"You have got (hic) to be kidding me," I said, aloud, into the inside of my helmet. How could such a sublime moment be interrupted every ten seconds by (hic) this incongruous and irritating spasm?
I couldn't, honestly, remember the last time I'd had the hiccups. Many (hic) months? A year or so?
When I was younger, in my late teens and early college years, they'd (hic) show up on the regular. Sometimes, they'd stick around for a couple of hours, which was as frustrating as any tic (hic) can be.
Fortunately, I knew how to fix it. Not with that glass of water upside down trick, which 1) had never ever worked for me and 2) might be a little technical while (hic) riding a scooter at fifty five miles an hour down darkened roads.
Defeating hiccups is simple. The trick, or so I discovered years ago after researching the mechanism causing the error, is control over one's diaphragm. The hiccough itself is nothing more than a spasm of the muscles that control that membrane. The semiautonomous organic subroutine that involuntarily breathes for us glitches out, and you get this (hic) twitch in the system. It needs to be reset.
To fix it, I breathe all the way out. Not just a little, but (hic) all the way, forcing every last possible cubic centimeter of air out of my lungs, putting intense and conscious demand on the processes that manage my breathing, flooding the system with demand input and the resultant neurotransmitters. Then, with my lungs fully voided, I attempt to breathe in, while at the same time closing my mouth and not allowing air through my nose. Again, I put as much effort into that as I can, while simultaneously resisting the intake of breath. The nervous system that serves the diaphragm is overwhelmed with input, washing away the errant process with the outflow of conscious demands, and the glitching hic tic is...wait for it...wait for it...gone.
Erased. Reset. Fixed.
It works, thank the Maker, even when riding. Before the lights of the next town came into view, I was fine.
Much of the anxiety that pervades our modern and technological existence comes from our overwhelming sense of that we can't fix anything or do anything meaningful, this gnawing awareness that we have no understanding of how even the most basic elements of our existences work.
Every waking moment of our day, that ignorance is pressed upon us and whispered in our ears by consumer culture. Do you really know how your phone works? How does the fuel that comes to you get there? How does your food get produced? How are you warmed on a cold night? And if any of the myriad socioeconomic processes on which we depend failed or glitched out, could you even begin to know how to fix it? How would we even live?
Everything around us is obscured from comprehension by systems that have been designed to be irreducibly complex, utterly beyond our ability to influence or repair. The box is closed and sealed, and we're not even allowed to see how it works lest the observer effect voids our warranty. It sabotages our resilience, and undermines our sense of ourselves.
Which is why we need to, insofar as we can and wherever we can, reclaim our sense of agency. Learn to garden or how to stitch a garment. Figure out how to replace an outlet or a fixture. Change the brake pads on your car. Replace the wheels on your mower.
Or know, with certainty, that you can stop those hiccups.
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