“Tain’t Good Fer Ya”

Who would have guessed this? Alcohol is not good for you. As if this is news. My mother instilled a “healthy respect” (you can call it fear, hatred, disgust, or anything in between) in all of us kids for two things. Snakes were “ferboten” anywhere in the yard. Dad would catch the non-poisonous ones and send them out into the fields to catch mice.

Mom, on the other hand, would grab her hoe and begin chopping. Head off first, then as the corpse continued to writhe, she would shout, “I am going to keep chopping as long as you keep crawling.” As if it could hear her in the first place.

As she approached the snake, even poisonous ones, she would inform them that this two acres was hers, and the 318 other acres should be enough for Mr. Snake. It never did any good, because she executed the offender before he could transmit the message to the other snakes on the farm.

So I don’t like snakes. (Not afraid! Just don’t like them.) And her second phobia was alcohol. Her father had been a drunk before he was saved. She would tell us of following her Mom through the fields as she pursued Grandpa, begging him not to drink up all his money. She needed some money to feed the kids. Her pleading was in vain. She hated demon rum.

In fact, I am surprised that she would even let us use cough medicine that had alcohol in it. We had a pastor who was a recovered alcoholic and his wife screened every medicine for him because any with alcohol in it would have upset his equilibrium. I think that Mom came very close to putting us on that bandwagon while he was our pastor.

She had, and passed along, a vehement hatred for any and all kinds of alcohol. Beer, wine, whiskey: anything that could be called “booze” was a tool of the devil. Dad told me that one time he had discovered some whiskey that someone had stashed in a neighbor’s cattle tank to keep it cool. He tasted it and hated the taste. So I have a clear line of tee-totalers.

“Why would anyone want to drink something that tastes that bad?” he asked. So I got a good dose of preventative medicine (pun intended) before I ever had a chance to “check it out.”

I have tasted wine once and spiked eggnog and neither was a friendly encounter. Whew! It was awful. And I cannot stand the smell of beer, so the trifecta is complete. No alky for this guy–except in my gasoline. (I don’t drink gas either.)

As a chemist, I was not surprised when I learned that alcohol is a poison. Mom already told me that. People have literally overdosed by drinking too much ethanol. It is not as deadly as methanol or propanol (rubbing alcohol), but it still has an LD50 which means the amount that will be a lethal dose for 50% of the population. (Lethal means dead for the non-chemists.)

So now a new study has linked alcohol consumption to at least five different types of cancer. [http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/alcohol-is-a-direct-cause-of-seven-%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8Bforms-of-cancer-finds-study/ar-BBuDXc0?ocid=ansmsnhealth11]

No surprise there. Mom always knew it was bad news and now we are finding out just how bad it is. Kinda like one (unnamed) US representative who said we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it. Now we know “what’s in” both and it ain’t good. Care for a smoke with that drink?

Ironically, or maybe providentially, I read Proverbs 23:31 and 32 today.
Don’t gaze at wine because it is red, when it gleams in the cup and goes down smoothly.
32 In the end it bites like a snake and stings like a viper.

It seems like we are discovering more about the bite and sting. Thanks for the good advice, Mom.