Chakras on the Ground: Tuesday Open Thread

When I was a young, I was heavy into Thundercats. Like, even as a six year-old I understood that Lion-O was kind of a little bitch, but he had an amazeballs extendable sword. Panthro was a genius mechanic/tank driver/generalized ass-kicker with a spikey harness thing. Cheetara was both a strong female character and the genesis of straight American furry culture. Tygra…had a cool whip?

Ok, so in retrospect there was A Lot Going On psychosexually.

But the real star of the show was Mumm-ra.

Mumm-ra was some sort of demonic wizard priest who, underneath his bandages is Completely Fucking Ripped.

While I’m sure he has a killer workout routine and the finest Roid-Protein Stack on Third Earth, the real source of his longevity is his Ancient Sarcophagus, which restores his decaying body and recharges his Dark Mojo.

A similar device is depicted in 1994’s criminally-overrated Stargate, where alien god/sluglord Ra emerges from a techno-sarcophagus which also has amazing healing powers (but makes you evil).

Both were arguably extensions of the Lazarus Pit, the pool of chemical something used by Batman archvillian Ra’s Al Ghul to heal himself and preserve his evil immortality.

So in the Age of “Let’s Create the Torment Nexus,” it was inevitable that someone would look at these fonts of eternal damnation and go “But how can we make money from this?”

Enter Ammortal, Inc., and their not-at-all-ominously-named Ammortal Chamber.

They burst into the public consciousness last summer, when it was revealed that ancient, brittle and oft-crippled quarterback Matthew Stafford had an Airstream trailer trucked into training camp with one of these inside.

Now, we’re all pretty inured to professional athletes doing insane shit in the name of health and recovery- blood doping now seems almost quaint, after Tom “No Strawberries” Brady, NanoBubbles Wilson and Aaron Rodgers’ Big Dark Decision Cave. And we all just kind of shrug and disregard it like that one aunt who is Really Into Crystals.

But then something strange happened. Stafford, who missed time in camp due to disc issues (with a long history of back issues), played all 17 games for the first time since 2021. And played spectacularly, winning a relatively uncontroversial MVP award. So maybe it wasn’t Complete Horsecrap?

So when I saw that a local place had one of these Infernal Machines, I felt a Boots on the Ground was in order.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT:

New-Agey-Hoodoo aside, there are five notable components to this contraption

• The bed, which is clear acrylic and looks like a place where Tron would talk to his therapist about his motherboard issues. I chose to keep my underwear on, on the basis that a. thinking about some other dude’s invisible assprint on the surface of the bed is not conducive to the goal of relaxation, and b. neither is the idea of hanging my junk out there for phototherapy purposes. It’s got a bunch of swirly patterns which I take to be related to:
• Pulsed Electromagnetic Fields. Per these charlatans: “Multi-wave PEMF renews and restores cells and amplifies the effectiveness of every other modality in the Chamber”.
• “Vibroacoustic Sound Therapy”- essentially there’s some bitchin’ subwoofers coupled to the plastic bed synced up with the meditation music
• A nasal cannula which administers “molecular hydrogen”
• Red light therapy. The top of Herr Machine closes down on you and some hella bright infrared and near-infrared lights get about a foot from your grill while other shine from your ass gets the same treatment from beneath

WHAT’S IT LIKE:

About 20 minutes in, I had a sudden and blinding epiphany that the Pop Tart and I were brothers.

You remember when we all sat around our TVs and watched something adjacent to human sacrifice at the Pop Tart Bowl?

The Ammortal Chamber Experience was not as warm as a human-size toaster would (presumably) be. But the searing red light and the vibration… it was then that I finally Understood the vapidly-grinning pastry man.

WAS IT EFFECTIVE:

That’s the bitch of it. Several of these concepts have legitimate scientific support as therapeutically beneficial. Hell, I wore a primitive EM device 25 years ago to promote bone graft healing, and both the heat and the vibrations were nice.

The problem is the common one in more mainstream woo-woo health circles today: the underlying concept may have some validity, but they overpromise the impact to such an extent that it almost discredits the science in a “normal” person’s mind.

Did I feel “rejuvenated”? Somewhat, although that may have been a function of laying down for an hour with no one trying to get my attention more than some micro-Hindenburg gas therapy.

Would I do it again? Yes.

Would I do it again if I had to pay the normal rate instead of the Introductory 50% Off? Hell no. I ended up feeling like toaster pastry when I wanted to feel like Mumm-Ra.