so last night i sat up for hours entertaining some pain. this is the second tooth to go like this, the nerve in a wanna be root canal giving up waiting for the dentist & committing suicide. in my life, this feels liks sparks. this *sounds* like sparks. i have tooth pain i can hear, & clearly. i have a lot of electricity in this body, & believe me, when it's good it's very good, & when it's bad, it's a fucking mini-taser going off in my gums like SNAP it goes just like that SNAP
laying there in the quiet dark not moving a muscle because of this fear that anything, anything, any impulse traveling down any neurons anywhere, might somehow provoke or prolong the enemy action in my face, i searched for ways to deal with it. i could see the red-orange gleam of the gameboy charging unit on the dresser, so i used that as a focal point & tried to breathe through it or whatever it is those annoying nurses tell you to do when you're having a contraction & fuck breathing it's time to scream & kick anyone that tries to put my foot in that fucking stirrup got it? so what do i know about breathing techniques? nothing.
so then i tried to visualize the little gleaming led was the pain, so i closed my eyes & changed it to a soothing blue white color. kinda aqua actually. however this is not the sort of pain that is impressed by that touchy feely new agey stuff, this is rude crude socially unacceptable pain politically incorrect pain that doesn't give a fuck pain that stands scowling its best badass scowl & growls, so do ya feel lucky punk?
and then i thought, what the fuck?
why does this electricity have such power over me? i fucking own the shit! i manufactured it out of raw materials in my spare fucking time! these are my sparks, this is my pain. and so i stopped reacting to it with the same response that i imagine some distant ancestor of mine would have, when he would have been almost inventing fire but having a few technical difficulties & "ow! ow! fire hurt og! fire bad!" & so mankind went without heat & cooked food for another buncha years before someone finally figured out fire safety & ... where was i? right, i was saying yeah, we're wired for stupid, we homo sapiens. we have this elaborate security system in place to warn us about shit that's bad for us, even if we already know. yes, i am aware how important it is to get to the dentist, & i will when i can, but right now i cannot. & no there is no cheap easy answer sitting right around here overlooked, i really can't go just yet. so this pain is of no use to me. you could say it keeps the urgency first & forefront, but you'd be wrong, because it won't -- i suppose it could, but it just doesn't -- this neuron seppuku that teeth do, it's wild painful for a good three days or a week, then it subsides & everything's bearable.
& so i focused my thoughts, my mind my body my whole attention on this pain. i followed it around & watched it work. i observed it, i tracked it, i measured it. i did not try to separate my self from the pain, good or bad right or wrong it is part of me, it belongs to me, it is mine, & mine alone. & gathered all my stubborn bitch™ brand logic (i've had this since adolescence, you can ask my parents, it's relentless) & decided that i was not going to let a bunch of electro-chemical reflexes be the boss of me. logically, this sensation i have in my mouth my cheekbones my eye sockets etc is no different from any other sensation i have, well, no different than say, the sound of the crooked cricket i call my conscience is from a humvee car alarm that goes off all night long at 175 decibels outside your bedroom window while its owner sleeps off the twenty year old scotch. you know? they're both sounds, one's just a wee bit more annoying.
so i still laid around much if not all of today wrapping my belief system around this, & practicing meeting the pain when it comes without that whining & cringing, trying to be matter of fact about it, calm & unfearful, unruffled like an accountant telling that stoner from purchasing that i simply will not approve any more orders for office supplies that have a first ingredient of sugar. & i did it without disassociating myself from my pain, people disassociate out of fear, i am not afraid. the pain is here, it is inside me, an integral part of my existence. "life is pain, highness. anyone who tells you something different is selling something"
pain is interesting when you're not sitting around frantically trying to make it go away. i'll never like it like it, that's not my thang, but i don't have to react to it like dear old great×75324 uncle og did when he was failing to manage to make fire work for him.
i still haven't quite got the hang of pain + sleep. it's like having a lonely tweaker friend show up & decide to spend the night, in 100000 words or more if they can manage. which is fine, it's not like i fear sleep deprivation, i'm pretty damn good company, even when i'm having problems with this fucked up wiring system of mine.
