Friday, September 7

An observation about sneezing

At this very moment I am sneezing. Why? I don’t know. There isn’t any sneeze aggravator in the air. Recently I have observed that my sneezes don’t come in twos but threes. For most of my life I have sneezed twice per sneezing session. Now I almost always sneeze three times. My current sneezing spasm has produced five sneezes. It seems to me that as you grow older such events as sneezing should diminish since the body is less capable of supporting their energy expenditure. Does this make sense? Do bodies really have less capacity to sustain such wonderful releases as the sneeze? I hope not.

I love sneezing; it feels good. Sometimes the best thoughts of my day occur during a sneeze, at least the really brief thoughts. All body pain is masked during a sneeze unless that pain is from a bruised or broken rib. If I’m tired, I get invigorated during a sneeze and for a brief few moments afterward. I would sneeze all the time if I could, but several things would have to be put off till later, such as if I’m preparing a meal for others. Ditto talking on the phone. Or while soldering a micro-picofarad capacitor to level four of an eight-level circuit board next to a multi-gigabyte memory chip during a thunderstorm while soaking wet and naked.

Or picking my nose with an untrimmed fingernail.

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