Tag Archives: poison

Arachnophobia

dictionary with letter A

Arachnophobia: (n) an irrational fear of spiders.

A fear of spiders.

Isn’t that like saying, “people who poop?”

I mean, it’s everybody, right?

You might have two creepy people you’ve met in your life who think spiders are cool, but you would never let them babysit your children, nor would you co-sign a loan so they could buy a really neat video game setup.

I guess the key word here is “irrational.” An irrational fear. When it comes to spiders, what would that be?

Honestly, I do not see parents turning to their children and saying, “Come on, Billy, it’s just a spider. Here’s a little comb. Preen his hairy legs.”

People have all sorts of pets, but no one has a pet spider. Matter of fact, I think having a pet spider might be one of the four profiles of a serial killer.

So what is an irrational fear of spiders?

I suppose if you mistook a box of raisins for spiders that might qualify.

Or if you believed the dried boogers in your nose were spiders and constantly tried to dig them out with Q-tips, I get that.

But other than that, a distaste for spiders is not really a fear, but rather, an intelligent pursuit.

I remember when I was told that you could tell a black widow spider by the hour-glass on its…well, I don’t remember. Was it its backside? Or its underside? Either way, if I have to get that close to be sure, just to have fellowship with a black spider without being prejudiced against it for being a black widow, I will pass.

Then there’s the brown recluse spider, which is brown, and I assume, reclusive. So I imagine if you happen upon one of them, they’d be really pissed off because you found their hiding place and they would spread some poison your way.

I don’t even want to get into tarantulas.

And Grandaddy Longlegs look like they should be in Star Wars.

I don’t like spiders.

If I reach the pearly gates and God finds my bigotry against them to be distasteful and feels I need to spend some time in purgatory for my intolerance, so be it.

Just as long as there are no spiders.

Donate Button

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

Angelou, Maya

dictionary with letter A

Angelou, Maya: (1928-2014): a U.S. novelist and poet, who wrote the autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” recounting her harrowing experiences as a black child in the American south.

When Ms. Angelou died recently, I was curious about how the press would discuss her journey.

Let’s be honest–it’s what we do. We characterize human beings into such small compartments that it is difficult for them to be contained without busting out the sides.

Here is what I discovered: most of the reports focused on some aspect of her race, her experiences within the realm of her color, or her writings about the subject. It will be many generations before we’re able to escape the statement, “She was black.”

The next popular phrase used for her was “ground-breaking.”

Often I think we fail to understand that breaking ground means that the earth has gone fallow, failing to grow anything, and that someone needs to take a shovel to the crusty surface and risk looking like a fool for pursuing hope in the desert.

Even though we laud her efforts, we must realize that she spent the majority of her life subjugated by a society that found her inferior by hue, even though she was able to intellectually surpass all the hum of their activity.

In third place was an appreciation for her art.

I suppose it might have taken a primal position had it not been for an ongoing, quiet racism that whispers in corners of the secrecy of our private moments.

I personally remember her as a soft-spoken, gentle woman with a bit of edge, who tried to explain the confusion around her using more beautiful language than it perhaps deserves.

I recall her debating a rap artist and telling the young man that using dark or evil language was like pouring poison into the world. She said, “Poison is always poison.”

The young rapper was very respectful but unmoved. For after all, one man’s poison is another man’s medicine, and all the cures we have for ailments, left to themselves or taken in excess, are deadly.

She was a tender, simple woman of craft who believed there was still much to be done, carried the scars of her upbringing and yearned for a more peaceful place.

It is a great comfort to me that she has found that home.

It is a great curiosity to me that perhaps in the future, people like Maya can be known for what they say … instead of what color they appear to be.

 

 

Donate Button

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

Amphetamine

dictionary with letter A

Amphetamine: (n) a synthetic, mood-altering, addictive drug, used illegally as a stimulant and legally to treat ADD in children and narcolepsy in adults.

Thirty seconds to explain what it does and thirty seconds to scare the crap out of you over the side effects.

That is the construction of the normal commercial on television advertising a new drug.

We need to get away from the concept that drugs are miracles.

Perhaps they are miracles in the sense of describing the Grand Canyon if you’re only viewing it from a safe distance or in some sort of slide show.

