Blogged Out

The bulbs are coming up, but I’m not. That’s how I feel. It’s sort of warm, but I am stalled. The edges of the world are crisp, and I am under the dirt, not even sure I have sent up a single green shoot. Where is my head? I thought I was waving but maybe it was all a dream?

What is it? I envy people their children. Not always, just this moment when some sort of melancholy has taken hold and I have almost wept to miss the niece and nephew toddling around on an egg hunt. It is obvious I am not spending enough time with real children, to so sentimentalize them.

What lurks in the green grass?
Here in Suburbian the poison flag markers have all raised up along with the daffodils.
This morning, Easter morning, I was treated to the sound of chainsaws in my backyard. The neighbors cut all the arbor vitae that lined the fence between us. Why? Why? Now we can stare at each other. Who wants to stare at strangers in close proximity? I wish I could plant tall trees at the pace the neighbors are cutting theirs down.

Here is my confession: this morning it was like the man was using the chainsaw in my head, the noise was so loud I could not block it with the fan or shower, and so I almost ran to the porch, leaving my towel behind me, to stand there naked and yell at him, the little kids behind him, and me screaming, “Happy Bleeping Easter to you too! I hope you are cutting that down to build a cross so I can come over there and nail you to it.”

This scenario crossed my mind. I thought it would give those children an awesome Easter memory, much like the kids in the Midwest this year who were on an egg hunt and instead found a dead human body.

Suburbia makes me who I am not.

But I have been here so long now; I don’t know who I am.

And I think I am blogged out. This may be it.
I don’t want to blog about suburbia, I want to get out of it.
I hear the poetry of the world calling me/ I hear the larger poem of the world calling me.

Light As a Sharp Object

The rain falls. It bashes down the daffodils. But oh how I love rain. So I forgive what it does to the flowers. And they will Spring back, I believe.

My life is evolving into something else, the shape of my days changing, for thanks be to some miracle, I am having fewer migraines. It was hard to even call them migraines, as if they were a plural, because life had become one long migrainoid event. Even today I do have something of the aquarium eye, but overall have had the longest reprieve in the past few weeks. My days can take a new shape. (I feel like a stiff newt dancing in a summer shower.) I still must avoid flat screen tvs in stores, staring at fluorescent lights, the beams through the Venetian blinds, light as a sharp object, but am able to do so. Somehow I am skirting the migraines.

When I feel anything coming on, I begin drinking copious amounts of water, because I suspect perhaps some of my pains are from a struggling gall bladder and so I try to help it by diluting the body. It would come as no shock to me that I have issues with bile. And gall.

There is the ongoing tragedy of the hundred year old trees being cut.
Meanwhile, the light falls. I mean the rain.

I have begun going to the gym. I am writing things, watching flowers work their way above ground. The mate has two job leads, one in New Mexico and one in Washington State, and meanwhile his current job goes fine, so we hang in.

My biological father may have cancer and in a week will come the appointment with the dermatologist which will tell us more. I lie awake at night thinking about this, worrying about this. His was not a fair life. How do some lives get so much suffering into them?

Yes, while I was there visiting with him in February, I kept thinking he had cancer, that on top of everything else he has cancer. There was a growth on his neck that had gotten larger. But as I sat there across from him, at the wooden table in the dining commons, I thought ‘If it is cancer maybe it is helping him, maybe it has stimulated some tremendous immune response that is helping him, alleviating his suffering, keeping the pain from his failing liver at bay.’

He has that phoenix liver…it rises from the ashes and renews itself.
And when someone is on their death bed why would you worry about a lump on the neck which looks like something an old log in a forest would grow? I am only dealing with this possible diagnosis of cancer because a man who has more lives than a cat, once again rebounded after his trip to the ICU, his days and nights of moaning delirium, after the doctors said to say goodbye, after the ministers had come. How much can this man, my biological father, creature from whom my own genes originate, survive?

I have to wonder. And in that wonder, is hope for the world.

Then again, who wants to lie awake at night thinking about these things? I suspect unpleasant thoughts sometimes prevent you from sleeping also. We have so many things thrust upon us now. So many things erupt and sprout from us, the mysteries and misfortunes abound.

