involving division.

Ok, one more time: Vinny, you stand on Old Man Nut Case’s front lawn and scream like a stuck pig. He’ll come running out the front door to see what’s going on. Ralph and Ticky, as he comes out the front door, you break in the back door and use your metal detectors to find his gold. When he gets to you Vinny, you taser the old buzzard, chloroform him, and you and Joey drag him back in the house. I’ll pull up and the four of us will load the gold in the van and take off. Any questions?

“What if somebody sees us?” Vinny asked. “We’re all wearing Ronald Reagan masks and I took the plates off the van.“ I answered. “What if the old goat doesn’t come running out?” Asked Ticky. “Then, we go in. We ring his bell and barge in the front door when he opens it.” I answered. “But why don’t we do that in the first place?” Asked Ralph. “Shut up.” I said.

The night came! We were going to be rich. It was rumored that the old man had $500,000 in gold stashed somewhere in his house. Supposedly, he was a gold miner when he was young, panning near Sutter’s Mill, California when discovered a vein of gold the size of a box car. He mined the vein and had the gold melted into ingots. He bought a modest home here in Bakersfield and had the gold transported here by tractor trailer truck. It took him a year to move the gold into the house without being detected. He wrapped the ingots in baby blankets, disguising them as infants, and carried them one-by-one inside.

He lives by shaving thin slices off the ingots and turning them into cash at “Gold Line” at the mall. The proprietor of “Gold Line” is our inside man. He gave us the heads up on the old man, so he gets 10% for informing us, and also, laundering the stolen gold.

The big night had come.

Vinny had perfected his stuck pig call. We pulled up and prepared to take our positions. We were immediately faced with a police car that pulled up alongside us, lights flashing. What the hell? We hadn’t even gotten out of the van. The cop said, “Mr. Zwanger across the street noticed your van doesn’t have any plates.” I said, “They fell off in the car wash and I’ve been too busy to put them back on.” The policeman said, “Ok. Put ‘em back on and stop by the station tomorrow morning.” I breathed a sigh of relief, but our plan was foiled.

As we were pulling away we saw the “police,” now with balaclavas over their heads, barging through the old man’s front door. We looked at each other and then said “Nah” almost simultaneously.

The morning newspaper’s headline read: “Phony Fuzz Finds Gold.” The cops that had told us to be on our way and put the van’s plates back on were fake! They had robbed the old man’s gold. We had seen their faces! We could help catch them. We went to the police station to see if we could help apprehend the robbers. The desk sergeant was of them! He recognized us instantly and he motioned us to the interrogation room. His three co-conspirators showed up. We made a deal. They split fifty-fifty with us to keep our mouths shut.

I was pretty sure they were going to kill us. So, I took my share of the gold and built a mega-church and became a Christian Evangelist Minister. I figured I’d be safe as a minister of the Lord. Plus, I give sermon after sermon on loving your neighbor. I think I even saw one of the fake cops in the back row of pews one Sunday morning. He kept pointing his index finger at me like a gun.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.