But if you’re standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and leaping head-first into the abyss, it loses some of the glow of its “miraculous.” Then it just becomes a bunch of rocks smashing your brains.

Here’s my truth: use as few drugs as possible.

For me, this became fairly complicated when I was diagnosed with diabetes. They recommend you try to keep your blood sugar down through diet and medication. But with this particular condition, the doctors began to introduce other peripheral possibilities which they decided to pre-medicate by giving me additional drugs, which, separate from their helpful tendencies, are basically poison.

Just as ministers want to make you a sinner and politicians want to put you into a voting block, physicians feel useful when they discover ailments in you.

I don’t hold it against them. It’s their profession. After all, in the process of being paranoid, even crazy people avoid obstacles and difficulties.

But drugs are nothing to mess with–especially amphetamines. It is beyond comprehension that we pump our children full of chemicals to get them to be attentive when it used to be handled in the schoolyard at recess by somebody throwing a ball at your head and saying, “Wake up, Billy!”

It’s not that I recommend the crude treatment of children to one another. But I am not convinced that rattling the human body with deadly potions is a better alternative.

I am not an individual who places great faith in holistic medicine.

I am not against prescribing cures for those who are hurting.

It’s just that I think the truly mature human being needs to step back from any diagnosis, and before popping a pill of purpose, ask if there is any other way.

Because when drugs get done with human beings, they mostly addict us and hurt us.

Therefore, we should only welcome them temporarily … and cautiously.

 

Donate Button

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

Agent Orange

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter AAgent Orange: (n) a defoliant chemical used by the U.S. during the Vietnam war

I don’t trust the press.

I don’t trust the government.

I’m a child of the 60’s.

What is the problem with mistrusting the government and the press? They seem to control almost everything. It puts me in danger of not trusting anything.

Matter of fact, many people my age have rejected spirituality because it appears to be a heavenly government with a press corps, promoting the Bible.

This is what I think about when I hear the words, “Agent Orange:”

As a kid I went to school, had friends, flirted with girls, tried to play football and attempted to keep my grades high enough that I didn’t get kicked out of the National Honor Society while all the time my government was spewing poison all over the countryside of Vietnam, which not only killed vegetation but also ended up destroying human life.

By the time I discovered it, along with everyone else in the country, we were already in the midst of an elongated conflict which ended up costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

To achieve what? A Vietnam which is now united under one government–basically Marxist–which after all these decades, is accepted by our nation as a friendly and fertile climate for commerce.

What can we learn from the Agent Orange stupidity that exists in all aspects of our society? What are we trying to defoliate today, which in the future will become acceptable and those who live long enough to walk in that future time will look back to wonder “what in the hell we were thinking?”

There are three things you must have if you’re a human being:

  1. A sense of history. Try not to repeat the stupid stuff.
  2. An enjoyment of the present. Today’s all we’ve got.
  3. An eye on the future. In other words, what is this going to look like in twenty years?

If we had thought that way, many of us would never have worn lime-green leisure suits … and probably would have avoided any agent that was called orange.

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.”

Absinth

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Absinth:  (n.) 1. the shrub wormwood 2. a potent, green aniseedflavored liqueur that turns milky when water is added. Prepared from wormwood, it is now largely banned because of its toxicity.

All right, my imagination went nuts. Here’s what I see: a rather smarmy middle-aged gentleman, dressed in an unkempt, off-white linen suit, with beads of sweat sprouting around his brow, sitting in a large chair with once-lush velvet cushions, now a bit threadbare, presenting a chalice of drink in the direction of our hero, with a tiny, wicked smile on his lips, speaking in a broken accent: “Here. Drink. It’s dee-lee-cious.”

Our hero pauses, knowing certainly that this offering of refreshment is laced with some sort of poison–probably from wormwood. But to keep the upper hand, he takes the cup and downs it with one humongous gulp. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve and says in his best Midwestern, American accent, “Best I ever tasted.”

Our villain begins to laugh and cackle, giggling uncontrollably. “It is poison,” he says, sporting a bit of drool at the corners of his mouth. “And only I have the antidote.” He holds up a small vial which looks like it would contain really expensive eye drops.

At this point, any variety of plot twists could occur. A wrestling match for the antidote. Or perhaps our hero masterfully regurgitates the contents of his stomach, explaining that figuring our wicked friend would conjure a devious plan, he had surgically had his stomach lined with polyurethane to protect him from all poisons.