As do the miracles.

Life itself goes on. Spring comes. My mother renews her contract with the earth. She will grow her garden Helios again, and if I am lucky, I will be there at some point to help dig, water, plant, weed, or harvest.

Bellicose Varicose

Today the honeybees woke up in NJ and swarmed about. The first flowers opened, purple crocuses with yellow centers. The kitten piñata Shaka Zulu lay in the garden napping. Blueberry the cat, her son, brought his first mole to the doorstep. The creature was still warm, like a tiny precious seal of the earth, his soft little flippers. I said a little prayer for him or her and laid it in the flowerbed with the crocuses, so at least its bones could come back as flowers.

It’s always something. For the past two weeks I have been elevating my leg. It didn’t like flying west a month ago, now it doesn’t like anything. That season when I ended up at the ER multiple times was followed by a strange array of symptoms, from cardiac shuddering to a skin cancer scare to an infected eye to heel fissures to migraines to this lump in my lower left leg. It had seemed like a lump in the muscle and would flare up and down during the month, like everything else wrong with me. Finally, I was getting better in most ways but the lump was getting worse, and that night after I got off the plane in Seattle a few weeks ago, I could barely use my left knee or leg.

The week that followed found it stiff and swollen and me lying awake at night in pain, thinking it might be a tumor and they might have to amputate if something was not named, was not diagnosed and treated soon enough. (Actually, I had had one doc check it the year before but he was not sure what it was and I described it truthfully as the least of my complaints at that dire time.) This time I had two docs look at it and one considered it might be a cyst, though he did not do a very thorough exam. The other doctor was pretty certain it was a deep varicose vein. I had never heard of deep and excruciating lumpy veins. (There is no sign of it from the surface.) He recommended an ultrasound and a visit to the Vein Care Center to be certain. Also said to try compression stockings and an herbal supplement, this surprised me to hear an MD recommend an herbal supplement, but cool. Then unintentionally I made things worse by having too much fun trying out my parent’s wii. (pronounced wee, whee, Ouch!) The wii that broke my knee. Who knew helping a penguin catch fish while balanced on an iceberg could be so satisfying? But what the wii really taught me is that humans have not evolved to play video games with their feet.

The gulping of more ibuprofen. Then I flew east. My leg really did not like the flight. I read about varicose veins and didn’t really like what I read. I am in pain now and so I alternate between taking good walks which I think are essential for overall health, and then keeping the leg as high up as possible when not walking or cooking. My leg is up now. Last night it was crying in the night. It whimpers. My knee whimpers.

I recall when my otherwise healthy brother, the one I feel somehow avoided the family genetic health ailments that the females suffer, ended up with a condition that made his knee look like a skull. He was very brave. I teased him that he was pregnant in his knee and that his homunculus would pop out. He had to have surgery. As a result, he missed his opportunity to dress up in colonial gear for some historic family reenactment.

Of course little moles and mice have souls.
Does pain have a soul too?

Werewolf Girl Needs A New Home

My dreams last night were interesting to me, maybe not to you, but I would certainly listen to yours if you wanted to tell me.

Is the blog an imaginary friend for grown-ups?

In the dream there was a theater just down the block from me, much like my favorite theater Idiom. A woman and I were rehearsing our roles as werewolves and trying hard to get the voices right. Actually, I think she was a vampire and that was territory that had been much further explored so she was drawing from some rich theatrical history and I was simply trying to get in touch with my primal mammalian roots. There was much laughter, and I had yet to really figure out what a werewolf girl sounded like. The woman and I left the others at the open air rehearsal and went back to clean up the theater which looked like a toy room wrecked by enthusiastic toddlers. After all was put away, I saw that what I had put at the top of some stacks of boxes and papers were the two old antique photo albums that in real life I brought back from my grandmother’s house in Virginia after she passed away.


