<\/p>\n
Nine days ago, I went under the knife for a lengthy operation which involved cracking my head open, meandering around my brain with pretty toys and brutally scraping a blood vessel off of my poor little trigeminal nerve.\u00a0 Want a picture?\u00a0 Sure you do.\u00a0 So, at the end of this random post, I’ll post a picture where I’m imitating finely dressed veal.\u00a0 Yum!<\/p>\n
For 12 years I\u2019ve suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, which has shaped every moment of my life.\u00a0 It is fair to say that every misstep is related to the pain.\u00a0 Every mistake I\u2019ve made has been dictated by how I, or others, react to my pain.\u00a0 When the pain wasn\u2019t ramped up to white hot, I was spending every waking minute catering to the ever-present background hum, side stepping simple tasks that induced flare-ups \u2013 brushing my teeth, showering, breathing, turning on my right side while I slept, blinking, living. And if the pain had been pushed back enough to allow me to live, it was only because I was on a cocktail of mind and mood altering drugs.<\/p>\n
So now the pain is gone.\u00a0 I think.\u00a0 I hope.\u00a0 But, thanks to all the work they did inside my head, half my face is numb and I\u2019m deaf in one ear.\u00a0 But that\u2019ll go away in a few months.\u00a0 Then:\u00a0 Back to normal!\u00a0 Oh, and it\u2019ll take six weeks to get off of the drugs I\u2019ve been taking, during which I\u2019ll suffer from insomnia, profuse sweating, and acute paranoia.\u00a0 All things that I suffer from anyway, so my coping mechanisms are all in place.\u00a0 Except I might just kill the gay guys next door, because they fight an awful lot and this apartment building was made using tissue paper for walls.\u00a0 Sometimes, late at night, I watch their silhouettes, lit by the warm, flickering glow of candles, as they\u2026<\/p>\n
No!\u00a0 I kid.\u00a0 The walls are thinker than that. And I don\u2019t press my ear to the wall to listen for gayboy make-up sex.\u00a0 I have better things to do like download porn and shuffle around my own apartment in glow-in-the-dark boxers and bunny slippers, watching happier, wealthier people pass on the street below and pretending that, somehow, I\u2019m involved in their beautiful lives.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be 33 on May 10th<\/sup>.\u00a0 So I\u2019ve suffered from this pain thing since I was 21. That\u2019s my entire adult life wasted on pain and horror and drugs.\u00a0 But, now I can enjoy the fullness of life and become what I wanted to be before 1995: An astronaut.\u00a0 Then I can go explore that new earth-like planet that they found.\u00a0 Have you heard about that?\u00a0 It\u2019s only 20 light years away and it\u2019s teeming with millions of really angry cannibals who are constructing a giant, interstellar ark aimed for us.\u00a0 No kidding.\u00a0 I read about it on the BBC.<\/p>\n But 33 might be too old to start astronaut training.\u00a0 Plus, becoming an astronaut is, like, hard and stuff.\u00a0 I think.\u00a0 It can\u2019t be that hard if diaper-wearing maniacs can pass the grade.\u00a0 So maybe I should sign up.<\/p>\n I also wanted to be an assassin when I was a kid.\u00a0 Like Storm Shadow from GI Joe.\u00a0 I strongly feel that I\u2019m capable of this task as I have no strong attachments and no scruples.\u00a0\u00a0 Which lines me up as more of a Cobra Commander sort.\u00a0 Which would be better.\u00a0 Of course, Cobra Commander was a real fag in the cartoon. And he was pretty retarded in the comics, too.\u00a0 So he had a son he didn\u2019t know about.\u00a0 Boo-hoo.\u00a0 Who cares?\u00a0 Why\u2019s it matter?\u00a0 You\u2019re the most successful international terrorist ever known.\u00a0 Kill the kid and live happily ever after picking off the Joes one by one.<\/p>\n I wanted to be a cop, as well.\u00a0 It was more glamorous when I was in high school.\u00a0 I now realize that the only joy of being a cop will be when I get to say, \u201cSir, we found your semen on body.\u00a0 You\u2019re under arrest.\u201d<\/p>\n While that would go pretty far towards making the day all that much more humorous, I think I\u2019d get bored of it after a while.