I don’t know. I decided a long time ago that it was much more fun to be a little wacky than being straight-laced and narrow-minded. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would want to drink anything extracted from wormwood. Of course it’s going to be poison. Sometimes the name says it all.

But there are those people who call themselves adventurers, who are not excited enough about the prospect of breathing normally, moving around and enjoying pizza–so they want some danger in their lives.

I am not one of them.

But I am willing to go to the movies to view their antics.

(What did you think of the polyurethane-lined stomach??)

 

Abscess

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abscess: n. a swollen area within body tissue, containing an accumulation of pus.

I was trying to figure out an acceptable–dare I say pleasant?–way to present the concept of pus. Absent any constructive idea, I was reminded of a time when I was infected with the nasty goo.

I was twenty-two years old, traveling around the country without very much money and no health insurance. One day my face started to swell up. It is a frightening thing when you are fairly homely, to realize that it is possible to become even more unattractive. At first I didn’t worry about it, which was stupid, but then on top of the swelling came great pain, light-headedness, a sensation that I had been beaten up and humiliated by a gang of aggressive nuns, and a little nausea.

I was sick.

I went to a doctor who was gracious enough to offer free service. It was good that it was free, because he thought I had a “cold in my jaw” and suggested antihistamines. I am sure that the medication did kill all my histamines, but they did not seem to be the source of the great swelling.

Finally, near the point of passing out from my affliction, my friends drove me to a dentist in Jacksonville, Florida, who looked inside my mouth, and with a bit of horror etched across his face, announced, “You have a severely abscessed tooth.”

No part of that sounded good. He suggested a treatment of antibiotics for two weeks to reduce the swelling, and then he would pull the troublesome tooth. I laughed through my pain and explained that I would not be in town in two weeks, and that I needed something done today.

He paused. I don’t know what was crossing his mind, but I imagine it had something to do with disposing the body in the Atlantic Ocean if the big, fat boy sitting in his chair died from the treatment given in his office. Actually, I will never know why he did it, but on the spot he chose to give me oral surgery, which included five shots of Novocaine, which did not deaden the anguish. Then he cut inside my mouth and squeezed out all the poison and pus from the swelling.

It was gross, sickening, painful, ugly and all the time he was doing it, he was saying little oaths and curses under his breath because he realized that he was in the midst of a great malpractice suit.

He squeezed and he squeezed, and I cringed and I cringed. After about fifteen minutes, he was satisfied that he had drained the well. He sewed me up, handed me some antibiotics and after about a week, I was well again.

Oh, did I mention that in the same sitting, he reached in and yanked out the tooth? I think he was convinced that if I left his office, I would never try to get help again.

That was my experience with an abscess. Sometimes you just have to cut into it and squeeze out the guck.

It is never pleasant, but if you don’t, all the poison ends up winning.

Abalone

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abalone: n. an edible mollusk of warm seas that has a shallow ear-shaped shell lined with mother-of-pearl and pierced with respiratory holes. Also called EAR SHELL.

He was unnaturally attached to his daughter.

I’m talking about creepy stuff. So much so that he decided to kill her husband so he could have her all to himself. Since the father was a chef and the husband was also one, the weapon of choice was to poison some seafood with chicken salmonella and give it to this hapless young man as a gift to serve in his restaurant.

When the young chef served this particular delicacy, it made everybody sick, creating a secondary motive for someone to kill him other than the father who wanted to be wacky with the daughter. Do you follow?

I bring this up because the seafood selected to poison was abalone.

Now, it is a long drive (or swim, in this case) for me to find a connection to this mollusk, but I also learned, from listening to Goren investigate on Criminal Intent, that abalone is illegal to procure because it’s rare, and therefore extraordinarily forbidden–and for those who actually do acquire it–expensive.

I realize this doesn’t shed a lot of light on the life and times of this most uncommon mollusk, but it does explain why sometimes the only reference we have to certain words and ideas is through our own experience–or lack thereof.

So when I saw “abalone,” it made me think of Goren on Law and Order and the creepy dad who wanted to get too close to his daughter and killed her husband, emulsifying his body and bones in a meat grinder in the kitchen of his restaurant.

I’m sorry. It was the best I could do.