Dogmeme

My initial plan to get round I.T's 'Dogmeme', which is explained thus:
the idea is to identify the common rhetorical and stylistic tropes of your favourite bloggers and ask them to write a post in which they get taken away, thus revealing the pure truth of their writing. Possibly. All posts must be at least 200 words. in which my task is to write a post without reference to proper names, places, buildings or cultural objects of any kind.

...was to continue to write about place, melancholy, nostalgia etc by writing about weather. The beauty of cloud formations, the irrelevance of the passing of the seasons after the industrial revolution, and a panegyric to autumn (by far the most elegant of seasons). Anyway, this was too big a cheat, so instead I shall write about illness, and specifically about physical pain. This was one of the mission statements of this blog, to be an area in which I could complain about my health without boring any of my friends. Obviously it hasn't worked out like that, and the occasions when I have have been as a thinly-disguised means to complaining about particular institutions that have crossed or irked me.

First of all, it needs to be said that pain is boring, and, unless you're a doctor or a psychoanalyst, describing pain makes people as nonplussed as a description of a dream. There might be some masochists who have embraced a pain to which they're condemned in the quotidian and made it into something else, but as a rule it seems a fetish for those to whom pain is an unusual experience. Also, the pain from which I suffer most of the time is very, very seldom an excruciating, unbearable agony, the sort which is genuinely hard to take. It's a sporadic, common-or-garden pain, although there isn't a day that goes by without it. There are a few different kinds. One, which I get rarely at the moment, is a feeling akin to having one's intimate areas sandpapered for short bursts, a kind of quick, abrasive thing which (like all of them) is made worse when walking (especially irritating, given one's choice of timewasting activity). Another is a dull ache in the abdomen, which, a couple of times, has suddenly switched in severity to the point where I almost double over. At the moment though, it's a different pain - without giving too much details, the phrase 'torn a new arsehole' has a particular acuteness after my last operation. This sensation (perceptible, regardless of the amount of co-codamol) is of an elastic band with staples on one end being slowly pulled through your body. Which is interesting, as that is in essence the medical procedure.

Also, in a similar way to the manner in which noises during sex come more naturally than during masturbation, one very seldom cries out when alone. Walking on my own I might just growl quietly occasionally, or make the odd wince - only with someone else there does it rise to an audible 'OW!' I've never really itemised the particular pains like this, perhaps because they aren't dramatic enough - someone suffering from cluster headaches might list or explore the agony as a way of understanding and overcoming it. This isn't like that. It's always there, but blandly so (struggles to not make comparisons to cultural artefacts here). The only way to avoid it is to stay almost perfectly still. Which would be even more boring than the pain itself.

Right - now to inflict the dogmeme on others...

I.T - absolutely no humour, no flippancy of any sort, no exclamation marks or rhetorical flourishes.

A of Aloof from Inspiration - no barely suppressed rage or melancholia, and no unwarranted self-deprecation.

Charles of the F.J - no complexity or contradiction.

Martin of BTI - no jokes, no capital letters, no ultraviolence.

Douglas of E&V - must write without reference to ruination or Beckettian futility, at length, about a 20th century architect(s) he unreservedly admires.