Dislocated my shoulder this morning which is always super fun. I’ve done it before and have been to hospital so many times, even at the end of a 48-hour shift, the doctors recognise me. Most of them are the baby doctors, delighted with their stethoscopes and still green enough to think that primum non nocere actually has a practical application. I try to be helpful and tell the sweet nurse a joke in the hope it’ll make him stop looking quite so nervous as he flits about and dashes off, reappearing with my old friend, the canister of entenox. He tells me I’m doing wonderfully and I’m very lucky because there’s a registrar on duty who’ll be in to mend my shoulder in just a moment. She appears, looking about fifteen like they all do and starts moving my arm about. I close my eyes and try to think of being in bed with this man I don’t know very well but who I’ve taken a liking to and looks like he’d be fun, but I just can’t get the image to appear. Years ago I had some hypnotherapy and, though I never found it much use, something must have worked because whenever I’m on entenox, all I see are green grass and fluffy clouds. I try saying sex sex sex sex sex to myself (silently, I think) in the hope it’ll make the the grass and sky bugger off, but it won’t so daisy-flecked meadows and no man it is. The nurse says something about what sounds like “the kent technique” but turns into “cunt technique” in 
my head. Off my face on entenox, I think this is absolutely hilarious, of course, and start thinking about how it could work. Having a man’s head between my thighs would be a good distraction. It wouldn’t make the pain go away, but it would give me something to think about or something to make me think less, anyway. Think I might have to have private health insurance to get that sort of care, though, so I decide to solve complex philosophical conundrums instead. I once went to a philosophy lecture at which some people were debating the difference between brain and mind and wondering round and round if there was one. The lecturer said the debate was 20 centuries old so you’d think they’d have come to some sort of conclusion by now, but apparently not. I thought it was pretty bloody obvious there was a difference, but I didn’t know any of the key phrases so just let them ramble on and did my best to look fascinated. Anyway, I’ve solved the debate for them. My theory is that, if the mind and brain weren’t separate entities, my brain couldn’t send messages to my nerve endings alerting them to the pain I couldn’t consciously feel and my mind couldn’t have me tripping along through a meadow solving 2000-year-old problems and working out the precise logistics of cunnilingus-based pain relief. So stick that in your pipe, Plato, and pass it along to Descartes. I realise it might not be water-tight, but there’s a certain clarity that comes with befuddling drugs. My shoulder’s fine now. Next time it’s out, I think I might give the God debate a shot. That seems quite popular and it’s gone on long enough.
