I can tell I am having an off day when the sides and back of my neck begin to ache with a familiar tense pulse. These are the scalene muscles, the side-stabilizing trio which protect and mobilize the thoracic spine. One of them in particular is used to raise your ribcage when you breathe deep. From the way you do or no longer play, to the way you breathe or hold shallow breathe bayed, without the roving ocean of motion and sensation, your body sacrifices part in lieu of others. Muscle is expensive, just compare a potato to a steak.
The reasons you experience chronic pain may be myriad, but one sure thing is the paralysis of stressors in our everyday, long-con society can certainly petrify the most supple of elegantly muscled animals.
And that’s all we really are. Fancy af animals.
Oh, sure. We do some amazing shit (together):
We have created powerful clans, realizing that cooperation meant many more minutes of sleep before the snooze-less alarm clock of real fucking danger jolts you awake. We make stuff. Out of everything. Funny thing is though, no one you or I know knows with whom it began. It was all passed down; dropped in our laps as the ones caring for young never know if they’ll make it back.
Knowledge this library of words and thoughts passed down.
We have altered the course of the world with only the whirling winds of camaraderie. We can exist in relative luxury, conceal our canines and smile happily when someone smiles back at ya. It’s an amazing thing the reflectivity of emotion we are capable of.
Countenance frown-locked. Trapped, bound, stuck down.
Your neutral self becomes upset at things that are usual, regular, and not the source of your upset. Then you’re falling, falling again and again.
I find myself often contemplating this simple toy we are likely all familiar with: the finger-trap. Intuition says just yank to extricate your two fingers from their bound state. To take them apart, push them together? Logic have you failed me or have I missed something important?
Sometimes the only way to release the tension is to come together again. If you find yourself hitting the same fuckin’ wall over and over again, then perhaps take a moment to just try something new. Bring some of your shit to the surface and dwell on it with me, for just a moment. I promise nothing bad will happen, you are already dwelling presently there anyways 
Embrace your cage. The static, the anxiety of this life is not inherent in the situations we find ourselves in. It is inherent to us in said situations . . . if it is not first side-stepped.
Swallow these sour concepts: You will die. Your loved ones will die, too. They will die before you and continue to die after you. The general space we find ourselves in is chaos, yet humanity in particular has said, “I shall try to organize this chaos” and we have made some very nice existences in for some of us. Arguably for nearly all of us. Even if you are in a shit spot, if you got shot by some fucker on in an alley on the way home, you could potentially limp your bleeding self to a hospital, and even if you had no coverage, would still, if you could be saved, be saved. They didn’t have that shit back in the day. Granted they didn’t have bullets either, but they did have danger. Fill in your analogy there, but I would still say we have it pretty nice.
We have not erased the impermanence and loss and neither should we. The ability to grow outward, to expand if ever we could into verses unknown requires that we equally understand the inward.
So there are I suppose two great sources of misery. There is the misery of actual state: pain, loss, grieving. And there is the pain of loneliness: being separate, un-cared for, lost, an utter non-entity. The former is definite. The latter is a byproduct of our evolving beyond tiny groups relative to present day. I do not think this is insurmountable by any means, we just need to . . . (hehehe) come together and twiddle our collective fingers like Burns.
How could one hope to know where humans may go if we
Once shown the way out of this simple physical paradox, we say, “Aha!” and go on to play other games in life.
Let us imagine, next we
Here are the top secrets to extrication