Block the Receptors
After helping my friend move the other night and getting home very late I crawled into bed and found I had an amazing headache which was swarming over my head like flies on a corpse. It wasn’t just one headache but many, collectively determined to find a way in.
I found myself thinking of Lindt 70% cocoa chocolate, because some people get headaches when they eat high-cocoa confectionary. Then a strange thing happened. Here’s what I wrote in my notebook in the morning:
and as the phrase “block the receptors” spoke itself in my mind, my headache simply disappeared.
Not wanting to jinx the effect, I thought coolly, “Ah, well, that’s good. It seems to be working.” But a second voice was shrieking incredulously, “Holy shit! You’ve found the power-phrase — you can make headaches disappear!” Trying to get this second voice to quiet down a bit so it didn’t spook the first’s calm acknowledgement that everything was going according to plan.
The realisation that I over-verbalise in not just one voice but two.
Headaches by way of Lindt 70% cocoa chocolate and some people’s unfortunate reaction. Immediate response: just take some ibuprofen. But would this work — blocking the receptors — if the headache was induced by a cocoa chemical high?
I imagined a television commercial where a 3D computer-generated soothing balm of pulsing blue vaguely jelly-fish-like corpuscles (but detentacled and non-threatening) spaced evenly along the default layout grid of the production house’s 3D application, ray-traced into a matrix of scientific healing (the residual cheesiness of the effects perhaps a deliberate artefact intended to subliminally convey the pharmaceutical company’s committment to technology), applied itself over an oddly-lit hemisphere of jittery, chocolate-addled synapses.
The headache started to quickly fade before I’d even finished speaking the first syllable of “receptors” and when I hesitated, struck by what appeared to be happening, it began to return. I finished the phrase and it faded out completely. When the astonishment wore off and after I’d taped a mental note onto myself to remember to write things down in the morning, I fell asleep.
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Posted to General Rants • 2003.08.14 (Thu) • 17:34
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