(Auto-generated)Welcome back, you wonderful people who matter so very, very much.
Really sorry about that last episode.
I was so very, very tired and recorded that at 5.30 in the morning, having not been to
bed yet, and 4am is when my voice takes on that really put anyone to sleep tone to it.
And not in that like really cool Sam Elliott and Rodehouse intriguing kind of way.
Or even a Steven Wright kind of way.
But more like Ben Stein, dry eyes kind of way.
Now hopefully today's episode will be a tad bit more upbeat, and to kick that off, I thought
I'd offer some slightly more quirky help on the outset of today's episode.
And to be perfectly honest, I have waited a long time for the right moment to share
this one with the world.
You see, I have discovered a treatment for the hiccups that works.
Science based.
Not these old remedies and superstitions, but something that deals directly with the
problem on a medical level.
Yes, it is true that we do not fully understand what causes the hiccups to occur in the first
place, but we've pretty much determined that the main mechanic involved in the hiccups
is the spasming of your diaphragm.
Which for those who don't know is a large dome shaped muscle that causes inflation and
deflation of your lungs.
It's the muscle that does all of your breathing, and it's just below where your rib cage comes
together as your sternum and just above your abs.
So let me ask you this.
When you have a muscle that suddenly starts to spasm, what do you instinctively do first?
You add pressure, you clamp your hand over it, you massage it a bit.
Now with my method, we're going to add pressure to the diaphragm on both sides.
Front and back.
Have you ever held your breath and felt like you were not swallowing your breath, but pushing
your breath down towards your stomach somehow?
Kind of the same feeling that you do when you push your stomach out to pretend you're
pregnant.
In this method of the hiccup cure, after the hiccup, you're going to start by taking a
deep breath in, pushing it down and pushing your stomach out as if to pretend you were
pregnant and hold it there.
That will take care of the pressure on the backside of the diaphragm as much as we can
anyways.
Then take your fingers, curl them all over once so that they touch the point where the
palm extends into the fingers, and massage the diaphragm.
Knead into it with your knuckles, and hold your breath for about 30 seconds while you
do this, and then stop the massage.
Slowly blow out half the breath gingerly.
Take a tentative and somewhat hesitant half-breath in, and then slowly blow all of it out, and
breathe as normal.
I've gotten rid of the hiccups over 40 times in my life this way, and I've never experienced
a hiccup fit that I was unable to cure with this method after I created it.
So uh, yeah, enjoy not having hiccups that last more than a minute for the rest of your
life.
My gift to you.
Right, so next order of business.
I want to point something out that I found recently that really reinforced something
else I've been thinking about.
Now I've noticed that there are books and speeches and media that have said some of
what I'm proposing, but it's a bit more like they're talking about the footprint
rather than the foot that the breaking laugh and being made of God are.
They don't directly say what I'm saying in the book, but you can see what I'm saying
in what they're saying if you know what I'm saying.
And the other day I was singing along with this song that I've known my whole life, and
that I've loved my whole life, and only just now looked up the lyrics to it.
There was one lyric that I've never known what it was, it's just kind of slurred out
every time I do it, and I really want to speak to what I see in that song now.
So one of the main focuses is a pressure that's placed on all of us, that permeates our lives,
that no one asked for.
This pressure not to love all of them, to create further removal of our compassion,
to distance ourselves, this pressure not to trust one another.
It's a pressure that results in systems that take homes from people, and that seed distrust
in families.
This pressure to put oneself first and foremost, and to get mine, doesn't condemn love, but
also doesn't encourage it, and does not welcome love as a motivation.
Anyways, so here's the first set of lyrics.
Pressure, pushing down on me, pressing down on you, no man asked for.
Under pressure, that burns a building down, splits a family in two, puts people on streets.
And I know what you're thinking, he's reading way too into this.
Just wait.
We are getting there, just wait.
David Bowie sings about the burden of the horror of seeing this for what it is, and
what it's doing to us.
It's the terror of knowing what this world is about.
This burden of seeing it kill off that feeling of importance and connection and loved ones,
to the point where they're screaming to be let out of all of it.
Watching some good friends screaming, let me out.
This burden is not only something that the singer carries with them, but that they request
that they don't fall into that all too familiar to us situation that happens to us where we
just unsee it for the sake of convenience.
The singer prays that tomorrow he can keep it together enough to be better than this,
to be above the pressure to disassociate.
Pray tomorrow gets me higher.
Now the lyric, Chipping around, kick my brains around the floor.
Chipping around, kick my brains around the floor.
These are two distinctly British phrases that I actually didn't know.
Chipping around was a term that meant not doing much of anything at all.
And to kick around means to have no definitive plans.
Now I would say that the addition of kicking my brains around the floor kind of seems to
indicate damage that's being done in the thinking.
But you know, I might be reading too much into that.
But I will say the next lyric is poetry.
These are the days it never rains but it pours.
Rain is helpful, replenishing, aids in regrowth, nourishes and cleanses.
But it doesn't rain.
It only pours.
That constant wet and discomfort and reduced visibility and danger and get back in your
house and stay there kind of weather.
In the next set of lyrics they lay out two of the popular options that have been tried
by people in response to this pressure.
Turned away from it all like a blind man.
First they tried turning away from it all like the blind man.
Just kept going under the pressure, kept turning their backs on their fellow human beings,
choosing to ignore what we were doing to ourselves, ignoring that there is a better way.
They tried that.
And then they stated they tried having one foot in each camp.
