cramps! who invented them?

fooey on that person, whoever it was. i mean, what is the purpose of cramps? what is their reason? is it about fitness? am i building hidden muscle power in some secret velvet place? my body is doing something fabulous & necessary and kind of clever, after all; purging and renewing its very cells! why should this not be a fun time filled with wonder and the delicate crystal song of new electrons dancing?

i read somewhere once that our bodies do not retain sense-memory of pain. we just can't do it. you know those little orgasm after-shocks that rock you an hour after a Good One? no such physiological equivalent for ouches. once the pain is gone, it is GONE. perhaps this is how women come to give birth to more than one child. (hee hee.) more relevant to my own experience, perhaps this is why each month i sing the same broken lament: in the face of sudden & always somehow surprising crampage, i mourn my absentmindedness and demand of myself the IMMEDIATE development of better pain management skills.

i imagine it needn't be that hard. i imagine it would simply require greater attention paid to the dosage/schedule/timing of the soup of random chemicals i ingest for two days every month.

i'm talkin the good stuff. ibuprofen, acitometophen, aspirin, naproxin sodium. sometimes combined in strange and intoxitating ways with that kick-starter, caffeine, by the people at MIDOL or EXCEDRIN (yeah daddy, talk those sweet chemical compounds to me.)

now, normally i'm not a huge supporter of the medical/industrial complex in general. i much prefer unadvertized and organic substances that can be plucked from the fertile earth and swallowed, smoked, steeped and sipped, or used as a fabulous conditioning rinse, depending.

but once a month, like many other Good Witches In The West with extremely low pain thresholds, i take my meds. i pop them when i feel the twinge, then languish in agony until it's gone. and in that moment, that's my only thought. not, 'fight the power' or 'affordable healthcare for all' or 'the earth is our mother, she has all i need,' but 'GET THE PAIN GONE.'

and then once it's gone, because i am a dunderhead, i forget i'm supposed to be in pain at all and go gallavanting around living my ordinary life of constant discovery and joy in everything. until WHAM-O, back it comes and i'm like, "oh, that's right, my period just started. my uterus is doing stuff, huh? i should've probably taken another one of those little pills like twenty minutes ago, and then i wouldn't be curling slowly into a fetal ball right now."

o, cruel attention span, thou art mine own worst enemy.

grumble grumble.