While I was traveling I was unable to write, unable to keep up with myself.
Upon returning to The Burble of Suburbia, central coastal Jersey, I was immediately thrust into a battle with people who were cutting down healthy hundred year old trees in our neighborhood. Storming into the Borough Hall did no good, nor did glaring at the men with the chainsaws, calling the planning board, emailing every local office including the Mayor, taking photos, leaving phone messages all over town, contacting a reporter, and praying and hoping. The horror was only magnified when it came to light that the deforestation was done under the auspices of the Shade Tree Commission which got a $25,000 dollar grant to do the destructive deed. They even called it The Rejuvenation Project. It was, in truth, by definition, a Decimation Project, but these are the same citizens who elected George “Mr. Clean Air Act” W. Bush. The trees were felled; the top soil and moss destroyed, and the woodpeckers, owls, and hawks will have to find somewhere else to call home.

And so will I.

Triggers

The lurching. Is it hot tea hitting the empty stomach? The Venetian blinds in the shower? Something coming out in the steam? Should I bleach the showerhead?

Twelve hours back in NJ and the migraine was with me. Before bed there was a loud humming. I asked my mate if he could hear it but he could not. It was so loud it seemed to be almost like hands pressed against my ears. But maybe it was just me? I had flown into NJ from Seattle, had the altitude of flying left my head in a hum?

And it is not like I did not have migraines while in WA. But they followed the old rule, just appearing during my period. They were visual, and they affected my mind. I saw blurry fuzzy bubbling things on all the edges of my sight, and sometimes hallucinated cats. Sometimes the cats were real. I tried to say “relatives” and the word “elephants” came out. Not once, but twice. And I kept repeating “Math man exam, math man exam” while trying to say just “math exam” or “math test.” But the pain part only crept in a few times and I kept it at bay with ibuprofen, 600 mg almost every day.

But now in NJ, today as I got in the shower, the lurching sickness hit again, and I have to wonder if there is an environmental factor. But I don’t know how to start looking. Everything has holes in it.

And So We Shall

March 4th, the only day of the year which is also a command. And so we shall.

Flew into Newark airport late last night and was blessed with a gentle flight and nearly unnoticed landing. Had left Seattle at 4pm, flown through clouds piled like icebergs, passed close by Mount Rainier and on over frozen America where night was swiftly falling. The plane was only half full, what a rarity. I was served a delicious turkey hotdog with a packet of yellow mustard and some baby carrots and then tried to take a nap but kept bumping my head against the window and straining my neck so I gave up and read The Stranger and the New Yorker, keeping current with events in Seattle and New York City, none of which I plan to attend any time soon. Voyeurism I suppose. Let’s see what other people are doing while I float 35, 000 feet above the planet.

For two weeks I was fully engaged in nonstop living, my time in the Pacific Northwest divided between visits at the nursing home where my father resides now, appointments with my own doctors, and playing with my niece and nephew who are so new to the world, along with my friend’s children who range in age from 1 to 7.

I did not stop to do any writing, though I was sorry not to. I did not sleep either. I neglected to write letters, to write in my journal or on the blog, and my only word output consisted in scattered posts to facebook about what fun the babies were being as they sprawled on top of me eating apples while I read The Three Little Pigs. The youngest child running into any room singing, “I see you.” His three year old sister twirling and dancing through multiple costume changes as she shed dresses around the house, spinning a happy dervish, tippy toes, tippy toes. The one and a half year old nephew grabbing me by the finger insistently saying, “Nuhm Awn” (his version of “Come On”) as he leads me to the playroom for more games with trains.

Seattle and Bellingham had so little winter that they were deep in blooming Spring. The streets were lined with pink trees. The earth was abundant with the landmines of bulbs: crocus, hyacinth, anemone, daffodil, and soon soon the tulips.

In NJ we have a flurry of squirrels. Mounds of dirty snow. Snow which hasn’t given up the ghost. But the ducks paddle on an ice free pond. Shaka Zulu the kitten piñata comes to the garden and lies down for a nap in the oak leaves.

Any day I do not write feels a little lost to me.
Here I am. I am back.

Suddenly I am French

So there is a name for me, migraineur. And sadly I am not alone; woe is the world, filled with migraineurs.

I had two days off from migraine, then three days on, and now a day off. So in truth I have been too ill to read the books on migraine I checked out of the library but still the fact that the books exist gives me hope. Maybe I “just” have migraines. Maybe I can be treated.

