Tag Archives: Kool-aid

Coshocton

Coshocton: (n) a city in E central Ohio.

My body was twenty years old, my heart, fifteen, my soul, sixty-five, and my mind, ten.

Yeah. That’s about right.

I had started a music group and was convinced it was just a matter of time until we would have a record contract, dazzling the airwaves, and in the process also impress my family members who thought I should get a job at a local department store called Buckeye Mart.funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Gigs were hard to come by. We were performing contemporary music with a rock edge, but it had a Christian message. In that season, those elements were not allowed to combine.

So I was absolutely thrilled when there was a Bible college in Coshocton, Ohio, which contacted us and said they wanted us to come and play for their morning chapel.

I had long hair, and our group dressed like hippies who had put together their wardrobe with an Ohio mindset. We headed off to the college—which was rather conservative, and upon arriving, immediately ran into trouble.

The dean of students did not think it was appropriate to place us on a “platform of importance” when they had a dress code at the school which included that all men must wear their hair off their ears.

I kept my cool. This was the “old soul” part of me. I explained to them, in a comical way, that I was going to use part of the twenty-five-dollar honorarium check to get a haircut, because up to this point, I had not been able to afford one.

They looked at me with sympathetic eyes and actually bought the story—so much so that I was embarrassed that I lied to them.

Nevertheless, the Dean of Students included that part of our interchange in the introduction before we came up to sing our two songs.

I should say “prepared to sing our two songs,” because when we began, the bass guitar and drums were so foreign that the teaching staff came forward, objected and stopped the program.

The students were alarmed and perhaps offended that we were not able to continue but had drunk enough of the Kool-Aid to remain silent.

The ten-year-old mind and the fifteen-year-old emotions got together—and I threw a shit fit right there in front of everyone. I quoted Bible, Bill of Rights, Constitution and even something I had read in their school charter about “allowing the Spirit to move.”

It didn’t make any difference.

But apparently, I was eloquent enough that they decided to give us the twenty-five dollar check anyway, so it wouldn’t look like they were welchers and had cheated us.

So having only sung a half of a chorus on one song, we packed up our equipment and headed down the road.

By the way—I never got the haircut.


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Adenoids

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Adenoids: (n.) a mass of enlarged lymphatic tissue between the back of the nose and the throat, often hindering speaking and breathing in young children.

I was only ten years old so the significance completely evaded me.

Our family physician was named Dr. Livingston. To me it was just another name, not a literary setup, so when Dr. Livingston looked over his silver spectacles and told my mother and father that I needed to have my tonsils removed–otherwise I would have tonsillitis any time it was rumored to be in the area–they agreed.

They were further delighted when he told them that while he was in there yanking out the little boogers, that he might as well take my adenoids, too. It was common at the time. Tonsils were apparently so emotionally linked to adenoids that it was a given in the medical field that if you took one you had better remove the other, too, or fussiness would ensue.

Dr. Livingston? Tonsils and adenoids, I presume?

My father, being raised in a miserly German home, was excited because he felt he was getting two operations for the price of one.

So I was sent to a clinic in the big city twenty miles from our little burg, and was prepped for surgery. This was long before anethesia was perfected. It was actually barely beyond the phase of a shot of whiskey and a punch in the jaw.

What they used to put you under was ether. Now, let me explain what ether smells like. It has a distinctive odor. Imagine if a bottle of alcohol let off a big, stinky fart.

There you go.

So after they had removed my co-dependent organs, I awoke to the smell of this nasty “stinky” in the air, to spend the next hour-and-a-half doing nothing but trying to regurgitate all of my insides for public view.

About two hours later my stomach finally calmed down and they told me I could have some nice, cool Jello. (I had heard rumors that ice cream was the normal gift given to a patient, but apparently I ended up at K-Mart Presbyterian Municipal Hospital, where budget cuts were inserted to extract all pleasures.)

Unfortunately, the flavor they chose for my Jello was cherry.

When my mother and father wanted to go out and catch a bite to eat, they left my older brother in charge. The cherry jello by then had landed in my stomach, was introduced to the raging ether, and was immediately evicted. So when I threw up my cherry jello, my brother was convinced that I was bleeding to death. He ran through the halls screaming for nurses to come and save me.

The comical part (as if it isn’t already) was that it took the nurses at least ten minutes to figure out that what was in my bed pan had the unmistakable fragrance of Kool-aid.

Things went back to normal–if you call being ten years old, in a hospital, losing your tonsils and adenoids, vomiting profusely, with a maniac for a brother, only room for Jello and without the benefit of an ice cream confection … anywhere near normalcy.