Books Worth Licking

There are many different people on God's green Earth, and it may surprise you to discover that for some, nothing primes their jets like a good old-fashioned frog licking.

I said what I said.

It may strike you as odd, but perhaps not as odd as anything else you would find in a normal day scouring social media. Sounds similar to the days of my childhood when us young lads would find toads out minding their own business and utilize them for a new uninvited function of terror devices as we displayed them to every pretty young girl we could find.

This venture was going well for me until I stumbled upon the tomboy of the group. She shooed me as if I were a minimal threat, flashed the loveliest smile my little eyes had seen, then absconded with the toad. Took him right out of my hands to my amazement.

"Daddy says they give you warts," I instructed her.

"Do not," she answered, "I've been playing with them since I was little and I never got one." Examining the creature for I know not what, she announced, "You really need to let him go. How would you like it if someone just picked you up and carried you around?"

"My daddy does that sometimes," I told her.

"That's different," she said, placing my prize on the ground and watching it hop away.

I was in puppy love. I never saw her lick the toad at any time.

A few years later, we dissected frogs in school. The formaldehyde was a rough odor to contend with. Nobody tried to lick those frogs that I ever saw. I did witness a window or two get licked, however. No one I know licked a book, and we had plenty of those in school.

Most of the books were newer. In case you are not initiated to this fact yet, there are certain books that are titled the poisonous books. Not because a group of Karens have a distaste for them, in fact, many an innocent cashier might present such tomes to said basic malcontents for a sound licking. Perhaps a vivid green copy of a Brontë work. Or Louisa May Alcott.

Both are dead, by the way.

And the vivid books contained arsenic in the coloration of their covers. Made them attractive and highly desirable for their beauty. Perhaps they licked them. And no one asked for a manager.

Somehow, it's not easy being green, and that brings us back to green things that get licked. Apparently there is a toad that produces DMT.

It's a thing.

The authorities are vocal about this in a prominent news headline:

The National Park Service wants humans to stop licking this toad

The dateline was last month as of this writing. November of 2022.

I had a friend once named Chip that was partial to licking things. Usually food items, by and large, and there was very few consumable items that he abstained from.

He wasn't the kind of guy that would necessarily lick a frog or a toad, but he seemed to visually favor them, and you honestly couldn't put it past him. If you presented him one in the lot of a Grateful Dead show, all bets would be off. One of his favorite pastimes was frog gigging. It was an activity that tickled him to no end, and would have made Tony Bourdain proud.

I never saw him lick a book. He did have this one thing he did where he placed his mouth open on a car window and blew, making a loud farting sound and displaying his tonsils for the horrified victim.

It takes all kinds, I guess, and it was the closest to licking non food items that he came.

I have no idea where Chip is now, but I'm sure frogs are involved, and most likely not the ones that send him to new dimensions.

Let's just hope he never finds the antique bookstores.