There is nothing as spectacular as a day without a migraine, for someone who has migraines. Today the blankets of snow are receding. Sky is blue and sun is yellow. I am making raspberry shortbread for my Valentine, and cleaning the house, and getting ready to fly west in two days.

The house smells of melting butter and toasted coconut.
Outside the sound of chainsaws from so many snow-downed trees.

If I can ever muster a few more consecutive migraine-free days I am going to read the migraine book A Brain Wider Than the Sky by Andrew Levy.

Thank you universe for this day without pain!

The Brain Stem

Unlatched, unleashed, unmoored.

Books on migraine are strewn around the house but my head hurts too much to read them. Last night I was able to appreciate what Dr. Carolyn Bernstein wrote in The Migraine Brain. Apparently I am not alone in my fear of going to the ER. She describes the noise and lights and writes, “You’re in Dante’s Inferno for migraine sufferers.” Exactly.

But right now again I am in the pain that makes me puke and cry.
And I get confused, is this a migraine or just a really really really really bad headache? Because now that for the past six months the migraines have busted out of their three day a month menstrual migraine program and appear whenever they want, I am confused, and the excruciating pain makes things more confusing.

I am too queasy to take anything and how did that hatchet get into my brain stem?
I tried walking barefoot in the snow and that was pleasantly distracting, but that was all.

We have the storm. It sounds like sharpened needles falling on frozen haystacks.
Baltimore is shut down; no one allowed to drive on its roads but emergency responders. The mid Atlantic airports are closed for the second time in a week.
Blizzard. But what we have is so wet and heavy, a soggy snow sweater.

Migraine in the Burble. That is my weather.

I just had two days off from headaches. When that happens, as soon as I get out of the deep murky water with the shark hanging on to my ankle, as soon as I am on that tiny sandy island in the middle of nowhere, I get Very Optimistic.

I think, “Hey I could open an iced tea stand. I can teach myself to carve coconut shells. I can train hermit crabs to act out Shakespearean dramas. I am going to live! I am going to join the world!”

I loved those two days off from head pain!

Yesterday I took the dog on a long walk in the melting snow and was enjoying the pace of this eternal puppy who wants to sniff every corner for urinary perfumes. It gave me time to enjoy the silver blue and green mottled patterns on tree trunks. I did notice that my eyes were filled with floaty bits but that didn’t dim my appreciation of the lovely day, and though it is undoubtedly migraine aura I sort of ignore it, it is so common, and floaty bits and visual weirdness are so much better than pain.

Now I notice as the migraines begin I get a feeling almost like I am excited about something. And I think ‘Cool, what is happening in my life that is giving me this little feeling of excitement, like I will be picking a friend up at a train or going on a zoo date in a sunny place with my mate?’ But then I can tell actually what I feel is nerves or apprehension, a feeling something is happening, and it’s the precursor to the pain.

I wonder if this is what chickens and cats feel before an earthquake or tsunami, the thing that helps them flee for higher ground or find a safe place.

Only I have nowhere to flee.

Storm after Storm

I watch two ladies walk their chocolate colored dogs together. Their voices drift over the snow and rise like leaking helium balloons, bouncing off the icy white crust of the earth. The oak leaves rustle in the sunlight. Some things are melting but the news tells us a new storm is on its way.


The cat reminds me of a cloud with a head. He drifts there on the couch, smiling in his sleep, fangs protruding.


At the birdfeeder I see a female cardinal with such an enormous crest that from her silhouette I think we have a cockatoo visiting us.

O, the feathered heads.
Oh, the snoozing cats.

Thinking Out Loud

What do I like in blogs? What do you like?
When I look at blogs I realize I like looking at pictures. I like white space.
Blogs seem best as showcases for images, with very small amounts of text.
If I want words, words, words, I will go to a book, or a newspaper.
I associate words with Paper.
The virtual world is great for images.

So as I define this blog, I think of it more as a way to organize and archive my thoughts, so that I can print them. For now I am just using the blog format for my own interior goals.

Blogs are also interesting showcases of personality, places where strangers can see into one’s semi private rooms. The blog pulls back the curtain from the drawing room. The person passes on the street looks in, and if interested, finds the front door unlocked.

