Cold comfort

I’ve got a new companion for my Nothing Ever Happens adventures. My winter cold and I wheezed through the monster-truck rally together. We sniffled in unison over Joshua Ploeg’s vegan soup and chain-sucked Halls lozenges during the Miss Sacramento County Pageant. Given its druthers, my cold prefers to stay on the couch sipping lemon-vegetable broth and watching Lost. But somebody’s got to pay for our Kleenex habit, so it grudgingly accompanies me on work outings—until last Friday, when it turned mutinous.

I’d planned to write about a midnight performance by Dawn of Ashes at the gothic nightclub Trauma, but by 4 p.m. my head was throbbing with fever. By 9 p.m., my head was throbbing over the toilet bowl. Needless to say, I was nowhere near the club—or consciousness—when the band took the stage. Sometimes trauma makes house calls.

In the morning, my cold and I searched for an event we could both handle and ended up at East West Books’ Well-Being Fair. We wandered between shelves of self-help tomes, crystals, aromatherapy oils and assorted New Age paraphernalia. Tables throughout the store featured energy workers, an aura photographer, Tarot consultants, astrologers, and something called an amethyst biomat. The biomat’s testimonials proclaimed benefits from blood-sugar regulation to balding reversal. My cold was impressed by the promise to boost our immune system, but at $35 for 30 minutes, I opted for a free lecture on Reiki sound healing.

Several people gathered in a side room to hear Reiki master Aric Mills. He wrote a series of chants on a greaseboard, which he said used to be kept secret from the uninitiated. “It’s too late to keep secrets anymore,” he said.

“They’re all on the Internet anyway,” someone called out.

Mills explained how Mikao Usui, the man who discovered the Japanese energy-healing system of Reiki, first heard these chants after a lengthy fasting meditation and how they could be used to heal anything when intoned repeatedly. He played one over an iPod.

My cold and I closed our eyes to absorb the beneficial vibrations. As the words “ho a ze ho ne” ran together in rhythmic cycles, my juvenile mind heard, “A zany ho! A zany ho! A zany ho!” over and over. I stifled the urge to snicker like Beavis and Butt-head as the chant continued. My cold was less amused, and ratcheted up the headache factor.

Mills promised the next chant would energize us, saying he’d even started a car battery with it. Before he could play it, a man interrupted to ask how, exactly, he’d gotten the battery to work and why Reiki started batteries and crop circles drained them?

I decided my cold and I needed a more direct healing regimen and scooted out of the room for some hands-on work. We stopped at the table of Reiki master Colleen Denison. Feeling desperately woozy, I happily paid $25 just to lie down for 30 minutes. Any healing would be a bonus.

In a soothing voice, Denison explained that she worked intuitively with hands-on energy healing, mostly with the meridians of the body used by acupuncturists. She asked me to lie on the table and told me not to tell her if I had any ailments. She gave me headphones playing instrumental music and a lavender-scented pillow for my eyes.

Denison immediately placed her hands under my lower back on a spot that’s ached for weeks. I felt the tension release and began to think there might be something to this. I tried following her movements, but it was hard with my eyes covered. Many times I was certain she was near my head only to feel her touch my feet. I zoned in and out, sometimes listening to the music and sometimes to a nearby lecture on Mercury retrograde.

Thirty minutes later, I was astonished to realize I felt much, much better. I thanked Denison and went looking for my cold. I found it in the holistic-healing section, pouting at the thought of our eventual separation, and took it home to my couch.