The following can also be found in the book Chicago Stories 1998. Click here to learn more, and to download a free electronic copy.

I've been getting in touch with my pain this week. And I don't mean emotional pain and I don't mean the pain of an ex-lover and I don't mean the pain of my parents never buying me an Atari when I was a kid. I mean raw, pure, physical pain. I woke up at four in the morning on Sunday and my mouth was on fire. It was like all my teeth were made of porcelain and someone had just smashed them all with a hammer. It was like someone had just spent the last hour repeatedly punching me in the jaw. Raw, pure, physical pain.

So I crawl to the hospital which is conveniently located three blocks from my apartment and what do I find out but that I have an abscessed tooth, a cavity which has wormed its little evil way up up and up right into the nerve of the tooth itself. Now before you're tempted, let me just tell you up front not to pity me. It's been seven years since I've been to a dentist. I don't take care of my teeth. This is not the point of my story. The point of my story is that I was given a dentist's appointment for the following Friday and I was given a prescription for painkillers to get me through until Friday. But I couldn't get the money together for the prescription until Tuesday night, which meant that this week I went for approximately 72 hours having an actual nerve of my body exposed to the naked air with nothing to fight against it except a bottle of Alleve given to me by my friend Greg. I've been getting in touch with my pain this week.

Have you really ever stopped and examined what pain is? Pain is a signal given by little electronic pulses in your body that go to your brain which translates it into language you can understand. It is a signal of discomfort that basically cuts through to your rational, day-to-day senses and tells you, "Hey, something's just gone wrong with your body and you better take a look."

The most fascinating thing about the brain and these electronic pulses is that it can actually sense how bad or intense or dangerous whatever thing that's just gone wrong is, and will increase or decrease the sensation of discomfort according to the level of immediacy the injury's attention deserves. It'd be like owning a smoke detector that could actually tell the difference between whispering, "Hey, your bad cooking is setting me off again" and screaming, "HEY ASSHOLE, YOU FELL ASLEEP WITH A LIT CIGARETTE AGAIN AND YOUR BED'S ON FIRE!"

In my case, my smoke detector was yelling, at a rather loud rate, "Hey, Jason! You have a fucking hole in your fucking tooth!" Not a constant scream, but rather a steady stream of loud, piercing, blares, at me, like, a car, alarm, constantly, going, off, cause, the, owner's, in, Europe, for, three, weeks. Wave...after wave...of searing...red...heat, heat so intense that I couldn't see out of my left eye sometimes, heat so intense that the very act of breathing felt like torture sometimes, heat so intense that sometimes all I could manage to do is slowly beat my head against the wall and cry, cry so softly and so sweetly, like a baby with the crup, like a seven-year-old with chicken pox, for hours and hours at a time.

I'm on codeine now. I have learned the following things. One. Do not drink alcohol when on codeine. Two. Do not drink caffeine when on codeine. Three. Do read poetry when on codeine. Four. Definitely do smoke pot when on codeine. Five. If you are codeine and someone is talking to you and you stare at them long enough, they'll start sounding like the teacher on Charlie Brown: "Wauk-wauk-wauk-wauk-wauk-wauk." Six. If you are on codeine and walking down the sidewalk on your way to work and you are under the sneaking suspicion that you are saying out loud as you walk down the sidewalk, "Good morning, Mr. Bird! Good morning, Mr. Tree! Good morning, Mr. Dog-Walker!" ...you probably are.

If I have learned one thing from getting in touch with my pain this week, it would be this, which I will pass on to you. Sometimes...sometimes. Sometimes it is actually good to have a little time between an original injury and the moment that science has completely doped you up and deafened you from hearing what your body is trying to tell you. Because sometimes....sometimes. Sometimes what your body's trying to tell you is, "See, now, this problem is real. This problem is serious. All those things the last year you've been telling yourself are problems? ...They're not really, now, are they?" I've been getting in touch with my pain this week.