So if I want to use the blog for what a blog does best, I should create or cultivate an aspect of my personality that interests me. And I should use the blog for images.
How to harness the blog form so it serves me, and my current goals, and doesn’t add a project or alley way? Not that I don’t like alleyways.
Perhaps a blog of poems and photos? Something in me balks. Poems want to be printed on paper, or written on leaves and hung from tree branches like feathery chimes, or floated down streams as rice paper boats.

February is still getting to know you month. I have just learned to link the text and photo, so they appear together and not as separate postings. Progress. Baby Steps.
Baby steps do not guarantee that when you can walk you can fly, but that is fine, since I don’t really like flying anymore. Give me the life of long walks.

As for goals, they can be so very concrete, because this is a material world and we have material needs. And so this year I would like a haircut, a pair of jeans, a laptop computer, and a car. My car started on fire three months ago and went to heaven on the side of the road near Freehold, New Jersey. I probably would not have started this Burble had I not been carless in suburbia in the winter. One must keep busy and I will be damned if I will give in to knitting. Ok ok, someday I will. But not yet.

There are other goals. To continue to try to achieve health, to take care of the body and help it become strong like an ant, to be actively supportive of the mate and family, to find a job, teach an online class, revise two rough draft novels and write a memoir, to spend more time west. There are dream trips, to see a friend in New England, to Key West, the Grand Canyon, Central America, the Mediterranean. The wide open spaces. Everywhere.

To be alive in the summer when the sun is high and the sand is white and the ocean is blue and the soft serve ice-cream is melting and the world is one long series of country fairs and the garden grows itself.

What is it you want to do?

Porn and Spam

Remember when that was what was dominant on the web, you would bump into it if you turned your back, and it would ooze into your inbox and show up in the strangest places. The internet had a dirty mind back then.
Then it got increasingly capitalistic and everything was shopping and E-Bay.
And now it is social networking, and blogs about babies and religion.

I have been looking at blogs at random, not sorting or seeking in anyway, just hitting Next buttons whenever I encounter a blog, and seeing who is saying what, and I am truly amazed at how many people are missionaries.

In Between Goals

Rain falling on snow.

Cat operas.

English muffins with strawberry creamcheese.

What is cloaked by invisibility?
What is all around you but cloaked by invisibility.

What shows on the face?
What is it like to have no face?

Yesterday I was thinking this, that:
There is nothing wrong with me that death wouldn’t fix.

It sounds dark, but it is light. The soul is fine.
It is just the muscle of the heart which was pounding at the door of the body, so hard,
that I turned around to look at where I had just been, and said, “What is that?”

It was me. My own heart. I had run up the stairs from doing laundry, and suddenly my heart was trying to break loose from its ligaments and crash through my ribs like the Kool-aid man through a wall.

So the question is, do I have to wear a helmet while doing the laundry? I am not entirely willing to accept death, but that is still much more welcome than passing out and hitting my head on the tile floor and ending up brain damaged.

I am just in between goals. The liminal space.
And not ready to create new goals. Enjoying the threshold, because choosing goals is a task I don’t take lightly.

In this place I fill the bird feeder, and see who comes.

I watch the snow fall, and then the rain come and remove it.

In the middle of the night, two cats press their faces close to each other in our dormant garden, and they stand mirror images in black and white, long silvery whiskers and gold eyes, and they sing an opera, just like two wolves howling together, only this is feline music, and sounds like ancient snow cats telling their creation myths, singing all the great battle songs of the ancestors. Creation and destruction.

And there are other things too, places and times in between creation and destruction.

Inside the egg, the bulb.

Last night gravity claimed the amaryllis. The enormous red blooms had grown heavy and in the dark the amaryllis took a swan dive from the bookshelf. It looked like someone had entered the room and thrown it to the floor, so spectacular was the spread of dirt.

Flower tantrums.

Tantrums of flowers.

Trashed Voodoo Doll

Let me tell how it went with the puppy.
One of us could not be trained.

Today was colder than I thought. The sun lured me out without enough layers but I walked a long time through suburbia anyway. Three lovely teenage girls with straight flowing tresses blowing in the wind, like three princesses, all stopped to ooh and ahh at the puppy. And the puppy rewarded the princesses by collapsing into an eighty-five pound pile of fur and sprinkling pee on their feet.

