The Pain Show

Could you ever mutilate your body in front of an audience? Could you even conceive of it, Let alone derive some twisted sexual fulfillment from it? I can safely say I cannot. In actuality I’m not very big on pain personally, despite my insane threshold of tolerance for it. In my last lecture I learned that there was a whole big world of pain I have never even heard of, that of performance of pain. Never would I have thought there were actually people who could seriously make a public spectacle out of their own ridiculously excruciating acts of self flagellation. I was shocked to learn that people with that mind set actually are out there. My father always told me and still stands by his original statement, “there are a lot of sick people out there.” As I sat back and processed all the images the good professor shared with us I couldn’t help but hear my father’s voice reverberate back in my head. I did however find one part of it to be humorous even in its level of grotesqueness. That being the clip that was played where Bob Flannagan used almost every conceivable S word in order to convey what he wants out of everyday life. He did a very smart job with it, hell I never actually sat back and pondered just how many torture or pain words start with S. The guy named so many I couldn’t even help but to laugh at the sheer preposterousness of it. I mean sure is it sometimes fun to add some playful smacking or biting into your love life, hey I’m all for it and I’m sure that I’m not the only one, but that guy just made a joke out of it. He was in his own zone if you will, on in which I never even want to step foot in. I believe that that man has got some serious issues, although granted he was very ill. He suffered from CF which I happen to know a lot about because my mother once worked for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and I got the experience of meeting and knowing several CF fighters. I can say that it is terrible to watch and probably unimaginably so for the one experiencing it. I never have seen anyone with such an outlet as Bob however; for in actuality it is astonishing to me that he was physically able to conduct everything he did given the severity of the disease and its debilitating effects upon one’s body. No Pain no gain I guess.