The Ache That Breaks

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This may be the affect of being born just after sunset into the twilight zone, but I don't necessarily sing because I feel good. I sing in order to feel good. Sometime it works and I get to feeling pretty good, and sometimes no matter how long I work at it I never really get over the hump into sheer ecstasy.

I've just now been sing for about an hour. I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for a long time and only stopped about three years ago. I'm still coughing up phlegm from "the good ol' days", but it's fairly clear fluid as opposed to dark brown. I've been taking a nutritional supplement called NAC for a while now, and it's supposed to help clear my lungs.

So, when I sang just now I would practice singing the vowels with an "h" in front of them to open things up. This takes a while. I like singing the vowels with the h in front. Hay, hay, hay, hay.... hee, hee, hee, hee.... high, high, high, high... ho, ho, ho, ho.... who, who, who, hue, you are blue...

After I warm up a bit and cough enough phlegm out of my lungs and sinuses I start singing nursery rhymes and patriotic songs I learned as a child. I don't sing the words, of course, because I'm singing vowels. By this time I'm singing God Bless America as if I'm laughing. The laughing makes me yawn, but I'm not really laughing. I'm deliberately stringing together the hee-hee-hees, and the ha-hah-hahs to the tune of the song.

Nobody hears this madness. They're usually too far away, and today, there was a huge farm machine spraying fertilizer on some rye grass cover crops a few hundred yards away, and I could hardly hear myself sing.

I've planned for a long time to practice this fake laughing often enough to make it seem natural, and just start cackling at the least excuse to do so just to find out how the people I'd be around might respond. If I practiced a hour or two daily I might could go to the Wal-Mart some Saturday and start laughing and see how many people I could trick into laughing at my laughter. You know: A man gotta do...

Whatever I thought I was doing by stopping the medication was a dumb idea. I did learn a lot from doing it, but my elbow joints are raising hell with me. I'm probably gonna take some of the prescription medicine I rejected a while back to see if that might help.

A correspondent who also has RA wrote that when he took this medicine he got some permanent nerve damage from his use of it. He told me that as a warning. I don't think it matters as much as it did if the medicine killed the nerves to stop the pain. I keep wondering if it will also kill the nerves in my brain. Well, why the hell not?

After all, the singing I'm doing these days, and for perhaps longer than I've realized, is basically a controlled scream. It seems to help. I'm beginning to get some ideas I can try to turn the pain into sexual pleasure, and I'm practicing them if I remember to while I'm singing, but it's not even making my mildly excited so far. What else I got to do but try?

Controlled utterances are an interesting habit to indulge. Apparently a lot of people do it and call it chanting as a religious practice. I've done it in the past when I used the sacraments to go beyond the care acting I was taught to observe as a child. There is a lotta control that goes a long way when the walls start melting, and for me it was singing that helped me to remember myself when the praying mantis' working the control panels ignored my presence.

If I live long enough this rheumatoid arthritis will probably impede my ability to move my limbs freely and as I will. If it gets to the point I can't sing or speak, however, I will probably die of heart-ache.
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