Sad Ricky

Sad Ricky Figures Out Hiccups

Ricky Peters was coddled as a child and well into his adult life, which has lead to a deluded sense of self-importance throughout his later years. After moving to Honolulu and being on his own, he began to realize there are many things in life that we don’t inherently know. For example, how, exactly do you cure hiccups? How do you even get them in the first place? Who knows! Let’s figure it out.©

The plague known as hiccups has troubled Man since the time of the Ancient Egyptians (depicted in early hieroglyphs as a figure praying to the Sun). So I was surprised to find a lack of information out there about this condition. It seemed there was no single cure-all for hiccups—just a lot of “hiccus pokus”, if you know what I mean.

Well, since we’re here to Figure It Out©, let’s get to work! I began by asking around, gathering what little data scientists had already collected, and ended up with these common “cures” for hiccups:

Hold your breath until all hiccups leave the body
Have someone scare you
Drink water upside-down

Immediately, the flaws of these “cures” were obvious—I can’t hold my breath for very long, and you can’t be scared by someone if you see it coming. “Hey, Ricky, can you come into this room for a second? BOO!”

Yeah, right. You scared me, Brandon (not).I’m pretty sure the last choice is a form of torture called “waterboarding”, but since we all know that hiccups can be a form of torture in their own self, it seems like this cure might be a “lesser of two evils” choice.As always, I aimed to find a better solution through experimentation. Leaving all previous “cures” behind, I started with a clean slate.

The first step, of course, was to get hiccups. I did a little more research but came up completely blank—it seems like no one wants to get hiccups. Only cure them!

Therefore, my experimentation would begin even sooner than expected—I would have to first achieve what no one had been able to voluntary do before, and only then would I be able to do something nobody else has ever been able to do before. Two Figures It Outs© in one!

For the initial experiment, I decided to take a tried and true approach, using the folklore and wives’ tales as a starting point. If holding your breath and getting scared were supposed to be methods of curing hiccups, then the opposite would be a good place to start in procuring them.

I gathered supplies:

1 compact disk of the greatest hits from the artist Enya,
1 bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey,
A few sticks of smoke-shop incense,
1 Buddhist monk meditation bracelet.

The idea was to achieve an absolute state of calmness (opposite of fright) and breathe deeply and evenly (opposite of holding breath) in order to get hiccups. As for the bottle of whiskey, a few weeks ago I watched an old Jackie Chan movie, Drunken Master, and the more he drank, the better fighter he became and the more he hiccuped. So, I figured, why not?

With Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” on repeat, the incense burning, and the meditation bracelet around my ankle, I took a series of long, deep, luxurious breaths, and swallowed half the bottle of whiskey. But then, suddenly I was like, “Oh great, what if I actually do get the hiccups? I don’t even remember how I had planned to cure them!”

I thought that maybe I’d just start with the bullshit folklore ones first, just to see if they really worked, but I could only remember the waterboarding one. I really didn’t want to do that one, because of my political views, and mostly because I’m not getting paid to write this article. The hiccups were starting to get annoying, so I drank the rest of the whiskey and texted my ex-girlfriend, “Hey, what’s a good way you get rid of hiccups?”

She didn’t write back at first so, in between hiccups, I sent her, “Fine, don’t write back. It’s not like it’s an emergency or anything. Are you with Adam again? Probably…” But to my relief, she texted back, “Why are you texting me?”

I can’t remember for sure, because I dropped my phone in the water, but I think I wrote back something like, “Do you want to come over?”

That’s what I wrote, I remember now, and then I panicked because I told her the last time was the last time I would send her a picture of myself in the shower, but I thought it would be funny if she saw me doing a headstand in the shower, trying to waterboard myself, and so I sent it. In my resulting panic attack I started choking on air, I mean real bad convulsions, like my throat was going to cave in. It was terrible, and I slipped (that’s when I dropped my phone) and down I went into the water.

When I woke up three hours later, I had a lot of water in my nose, a pretty bad headache, but no hiccups!

So the next time you get a nasty case of the hiccups, and you have an important meeting or funeral or some event where it would be a rude to go in hiccuping all over the place, don’t text your ex for answers, just put on some Enya, and “sail away” into this cure-all remedy that I just figured out.