Words and paracetamol

Sitting here in my dressing gown with ears that prickle, a throat that is swollen and a head that is heavy, I am pondering a variety of things. (My harsh boss – me – has given me the day off, as I feel as rough as sandpaper toilet roll. I am so nice to me...)

Words is on my ponderance list: heavens, they have the propensity to cause all sorts of problems, don't they? I could write reams of words on words but to do so would be tricky at the moment due to the unconnectedness of my verbal reasoning synapses and the call of the leftover curry I'm heating up for lunch.

Curry fact: the heat from chillies in a hot curry cause the brain to think the mouth is burned, so it releases endorphins, which is possibly why so many people crave spicy food. Works for me.

So: words. This way we have developed of communicating with one another has evolved from non-verbal communication and grunts. Supposedly. But let's face it, non-verbal goings-on and gut feelings – intuition – can have a huge impact on us and can rule out the misunderstandings caused by words.

I set great store by my gut feeling, and the more I do so, the more it tells me, like an indistinct voice to which your ear becomes attuned. It is literally a persistent, simmering, throbbing feeling in my solar plexus, and I can know certain things (people's motives, whether someone will do what they have promised, whether something is advisable, more mundane things, too), with certainty, because of it. I consult it.

Who is to say that those areas of the brain about which we know nothing are not operating on what is naively described as 'another plane', but are governing such hunches and 'illogical' moments that most of us bury under a pile of steaming reason?

The trouble with words, as much as I love them, is our tendency to see what we want to see, to draw meanings according to our limited experience, and to interpret them in infinite ways. The more limbic things – the scent of one another's hormones, the smell of fear, a sense of danger – are often far more reliable simply because we do not translate these through our flawed, word-mangling, word-strangling, biased brains.

And on that note, I am going to take some paracetamol and lie down.

----------------
Listening to: Portishead - Sour Times