I have a new symptom. Muscle twitches. It started with two weeks of my left thumb twitching. Now it has moved to my lower right leg. I feel like those sad dissected frogs who are splayed on their backs and attached to an electrical supply.

Is it because I stopped taking calcium? I was loathe to quit but the doctor wanted me to stop so I could do a baseline lab. But I feel better on calcium so I am starting it again as soon as my blood is drawn in a few weeks. Right now I am building up my blood.

Did someone find my voodoo doll? Had the last tormentor thought it was finally lifeless and pitched it like a ragdoll in the trash?

Was my limp rag voodoo doll struck by lightning as it lay in the gutter?

At least our defenses are much higher right now. When I got the foreign object in my gelato (something akin to a metal pubic hair) I recoiled but was mainly just glad I hadn’t swallowed it, and I continued to very very carefully dig through the last few bites of chocolate and pistachio with my tiny pink spoon. The gelato was that delicious. I am mailing the metal shard to the café, but letting them know there are no hard feelings.

But why is my leg twitch twitch twitching?

Maybe it wants to go somewhere?

Colonial Mold

I could smell the mold when I took the box. It’s a particular perfume that only belongs to my grandmother’s house in rural Virginia (and in very few other places: a farmhouse in Rhode Island which dates back a couple hundred years, and wafting down a corridor in the Zona Colonial in the Dominican Republic, established in the 1500’s.)

It is old mold. It is what I now think of as colonial mold. And it is following me.

The nice man Joe had called from Fed-Ex saying he feared he had a bad address, that my house number did not seem to exist, and I was comforted by that, but still felt I had to give him the correct address. Joe is just the messenger, the cheerful messenger, oblivious to the consternation the contents might cause. He totes the unmarked box innocently.

I am thinking of trying to get a restraining order against my past.
Maybe a retraining order. I feel harassed; I want to be left alone. Want to hang up my cloak of genetics and last name and certain extended family, and to retreat, but the deeper I retreat, the more shocked I am at what can still find me.

Yesterday, like every week, I was being followed by documents that should go to my biological father, but since he has been seriously disabled for almost ten years, these things follow me like nests of irritated and persistent hornets.

What just turned up?
Well, at the door it was two mink coats.

On the phone, there were two callers. One was someone who wanted money from my father, and one was someone who wanted to give money to my father. You would think these things would somehow balance out, but really it’s like a tornado calling on you while someone delivers to your trailer park trailer four tons of fresh fish when the power is out.
It stinks. Sometimes it’s scary. Sometimes it makes you want to abandon your home and seek asylum elsewhere.

My sister will laugh hysterically, and then smile for days. (That is until she sees I am giving the mink coats to her for Valentine’s Day.) She will say it is my own fault and she will be right, sort of. The coats did not sell at the estate sale, and they did not sell after the estate sale, and my dear cousin who gets things done said she was trying to decide what to do with them, when I suggested we just pass them around on time-share. It was a cold day. There was snow on the ground. This dialogue happened over email, where it is easy to be misunderstood. I imagined that she had some spare closet room in one of her three houses and could just quietly tuck them away so we could all forget about them and the little minks could go back to sleep. The cousin took it to mean she should immediately box them up, insure them, and ship them to me in NJ.
I was sort of shocked speechless.

I have been stalked by the furry souls of old mink.

snowed in

So I used to just visit the kingdom of Illness, long forays there like intermittent layovers,
but in recent years it has become clear that I live there. There are no real spaces in between.

When I feel that thing I call happiness, I can tell it’s just a function of not being in pain.
A miracle.

I try not to look at my face too often because it’s like looking at a to-do list.

I have maladies for every letter of the alphabet. It’s like an Edward Gorey story.
A is for allergies, anemia, asthma, anaphylaxis.

As for the photos, enough snow?

It is like I am snowed in, in the body.
Talk about cabin fever.

(But I don’t want you trapped here with me, even though I will make you some tea and bake some chocolate chip pecan cookies for you.)

Trying to write the novel provides some relief. Instead of thinking about me, I think about the cast of characters, what they’re doing, their plans and hopes and dreams. They have their health and I hope to keep it that way for them.

