The Pain Journal Book

I don't know what kind of prose one should expect from a dying man -- least of all when they're dying slowly and painfully. But while you and I take for granted our innate biological abilities, that of breath and unencumbered thought, Bob Flanagan struggled every day in a vicious battle with his own lungs, heart, and body.

His journal isn't as I had expected it to be, a story typical of the man who sardonically described himself as "the guy who nailed his dick to a board." It isn't at all a failing of the writing, but I think more so a failing of my own judgement. This isn't a book about a dying masochist, a sideshow artist whose fascination with harming himself and being hurt makes his pain seem less real in comparison. This is a journal by an ordinary person at the end of his short life, in constant, uncontrollable pain, and whose bravery perhaps masks the gravity of the fact that his inevitable death comes suddenly and without warning.

It is, perhaps, apt that I finished the book just shy of the fifteenth anniversary of his death.