I Feel His Pain

I've always been one of those people who are most happy getting away from everybody and entertaining myself in solitude. But I am not completely asocial. I want to remain in touch with my fellow man and my fellow woman. Mostly my fellow woman, but I don't want to get off the subject with that.

What I'm saying is that one of the ways I keep myself entertained is by Trying to Relate. Trying to Relate is this solitary game I play where I try to keep in touch with the rest of the species by trying to relate to things that I hear or read about them doing. It is a fun game that can keep me busy for hours and hours.

Take for example this guy Aron Ralston who got his arm caught under an 800-pound boulder and chewed it off to get away. The news said he cut it off but when you read the details and find out how dull the knife was and the fact that he had to break both forearm bones first you realize that the "chew" metaphor is more appropriate than the "cut" metaphor. He chewed his arm off with a piece-of-junk knife. "Hacked" might work.

Trying to Relate takes me down many avenues of fun. I don't have to confine myself to trying to relate to Mr. Ralston. I can try to relate to the reporters, too. So right now I'm trying to relate to the guy who first wrote that it was an 800-pound boulder and I'm asking myself the question, "Who hiked back the ten miles from the highway with the scale and weighed the rock?" And I am imagining the reporter asking this question and getting a blank stare. This way I am relating.

But of course the story is about Mr. Ralston and most of my fun naturally gravitates toward trying to relate to what he did.

I am reminded at this juncture of the recent news of a study, done by actual scientists, that determined that (duh!) some people hurt more than other people. Now, "relating" requires just such comparisons between people. To be precise, in relating to Mr. Ralston I would be relating two people, namely him and myself. Therefore I must consider how much would I hurt, were I to hack myself.

Well. It so happens that I am the sort of guy who can't even touch his nipples with his fingertips without screaming in agony. For me, popping a pimple requires that a local anesthetic be applied by a qualified nurse. To remove a band-aid from hairy skin on my arm I shower frequently until it falls off or decays. I am not exaggerating one bit.

So the answer to the question of how much I would hurt if I were to hack myself is: gobs.

There is absolutely no possible way that I could chew, hack, or even cut my arm off, and then later say to the world, "I felt pain and I coped with it." The word "coped" would not be part of my description of what happened. I would say something like, "I felt pain and I screamed bloody murder." Or something like, "I felt pain and I passed out and bled all over myself and then I woke up puking and alternately screaming bloody murder." Or, "I started to cut myself and I couldn't do it and instead I passed out and woke up in this hallucinated press conference and now I'm going to die trapped under this rock."

What I am suggesting here is the heresy that Mr. Ralston was able to do what he did because he was constituted differently from some of the rest of us. He evidently does not feel pain as much as some people, namely me. I actually suspect that he is the sort who feels less pain than most of us. Why, I wonder, is it so important for him to climb every 14,000-foot or higher mountain he can, in cold weather no less? Could it be that he's desperately running around trying to feel anything?

But, hey, I'm not saying that what he did isn't still very impressive. Just because he couldn't feel his arm as much as most of us can feel ours, doesn't mean he wasn't attached to it. I'm sure that he's going through a grieving process now as serious as any I would.

Now, grief, there's something I can relate to, while we all wait for Paradise to fall on us.