Tag Archives: horn

Cranberry

Cranberry: (n) a red, acid fruit or berry of certain plants used in making sauce, jelly or juice

 I have gotten in more trouble in my life by pretending to be cool or passing myself off as something I am not than I ever did by just being bumbling or incompetent.

That’s the truth.

I don’t know whether I’ve ever actually allowed that realization to sink into my soul and find a home there and build a warm fire of awareness. I may still be susceptible to wanting to blow my trumpet, even though I actually have no horn.funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

But this was certainly true when I was in my twenties and I was trying to get well-known in the music industry. I immediately found that I was surrounded by drugs—mainly cocaine and marijuana—but for those who were not willing to pursue a narcotic, alcohol was the name of the game.

I hated alcohol. I still do.

I don’t hate it because I think people who drink it are evil. It just smells like a hospital to me. And the idea of drinking something that isn’t pleasant to swallow to gain an effect after it’s consumed just totally escaped my reasoning.

So whenever I went out to a party, in order to appear hip, I would always order a cranberry juice and tonic. It wasn’t an unusual request, but it was a signal.

Usually my order of the cranberry and tonic would cause those at the party to look at me with sympathetic eyes and assume that I was a recovering alcoholic.

Now, here’s the damnable part of it.

There were nights that I was so immature, so foolish, so tentative, that I would allow them to believe that I was two hundred and thirty days sober.

I liked it. It gave me power. It made them believe I had a problem, but also had lived a life they didn’t understand, and in some ways, I sat there as a cautionary tale.

It all came to a head one night when a friend of mine who was fairly well known in the music business turned to another gentleman nearby and said, “This is Jonathan.”

Then he leaned in and whispered to his friend, “He’s a recovering alcoholic, too.”

Now I was down for the count.

Not only was it assumed that I was “working the twelve steps,” but everyone at the table was waiting for my back story.

And God forgive me…

I sat there, on the fly, and made up one that would have torn at the heart of any grizzled sinner.


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Abstain

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abstain: (v.) to restrain oneself from doing or enjoying something 2. to formally decline to vote either for or against a proposal or motion

l have discovered the quickest way to make sure that I eat a chocolate candy bar in the next twenty-four hours. All I have to do is promise to abstain from them.

This works with almost anything else, too. It’s like the decision to abstain is really similar to purchasing a billboard in your brain to advertise the product. Once I’m convinced that I’m deprived, it’s is an easy journey to convince myself that the deprivation is … terminal.

This is why I have to giggle when people talk to me about encouraging teenagers to take the “vow of abstinence.”

When I was sixteen years old, I only thought about two things: food and sex. And most of the time, in some bizarre way, I mingled them.

So to turn to an adolescent and suggest that he or she should make a vow of celibacy when they are sitting on a raging reservoir of tempestuous hormones is to create the tiny cracks in the dam of their resistance, which will certainly lead to a flood of error.

I raised a whole bunch of boys. Here’s what I found out about their appetites: unless they were totally exhausted, ready to fall into bed, to enter a coma of sleep, they were constantly pursuing, through their curiosity, the entire panorama of feminine mystique. To eliminate the power of exhaustion from a teenager is to grant them license to explore their lusts to an inevitable result. (After all, the Catholic church has learned that asking its clergy to abstain from the “pleasures of the flesh” does NOT mean that they will not find divergent methods.)

Abstain is a funny word–and by funny, I mean strange, unusual and not particularly helpful.

I taught my sons to be busy, active and to burn off a lot of their physical energy instead of sitting around studying all the time, having temptation lure them into porn sites on the Internet. I also instructed them in the intelligence of masturbation as an alternative to becoming a daddy with pimples. It was quite successful.

And when I sensed that they were still bursting and bubbling with sexuality, I sat down with them to talk and giggle about it until they were saturated and once again ready for a good night’s sleep.

Abstain. It’s a word old people impose on the younger of our flock–once the elder rams have lost interest in what now preoccupies the young bucks.

Like I said … it’s a funny word.