\u00a0 I\u2019d start to obsess over finding the semen in strange places.\u00a0 In the ear, in the neck of the decapitated head\u2026anything.\u00a0 Just to break up the monotony of yet another killer judge masturbating over the body of his secret homosexual lover.<\/p>\n So it all comes back to the job I could do with or without trigeminal pain \u2013 night watchman. \u00a0\u00a0One of those jobs I\u2019ve long lusted after.\u00a0 Walking around dark hallways in a tight, polyester uniform, swinging my flashlight and whistling tunelessly to myself.\u00a0 The perfect job for a sociopath.<\/p>\n Not that I\u2019m a sociopath.\u00a0 Just that, well, you know how it is.\u00a0 I\u2019m sitting here, housebound, on a beautiful spring day, recovering from brain surgery, watching old Doctor Who on DVD, and I\u2019m happy as a clam.\u00a0 Except that I lose all my energy in the afternoon and I\u2019m strung together by the grace of oxycodone.\u00a0 Which is probably why I\u2019m happy as a clam. Oh, yeah, two more little pills.\u00a0 Zonk! Normally I\u2019d be awake and alive all day and strung together by the grace of alcohol, absent from my life this long week and a half.\u00a0 Oxy has more of a kick, though.\u00a0 Booze on a spring day always makes me feel like a British landowner in the 1920\u2019s.\u00a0 I say, shall we walk down to the stables and solve a murder, pip-pip?\u00a0 Oxy?\u00a0 Yeah, that\u2019s a different sort of drug.\u00a0 Take those, let them settle, and, well, I feel more like a parakeet.\u00a0 How\u2019s the pain?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know\u2026chirp chirp.\u00a0 No!\u00a0 don\u2019t touch me!\u00a0 Hollow bones!\u00a0 Floating in space!<\/p>\n I had intended, in the days leading up to this surgery that would reshape my life, to brutally attack all of the people in my life who judged me or abandoned me.\u00a0 Instead, I spent those days having a long series of miniature nervous breakdowns.\u00a0 I suppose that means I should use the next six weeks of disability to bitterly run around and be a meanie.\u00a0 Instead, I\u2019ve been encouraged to write 100 word posts about my state of mind.\u00a0 A perfect idea, really. I\u2019m at about 950 words right now and, between the painkillers and my numb face and general post-op freak-out, I have no idea what I\u2019ve written.\u00a0 Stringing sentences and ideas\u00a0 together is like<\/p>\n Last night was the first time I\u2019ve truly slept properly for more than two hours.\u00a0 No drug dreams, no pain, no waking up with a wooden block for a neck.\u00a0 So I\u2019m not much in the mood for writing.\u00a0 I want more happy sleep.\u00a0 Lots more.\u00a0 A week\u2019s worth.\u00a0 So, if I do have enough discipline to actually pull away from Doctor Who and write, the hundred words will take the form of poems to oxycodone and other tiny white pills of love and happiness.\u00a0 Or endless praise for people who go to pick up my prescriptions.\u00a0 I need one now, by the way.\u00a0 Any volunteers?\u00a0 I need you to go pick up schedule two drugs and have all the counter people at the Giant pharmacy look at you with hatred and accusation in their eyes, then go through the whole thing where they say in a loud voice so everyone in line behind you hears:\u00a0 \u201cBecause this is a schedule two narcotic I need to turn around and walk one foot to the pharmacist and get it from them you fucking druggie pedophile rapist!\u201d<\/p>\n Um\u2026thanks. \u00a0I\u2019m glad you\u2019re going to inform me about every step you take today.\u00a0 What did you have for lunch?\u00a0 When was your last bathroom break?\u00a0 Holy shit, please, motherfucker, give me the drugs before I kill another eight year old girl.<\/p>\n And, now, the veal shot:<\/p>\n {mosimage}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[355,353],"class_list":["post-2544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-bra","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2544"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2611,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2544\/revisions\/2611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}