Tag Archives: alligator

Chemical

Chemical: (n) a compound or substance

The medical field is hampered by two delusions:

  1. There are chemical cures for everything.
  2. So much progress has been made that it should be trusted.

Both concepts make the health field insipid and often dangerous.

Medicine is the lady and the tiger. Do you remember that story? You come upon two doors, and you’re told that behind one is a lady and behind the other is a tiger. If you open one, you receive pleasure; open the other, you chance death.

This is where we are in medicine.

As long as we’re taking poisons in an attempt to heal disease, hoping that those poisons will not destroy all of our good parts, our solutions will remain Neanderthal.

I, for one, have taken medicine and gotten the lady. I felt better and by the grace of healing, I was able to continue my life. I’ve also taken the same chemicals and gotten the tiger, and been cast into even deeper sickness or infection.

Somewhere along the line, as we study, we will realize that the power of healing is regeneration. It’s why we’re studying stem cells–living tissue encouraging dying tissue to live again.

It works for the alligator which loses its tail–and the more we understand in our treatments that this is the answer, the less we will appear to be merely alchemists.

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Calamity

Calamity: (n) sudden damage; a disaster

Regeneration.

I think that’s when alligators grow their tails back if they’re chopped off.

That doesn’t happen with humans. I know we don’t have tails–but if you cut off an arm, you’re left with only one.

Yet in many ways, the human race continues to contend that “things will get better if we just leave them alone.”

We will regenerate passion.

We will regenerate the values that seem to have slipped away.

We will regenerate racial equality (which was really never here in the first place).

Some people are waiting around to grow a conscience.

Other people insist they don’t have a soul, since they’ve stuffed it back in their closet and put a whole bunch of boxes in front of it.

Calamity is easy to understand. It is usually quite explainable.

It is not walking along on a sunny day and being struck by lightning. Rather, calamity occurs when we wait for solutions instead of working with the information we have to make things better.

It is the thought that since your tires are bald, they will not become balder.

Maybe it’s the notion that your child is no worse than any of the other kids in the neighborhood, simply because he has a similar haircut–but likes to kill cats.

Calamity occurs when life has warned us sufficiently, and reluctantly renders a judgment against us.

Without it, nothing would be fair.

And those who believe they are divinely protected from the by-products of stupidity need to be warned: God is not mocked. Whatever we sow, we shall certainly reap.

Donate ButtonThank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix 

 

 

Buy

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Buy: (v) to obtain in exchange for payment.

Commerce: “I want to buy something and you want to sell it.”

Capitalism: “I want to buy something and you want to sell it for as much as you can get, whether it’s worth that or not.”

You see the problem?

Although buying and selling is an intricate part of life on this planet, it has become one of the more dangerous activities, because pride in work, authenticity and integrity have vanished like a bunch of relatives during clean-up time after Thanksgiving dinner.

We keep moving the bar on idealism.

We used to think idealism was expecting people to act god-like. Now we think it’s idealistic to think people are going to act like humans. Instead, we anticipate the grunt of the pig, the huffing of the bull and the growling of the dog.

We have attributed animal tendencies to the human race to such an extent that we no longer feel the need to use the full extent of the brain, since the end result will be barnyard anyway.

I want to buy something–but I want you to sell me a product, an idea or a piece of land that is worth the money that I am forfeiting.

I don’t want you to gloat because you feel that you got rid of swamp land in Florida when you are fully aware that I am not an alligator. Matter of fact, I am so certain that this is a cornerstone to the recovery of true humanity that I am going to implement it in my everyday life.

If I invest ten dollars to make something, I am going to make sure that if I charge you fifteen, you are getting a full fifteen-dollar blessing out of the experience.

I have nothing against profit–but it will profit us nothing if we cheat one another.

 

Donate ButtonThank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix 

 

 

Alligator

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alligator: (n) a large semiaquatic reptile similar to a crocodile but with a shorter head, native to the Americas and China.

Sometimes I think my brain is really bizarre–and then my actions confirm it.

When I saw today’s word, “alligator,” for some reason, the old rock-and-roll blues song, Polk Salad Annie, came to mind. Now most of you probably don’t even remember this 1970 tune, but it was sung in a gravelly voice by Tony Joe White, and had one great line, where he enthusiastically piped:

Polk Salad Annie, gator’s got your granny

Chomp, chomp.

Can you beat that? It doesn’t matter if I’m watching a show on Animal Planet, or merely hear the word. This song comes to my mind and I giggle–which of course, makes people stare at me. After all, an alligator crawls out of the swamp to eat flesh.

I also think of what used to be called Alligator Alley in Florida before it became an Interstate. I drove it one time in a very small car called a Fiesta Ghia. As I crept along in my little four-cylinder wonder machine, sitting in the middle of the road was about a four-foot long alligator, who had apparently taken a wrong turn at the last marsh. I tried to go around the gator, but I think he thought my car was small enough for a winnable attack.

So every time I moved, he chased me. I didn’t want to run over him, mainly because the car might have lost the battle.

By the grace of God and all things natural, this creature was suddenly distracted by some other sound or sniff from the nearby creepiness and waddled away. But I have often wondered what might have happened if he hadn’t.

Perhaps: “Gator got my fanny. Chomp, chomp.”

 

Acne

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Acne: (n.) the occurrence of inflamed or infected sebaceous glands in the skin, characterized by red pimples, usually on the face, prevalent among teenagers.

There are so many things about acne that come to my mind that I barely know where to start.

I was not one of those people who had tremendous amounts of the skin infestation. There were people in my class in high school who appeared to have a face of acne, with occasional interruptions of real skin.

This was not me.

My face broke out around my chin and sometimes in my lip area, which was frightening enough in itself.

Somewhere around my fifteenth birthday, I became convinced that my lips were huge. Matter of fact, I would occasionally purse them when I was around young women for fear that they might think I had some Afrikaan in my ancestry. Not only was that thought bigoted, but also ridiculous when you saw my parents, who made the Pillsbury Dough Boy look like he had just come back from Jamaica.

But the thing about acne is, in a self-conscious era, an even more obvious and visible affliction is placed on you. For those who wonder if God is cruel or just has a bizarre sense of humor, the gift of acne to adolescents is an excellent example.

As a teenager, you have a self-consciousness which teeters on suicidal to begin with, and to be given a red rash all over your face, to accentuate your lack of attractiveness, might be the definition of cruel and unusual.

It didn’t help to be around adults. Adults fell into one of three categories:

1. Understanding. Now, this may sound promising, but to hear someone say “you’ll outgrow it” is like the Mama Alligator telling her young offspring that his tail will grow back after the truck ran over it and severed it. It may be true, but it’s not very comforting.

2. Remedy people. These are the adults who are positive they have the perfect solution to get rid of your acne. And it always has something to do with a medication that burns or smells like crap. Oh, and then when you smear it on your face and it actually makes the acne MORE noticeable.

3. Then there’s the third group, which was inhabited by my mother. These are the people who warn you that if you pick at your acne, especially in the area of your chin and nose, that you are in the part of the face which she referred to as “the fatal triangle,” and that you could infect yourself, send poison to your brain and die within minutes.

So as you can see, there is no hope for those who are young and afflicted by Job’s cankerous sores.

I guess the truth is, you do mostly outgrow it, even though every once in a while, I will sprout a pimple, even at my age. It does not make me feel young.

It just brings back memories … of “the fatal triangle.”