As a kid, I deliberately cut myself with a knife. Several times. I did it on my own, no-one made me or encouraged me in any way. The proximate goal was to experience the pain of a flesh wound without actually being stabbed. It was extremely painful for a child, but I did it again. And again. More than the knife or a potential infection, I feared the adults would catch me do it or see the blood. There would be endless explanations followed by whining (not mine, obviously), arguing, possibly calling the doctor and the Armenian pope. I would not see the end of it for days and months. THAT would be pain. I’d spend off-school summers at my grandparents’ farm and that’s where I ran all sorts of secret experiments (I don’t remember ever getting caught). We had livestock, fowl, even a farm dog, so there were plenty of animals around to torture. The animals I fed, groomed, cleaned after; the experiments I ran on myself. (No, I did not need an ethics class or a special message from “morality” to figure any of that out.) I did the trials for two reasons. The first one was curiosity and desire to understand the world around me. Ultimately: to tame fear of the unknown, of all that could happen, of death itself. My instincts must have told me that I had to figure myself out before laying claim to the world. The second reason was that I was usually bored to death. There was only so much farm work that the adults would let me do, and there weren’t any kids around that I would want to play with. My despair was such that sometimes I would walk the country roads in the high-noon heat of summer, when even … Continue reading Blood in the Game