They sat on the fence but it didn't work.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
With both of those approaches real love isn't there.
They keep searching for love there.
But all that love that they come up with, sends a little bit of a kick back to the breaking
laugh a little bit.
You know, it's that faux love, that love that just isn't the good stuff, you know, the quality
sustenance stuff.
Anyways, the singer launches into asking why in disbelief.
Why?
And then... calls for and borderline begs for love.
And as it builds, probably the most misheard lyric of the song happens, the one that I
looked up in the first place.
Insanity laughs under pressure were cracking.
Honestly, I didn't know that was the lyric until I started singing along with it and
pulled up lyrics to find out what the lyric was.
Here they refer to it as insanity laughs, which could be exchange for the breaking laugh
and that they both drive you further into the madness and actively destroy you.
Under that pressure, we are cracking that connection between us.
We are breaking apart from one another and in doing so, breaking apart ourselves.
But instead of that, the singer asks us to do the opposite, and build up those connections
to one another.
He asks the listener two questions and makes a statement, and all three of these are made
out of the first question.
He starts by asking, why can't we give love one more chance?
And then he shortens it, changing its meaning.
Why can't we give love?
He then pelts us with a barrage of the shortest, most important two words of advice you can
give someone seven times in a row to ensure that we heard them loud and clear.
Give love, give love, give love, give love, give love, give love, give love, give love,
give love.
For love is an old fashioned word.
I kind of love this lyric because that is one of the biggest turnoffs to so many interesting
people that don't put love in as their focus.
I wish I could remember who said it, but love is the most boring thing when it isn't yours.
But to those that have it, it's the greatest thing.
It emboldens us to be better than we have been, and love dares you to care for the people
on the edge of the night.
And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the streets, which was the
original lyric before they changed it, edge of the night.
And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves, and I think ourselves refers
to all of us as in humanity at large and not just yourself.
And time on this is running out.
You don't have an infinite amount of time to make these decisions, to make these changes.
This is our last dance.
We get this one dance.
And this is ourselves under pressure.
I think just kind of a summation, honestly, of all the lyrics, that's the one I have the
least speculation about.
It just seems very matter of fact, you know, close out, this is ourselves under pressure.
Or maybe that's to say, we haven't done this yet.
This is still ourselves under pressure.
We know this deep down.
We understand this deep down.
And yet, look at where we are and look where we continue to be.
Before I hop off the topic, I'll answer a question for you that I had for myself jotting
down the thoughts on this song.
I guess one of the questions most likely to be wondered about given the nature of the
discussion I brought up here would be, so who wrote the lyrics to the song?
Because this famously was a collaboration between Queen and David Bowie.
Was this Freddie Mercury's lyrical handiwork?
Are they David Bowie's words?
Did these lyrics indicate that Brian May was woke this whole time?
Which by the way, Queen's legendary guitarist Mr. Brian May was a close second to Freddie
for the person who wrote the most Queen songs.
And as to who wrote the song, Brian actually answered that in an interview once.
Apparently David Bowie couldn't resist the urge to drop in on Queen when he found out
that they were in the same studio he was in, and sat in on them goofing off and playing
songs by other people.
And after a bit, Bowie stated that this was stupid and they should just write a song if
they were going to jam.
Now the rest that follows for a bit is going to be a quote from Brian May.
It's pretty long, so I'll let you know when it's over.
We felt our way through a backing track altogether as an ensemble.
When the backing track was done, David said, let's each of us go in the vocal booth and
sing how we think the melody should go, just off the top of our heads, and we'll compile
a vocal out of that.
And that's what we did.
Bowie insisted that he and Mercury shouldn't hear what the other had sung, swapping verses
blind, which helped give the song its cut and paste feel.
Everybody goes in there with no ideas, no notes, and sings the first thing that came
into their heads over a backing track.
So we all did.
And then we compiled all the bits and pieces, and that's what Under Pressure was basically
on.
All these random thoughts.
End quote.
Random thoughts, huh?
That just so happened to be talking about this very specific issue.
I'm going to be clear here.
Let me just out and say it.
I think that we were given a song.
One that would rise to become possibly the greatest rock and roll hit in the history
of man.
I have always said that I believed Under Pressure was the greatest piece of rock and roll that
had ever been recorded.
It featured no repeating chorus, no repeating vocal section, period.
And yet, everyone knows every part of that song.
I think that we were given this tremendous, amazing piece of rock and roll gold, and that
it was inspired into amazing musicians that opened themselves up to the very waters of
music and became instruments themselves and brought forth a message that we needed to
understand.
That we need to change our ways and give love that one more chance.
That we need to stop unseeing the separation.
That we can't run from it.
That we can't be blind to it.
And we can't sit on the fence on this.
It doesn't work.
We have to try and make sure that tomorrow, that we are above that view.
That we change the way that we care for ourselves and that we love and we give love, give love,
give love, give love.
So give love and be good to them and be good for them.
And you're gonna be great.
Be sweet.
Bye everybody.
And here's all the contact info.
You can check out the YouTube channel at youtube.com slash could help.
You can contact the podcast at willhelp at gmail.com with any questions or answers you
may have come across.
Come tell other people what you think and ask questions and hear what others think at
r slash The Laughing Matters on Reddit.
And you can stay up to date with the show's Facebook page at facebook.com slash I can
help and of course, The Laughing Matters.com.
And the r slash always looks wrong word of the day is gonna be environment.
It's environment.
Not enviro-ron-ment.
It's environment.