Tasty, tasty pain.

Fuck, my neck hurts. My shoulders hurt. Through those connected muscles and tissues runs a thin, tight wire straight to the back of my skull, which throbs and pulses in time with my heartbeat. The wire wraps around my ears and pulls at my temples, until even the tiny follicles of my hairline are taut. My eyeballs are going to squeeze out of their sockets and roll under the couch, where they'll be safe collecting lint, far away from the dull ache they're currently enduring. 

Tension headache. Not nearly a migraine, but nauseatingly painful nonetheless. The kind of pain you could nearly chew. A slow, taffy-like gnawing that flexes your jaw and grinds your teeth. You'd bite something, but it'd be the inside of your cheek or tongue. And that won't be pleasant the next morning. 

Some people take physical risks for their lifestyles. They break bones pursuing 360s or malnourish themselves and go into hyper sleep-deprivation to endure med school. Me? I write. Constantly. Ceaselessly. Even when I'm not writing for the 8 hours I'm at work, I'm reading something online or on a printed page. Then I'm typing at home. Words are many exquisite things, but for now, they are literally a pain in my neck. Fortunately, they still leave me the ability to describe my discomfort and try to lessen it in the recounting. My pleasure is my poison. God, I'd make myself sick with all this tedious meandering, if I wasn't feeling physically ill already.

Advil would help. Or a chiropractor. The latter is unavailable. The former, unwanted. I'm going to be sucking those babies down for the rest of my life if I keep this up. Maybe I need a dictaphone, so I can stop working on my hunchback while I'm sifting through sentence structures. 

It's not old-timey romantic like an impressionist painter dying of heavy metal poisoning from licking brush tips. Fuck, it's not even a sexy typewriter-induced injury, like a sprained wrist or a broken toe from knocking the damned thing on my foot in a fit of writer's block. Nope. It's a 21st century repetitive stress injury from poor posture and a lifestyle that has me staring at words day in day out. They say you hurt the ones you love the most. But I've never hurt the words. Why are they now hurting me? I need less squinting at the screen and more downtime on a feather pillow. 

Ok. Fine. I'm taking a muscle relaxant. Maybe some alcohol. What? It'll help. And hey, that sounds like just the kind of dangerous drink lifestyle my fellow wordsmiths adopt to lubricate the creative fervor. Hemmingway did it. And look where he...oh. I see. Ahem. Bad example.

Ow.