10-40-400-40-10: Pain in the Membrane

Pain is our first teacher…effective, with surprisingly little homework…

Pain is the first indicator, after we are born, that everything is NOT going to be okay. Look at a baby’s face when it experiences pain… same expression I wore when I first played punch-in-the-balls after someone punched my balls.

Eventually, youths split into two groups: Those who have learned from pain and EXTREME SKATEBOARDERS. Skateboarders have lives that are packed with strong emotions, danger and adrenaline… almost makes it worth dying before they are old enough to drink. I think, if we were more proactive as a species, pain would’ve already evolved out of us. But, we are LAZY. If it didn’t hurt, we’d go without eating until we were too weak to move and just let our bowels burst inside our bodies rather than defecate. We’d touch hot stoves just to watch our palms change color. Wanna know how important pain is? Lepers don’t lose limbs because they rot; they lose limbs because the extremities go numb so injuries go unnoticed and they get infected and have to be amputated. It hardly matters because I still don’t want them in my neighborhood. And, lepers have it EASY, blessed with numbness while the rest of us, from time to time we experience the WORST PAIN WE’VE EVER HAD. But, it is seldom the worst pain ever, because THAT pain is caused by having your eyelids stretched over your knees. And, on some level, we realize even as it is happening that there are worse pains than the one we are experiencing. Personally, I thought kidney stones were the worst; and, then one day I had a kidney stone while I was on fire and being bikini-waxed… I looked back fondly on those days I just had kidney stones. Pain CAN be pleasurable; but, remember that pain comes in many sizes and types. If you are making love to someone and that person says, “Hurt me”, disembowelment is probably not the kind of pain they have in mind. You have to understand the pains. Stepping on a board that has nails in it is a totally different pain experience than someone laughing at that person so hard that they fall backwards and hit their head on a car bumper. And, when pain finally retires its teaching position and moves into your spare bedroom, you know you’ve officially become old. You are in pain all the time and the only thing you learn from it is that you should’ve become an EXTREME SKATBOARDER when you were younger and you wouldn’t be dealing with it now. Even during the last third of your life you do not understand the “whys” of pain.

You’re told to “work through the pain”, but isn’t pain a natural stopping point? Working past it implies you weren’t paying attention…. Like that slogan, “You can sleep when you’re dead”. Frankly, I’d like to sleep some while I’m alive…

… just so I have got something to compare it to.