Brassneck

You realize you're getting older when the simple and wonderful act of sleeping causes aches and pains.

I would wake up sore occasionally when I was younger, but I could always pinpoint the cause, whether from skating, running, criminally excessive yardwork, or in older years, drunken hijinks. Other than the yardwork, I figured this was the infrequent price I paid for fun, and besides, for the most part, whatever aches and pains I had would fade away throughout the day.

Now that I am old and boring, there's a fifty fifty chance that I'm going to wake up in the morning with a sore neck. Which doubly sucks, since I can't take it as my penance for fun, and I don't even get any psychological peace out of it.

As far as I know, I'm just sleeping like a normal person. A friend once told me (kind of angrily, for some reason) that his dad insisted that nobody should ever sleep with their head higher than their body, but his dad was a chiropractor, which I'm still not sure is quackery or not. Still, that sort of stuck in my brain, so I try not to have a huge tower of pillows under my head.

Now that I think about it, this pain actually started when I was in the prime of my youth. I was about 25 or so and woke up one morning with a pain on the right side of the neck. Pain so bad that it hurt to straighten my neck enough to put on a shirt for work.

I made it to work like a responsible employee, where the pain got worse, so much so that I was  typing with my head resting on my shoulder. Some of my female coworkers gave me some cramp medicine, but that didn't seem to do anything. I tried a few times to straighten my neck out through the pain, but it wasn't happening.

There was a party that night, and I was in my twenties, so of course I had to go, even if my neck was clamped at a 45 degree angle. Maybe I looked like I was deep in thought.This would be my life from now on, a guy with his head fused to his shoulder. I should get used to it. I'd have to wear special shirts from now on, like in those movies where evil doctors transplanted another guy's head on some poor sap's body.

Hey, the guy on the left even looks sorta like me.

I was pretty sure that my neck vertebrae would eventually fuse to my shoulder blades or skull or something and I'd end up in a freak show like the Elephant Man. I drank a few beers that night which helped take my mind off my disfigurement and future carnival employment, then walked home and went to bed.

The next morning I woke up like a normal person. My neck was fixed! All it took was some alcohol and self-pity to fix things up, just like always.

Those were dark, pre-internet days. Now, within seconds I can find that I just had a pulled neck muscle. Pulled neck muscles are fairly common and it could have been solved by massage, which wasn't gonna happen, since the thought of massages sort of creeped me out at the time, and truthfully, kinda still does.

I'm still not entirely convinced, however, and still think that my morning soreness has something to do with the fusing of my neck vertebrae, which will reduce me to Elephant Man status in another 10 years or so. 

Eh, I was probably gonna end up working in a sleazy carnival in some capacity anyway, thanks to my laughable financial planning; at least this way I'll be in showbiz.