Laying in bed at night is often a fun experience. If the shooting pains have subsided long enough to get to sleep, then there is the never-comfortable feeling to deal with and the game that I call the Indy 500. In the Indy 500, just about every obscure muscle in your body will twitch just to let you know that it is there. Now, this is not all at the same time, a muscle in my arm may twitch, then one in my left, followed by my side, groin, toe, head, lips, back, buttocks, and feet, then start all over again. Often it is a different muscle each time and in places, you never even thought of having muscles. Yeah, I know that we have muscles all over the body, but these twitches are in places that you often don’t have control over, like try to twitch the muscle in your forearm, about six inches down from your elbow. Now only move about a one-inch segment of the muscle, and don’t move your fingers or biceps to make it move. Pretty strange huh?

Besides the pain the spastic muscles and the uncertainty of what’s going to happen next, I’d have to say for me the worst side effect would have to be the emotions. I was raised in a family where my father (or at least the person who provided the sperm, because he was not much of a father) where the children were to be seen and not heard. My father was a firm believer that children were to be his servants and do his bidding. One thing that was not well tolerated in that house was crying, especially for boys. My brother and I were chastised, to say the least for showing emotion, and crying was not allowed. My emotions will run the gambit of crying one second (and I very seldom cry) to being so pissed off that I want to explode a second later, to being even-keeled the next second. Being raised in a very strict family, boys were not allowed to cry. I got ridiculed when I was about six years old for crying at my grandmother’s funeral. And again a few years later at my grandfather’s funeral. My father who turned out to be the biggest prick I have ever met, would verbally abuse us, kids, from the time we got up to the time we went to bed. So I became hard and learned not to cry. But now as an adult who spent 10 years in the Marine Corps, I have caught myself crying for the strangest reasons.