Use Pylorexene with caution. Side effects may include nausea, internal bleeding, blindness, stroke, desire to commit suicide or murder, uncontrollable urges to stick your finger into an electric light socket, to pee on a neighbor’s new car, or to shoplift tubes of expensive toothpastes. See your doctor if side effects persist, and eat plenty of peanut butter.
Of course, I’ve created an ad exaggerating characteristics of ones I’ve actually watched on television commercials for pharmaceutical products. There are drug commercials on TV every few minutes, and they have in many cases become so subtle, that I can no longer even identify for what treatments they’re intended. The happy faces of the “patients,” who are hiking through lovely woodland settings with their dogs, fishing with their grandchildren, or just sitting blissfully on benches in beautiful gardens of public parks, beguile me into forgetting the purposes of the messages, the side effects of the medications often being ultimately worse than those of the ailments being treated with the medications in the first place. It seems that in our modern culture, there’s really a pill for everything. JB
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
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