Pain.

For as long as there have been saps on earth, they’ve been told what I’ve been told for my entire sad life. No matter what pain you’re in, no matter how badly it hurts, how deep it throbs, how extensively it radiates or how long it lasts, saps like me are told to shake it off.

In fact, like the Inuit are said to have 66 words for snow and corporate america has 66 times that number for firing people, I've heard about 66 trillion variations on the tough it out theme. I’ve toughed out so much for so long, bucked up up to my pupik, and bit so many bullets that often it takes a good forty five minutes of grade A harridan excruciation for me to even realize something’s rotten in the state of george.

I suppose to be acrobatic about it, you can get so used to being doubled-over that you learn to appreciate the perspective, like looking at the Grand Canyon through binoculars furnished by Marquis de Sade. Before long you accept the writhing on the wall and lather wince repeat becomes your modus operandi no matter how badly your modus is operandi-ing.

For three weeks, pretty much since i celebrated my 68th birthday, I've been in the throes of abdominal and abominable arrears. First with a series of kidney stones that made my soul feel like a nuclear test site in the Bikini atoll, without the distraction of bikinis at all. Then with a case of diverticulitis that’s lingering like the stench of urine in Penn Station after St. Patrick’s Day or an ordinary Tuesday, because either way too many boys are relieving themselves of too much beer in too many places with too great frequency.

Once as a boy I was horsing around on a ball field, helping a teammate learn to hit a breaking ball. Muttley was bending them from the hill and I had the perspicacity to crouch behind the dish wearing no mask. It wasn’t a ball that clunked me but Goldie’s Louisville Slugger, square on my prognathous just north of my right eye, so that it was rendered even more prognathous. 

I stuck my hands over the site of the infraction, feeling for the sickly sticky of warm ooze, either blood or grey matter, or the sharp shards of having-come-apart cranium. 

I’ve read in books on ancient peoples that even seven thousand years ago there is evidence of skulls having been trepanned. That is having a hole drilled in them to relieve cranial pressure. During the american revolution, doctors, the few that there were, carried trapanning drills to help a poor soldier who happened to take a 3/4 inch round lead ball in the noggin. The soldier, if he were lucky got a gram of opium or laudanum, if he were unlucky, as most are, a snort of rum, or nothing.

The truth about pain is as Tennessee Williams wrote in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." (That roof, by the way, was installed by Guatemalan roofers, now being abducted by steven-miller's-goonocracy and being shipped back to a country they never lived in despite paying taxes in the united states for three decades something our felon-in-chief never did, not once.) 

Williams wrote: "The truth is pain and sweat and payin' bills...  Truth is dreams that don't come true, and nobody prints your name in the paper 'til you die."

So much we are told, all of us, to shake off and to buck up and to chin up and to stiff upper lip. So much, then when physical pain of an errant in the wilderness kidney stone is added to it, the whole concatenation becomes life in lsd-fueled room of fun house mirrors, like the end scene of Welles' "The Lady From Shanghai," but without the sweetness and light.

My pain has subsided as of this morning. The intestinal happenstances that wracked and ruined my shell since the beginning of this month. But that's all dissipated now, except of the worst of it. Worse, even, than Welles' brogue.