When Goscolene Rhymes

When Goscolene Rhymes

“Fill your glass according to your tolerance.” If you exceed your tolerance, you are on your own.

Sometimes when you take a medicine for the first time it works fine. Months later it loses its effectiveness. Witches, demons, and curses are not responsible, your body is. The body develops tolerance to substances, medicines, and herbs making them less effective with prolonged use and encourages users to take higher doses to get the same effect. A simple periodic pause with a doctor’s advice would make the medicine effective again.

Such is why new drinkers of alcohol can become drunk easily. Drinking alcohol regularly builds tolerance to its ability to make you drunk. Those who can drink three bottles of Gulder without a single slight symptom of feeling tipsy have high alcohol tolerance. If you can drink half a bottle of whisky without getting drunk – seek help. Stop alcohol for a year and your five-bottle tolerance will disappear, one bottle (a.k.a. ọgọrudi) can get you drunk.

Goscolenia, the excessive use of goscolene and its substitutes we must discourage. By the time a person cries out, “Goscolene please, Goscolene please, Goscolene please, I beg you” – he or she is in terrible shape.” ^[1] No one should be in such shape. We reject it.

The only sensible reason one should drink is achieving lapotidunity, social, spiritual, and soporific. Lapotidunity is one of the ways of knowing oneself. Fasting, meditation, prayer, creative work, love, are other ways of achieving lapotidunity – that inner glow of relaxed contentment, that attainment of inner peace, that enjoyment of the present moment.

Goscolenoids, drinks that share similar characteristics with goscolene may rhyme better with the bodies and minds of certain people, I am talking millions of people more so from coastal West Africa including wherever their lineages dwell.

As I noted earlier you can find lapotidunity without alcohol. I know vast numbers of Niger Deltans, West Africans, and non-Africans who do not touch the stuff, reasons are unnecessary.

Now if you do drink spirits and are from that demographic, using goscolene may be beneficial. Goscolene first turn, the highest quality, surprises as the drink that rhymes best with the bodies and minds of those in question. However, in Nigeria goscolene is considered a poor man’s drink. People never want association with it in public. It is often drunk in secret, even the more expensive first turn. That is why London Dry Gin and Schnapps are so popular in coastal West Africa, status and self-image.

Cachaça, the Brazilian goscolenoid made of cassava starch has no stigma in its drinking. The taste, after taste, smell, after feeling qualifies cachaça as a true goscolenoid. If you live in diaspora where goscolene is hard to come by cachaça is handy. All you need is a trial as in so far as lapotidunity is the goal. A shot or two measure, 5cl (x2) is sufficient: a Fanta bottle, 30 cl, is far too much. Unless you drink goscolene for masochistic drunkenness. I was told by hard drinkers of the stuff cachaça does the same. Don’t wound yourself O!

Interestingly, cachaça is reputed to be good for watching football. A Brazilian who drinks the stuff would say that, but a Nigerian would not dare such a comment about goscolene.

Noteworthy, is Jesse my hometown, was the world’s largest producer of garri, a cassava food product, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Oil money ended that industry. Jesse also originated egun ọdoware, starch meal swallow pounded with ripe plantain, excellent with well-prepared amiedi, palm oil soup. My ancestors were cassava eaters besides a myriad of other edibles. I did not know this though a genius in my body called DNA knew it well.

My ancestors were not grape eaters, grain eaters, potato eaters, sugar eaters. Thus, it surprises me not, that spirits made from those starter foods don’t rhyme so well with my body. My ancestors drank palm wine well, ate cassava well well. This thing called DNA. – hailings!

Palm wine is quite different from cassava starch. The tricky question then is why do they rhyme with my body in analogous ways? Because it rhymed with my ancestors’ bodies, diet, and wellness.

Can we please leave it there.

Ọwanvre!

Be good, not lucky.

[1] Ogogoro biko, Ogogoro biko, Ogogoro biko, Mi revwe.