  Comedy
This week: Laughing Gas Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.
-Bob Marley
To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!
-Charlie Chaplin
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
-Karl Marx
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| ASIN: 0997970618 |
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Amazon's Price: $ 14.99
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When I was a kid, lo these many years ago, I got a toothache. It wasn't from being kicked in the face by a stegosaurus, or from tripping and falling while running from a saber-toothed tiger, plausible though these things might have been in my youth. No, it was just an ordinary toothache.
Unfortunately, "ordinary toothache" is some of the worst pain imaginable, exceeded in my life only by appendicitis. Woe unto my juvenile self when he found out that the only way to cure it is to go to the dentist.
The choice, then, was: stay in agonizing pain, or visit someone who would visit upon me even worse agony. Then or now, I've always been reluctant to suffer through temporary inconvenience for future benefit. I didn't, and don't, see the point, when one can be hit by a meteorite at any moment. But, being a kid, my parents dragged me to the dentist, a kindly old man - well, from my youthful perspective, anyway; he was probably in his 30s - who sat me down in a chair and put a mask over my nose. "Just breathe slowly," he told me. "You'll feel like everything's floating."
Thus was I introduced to the wonder of drugs. Er, I mean, the benefits of nitrous oxide. Pretty soon, everything was floating, as promised, including me. It wasn't so much that I didn't feel the pain anymore; it was more like I just didn't care. He came back in the room after some timeless time (I've found that nitrous oxide transcends time, somehow), and did things that probably caused my tooth even more pain, but again - didn't care.
Later, someone, probably my dad, told me that it was called "laughing gas." I didn't understand why, as I didn't find anything particularly amusing about the episode. Nor did I the next time I needed a cavity filled, or the next, or even when I had a broken tooth removed. The root canal was definitely not funny.
So I still don't know why they call it laughing gas.
But all these years later, I still laugh to diminish pain. |
Some pain-killers from all over:
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| ASIN: 0997970618 |
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Amazon's Price: $ 14.99
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Comedy: May 03, 2017 Issue [#8267]
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