Pain shaker (good name for a band)

Everybody feels pain, right?  I'm pretty sure we all do... but I think you can break that normal variety of common pain up into little pieces, and depending on how you add them up and put them back together, you'll get different flavors. 

For instance - pain can taste good sometimes.  Kind of like how nobody ever notices that carbonation actually hurts like a bitch.  Why do we do that?  Think about it.  Drinking a Coke hurts, so why do billions of people do it and come back for more?  Huh?  Why is that?  Are we all just stupid, deep down? 

And slurpees hurt, too.  I'd even venture to say that brain freeze is probably the most agonizing thing you can experience as a result of just going about your regular old uninteresting daily business.  I had one today, and it was just about the most agonizing thing that I've ever felt, and I'm not exaggerating.  The pain was debilitating. I was at work, and I had to stop what I was doing right then and there and just wait for the unbearable, excruciating agony to pass.   The customer at my register thought I was having a seizure, and was on the verge of dialing 911. That's how bad this stupid brain freeze thing hurt.  After it was over though, I took another long slurp of slurpee.  Am I retarded?  Seriously, am I?

And then there's spicy food. Chili peppers and wasabi, and what not.  That stuff hurts! Why do we do it? Why do we put fire in our mouths, and enjoy it?  It makes me think about that movie, K-Pax, and how Proat described the physical act of sex for his species as an overwhelming feeling of nausea, accompanied by the sensation of having your nuts squeezed in a vice while being rolled around in corroded alien sauerkraut.  When you think about it though, is that really all that different from putting a hot poker in your mouth and enjoying it?

So anyway. When I started writing this I was feeling pretty depressed, and my intention was to prepare this elaborate and profound exposition on the delicate subject of personal pain, seasoned with a dash of self pity to make it serious, and definitely not a joke.  But then the lid came off of whatever shaker it was that I was shaking, and this thing happened instead.