As for blog plans, maybe each month will be a new theme.
January was accidentally illness, bleeding, and snow.
What will February bring?

willow bark

I don’t like horror movies and I think it is because my body is too much like a horror movie, like a haunted house.

Some days the body is the thing that follows me up the stairs.

My mate says I look sad. I am not; I am just pale from pain. It hasn’t occurred to me to feel sad. I am still in the desperate throes of looking for something to bite down on. Where is the anodyne?

Feeling sad? That would be a luxury. I am just on a teeter-totter of pain and avoidance.

And the blog? I am talking to myself out loud, in a public space. Pain and madness hold hands.

The leather punching bag of the body.

Remember the theme of surfacing? I ask myself. How to surface, without getting the bends? February may be about seeking some more assistance as I come up for air.

Here is the Catch 22. On the few days I feel well, I want to live and get things done. I want to enjoy life. Not having a migraine is like being released from jail, or a medieval torture chamber. I can think, I can breathe.
On the days I am ill, I am actually too ill to call doctors and do research and track down labs and pore over them and make plans of action related to finding a cure.

I envy addicts in that they must have found something that will work, for at least a little while. I would be an addict too if I could find something that relieved my pain.

I believe we eat partly because we are looking for medicine. Not just that satisfaction of fullness or the opiates or endorphins brought on by sugar and carbohydrate, but than in the animal world we would have found our medicine in plants and roots and bark and leaves and so we are simply tasting everything, looking for a cure. Looking for our willow bark.

red cross

I am fighting off a migraine, as usual. I know it’s a migraine because one of the symptoms is that I think I see cats out of the corners of my eye. And that happened this afternoon on a walk and so I thought, ‘Oh I guess the pain will be arriving soon.’
If my suffering would help a trapped Haitian earthquake victim then I would suffer all I could. I wish all the suffering I have known would have helped someone, but I feel and fear, just like the gallons and truckloads of blood that have flowed out of me over 29 years, its all just –waste. Futile, fruitless, waste.

So we donate money to the Red Cross. It’s all we can do.


**

It seems this year at least, I will be reduced to writing about illness for it is what consumes me. And contains me. (I contain it). There is an existential aspect to the migraines-like there used to be when I had seizures-(E is for epilepsy).

I would be confounded as to why a chair was there, why did something exist at all? But now with the migraines I am very startled by the body, very me/not me about it.

I was driving to the train station and suddenly I was scared and claustrophobic with the awareness that my neck was simply some bones and tendons, so easily toppled, such a frail piece of architecture, and that’s all I had to rely on.
Two days later I touch my hip or shoulder, and I am shocked to find that I am encased in basically what seems like a bag of leather, a cow costume.

The enormous endometrium

Oh baby, isn’t the modern wired world a wild one? I began clicking through the “next blog” pages to find I was surrounded by lovely Aunt Donna and her lady friends at the beauty salon, and ab bearing men referred to as “Shirtless Perfection.”
This makes me wonder who I am! And who are you?

We are something between naked musclemen and old ladies in beauty parlors.

The mate is in Boston and I am alone with a cat and a dog and thing in the attic that chews and chews.

**

Am I like the pre teen who gets a diary and the first thing she writes is about her menses and crushes on boys with angelic eyelashes? Well how can I not? How does one tune out hell? Each month, since childhood really (and isn’t eleven childhood in our culture) it has come and sacrificed me on its altar, dragged my body out onto its altar and demanded the blood sacrifice.
The apples and rubies and pomegranates, the iron of the body.
And then afterward, the commandment to rebuild.

God and the body are all wrapped up together.


I liked my period until five or years ago. Maybe ten years ago.
At least I told myself I did.


Maybe I always had Stockholm syndrome.

**

When I was fifteen I lost half the blood in my body.
Through my womb. Out between my legs. I was only Not Dead because it had taken days and not hours and so I had adjusted to the shock.

Before that, the first few years of my period, I marveled at the power and beauty of it and thought it was the god and goddess of fertility flowing through me. That the body belonged to nature, that girls were special vessels chosen to endure and procreate the magic of life.

In my middle perimenopausal life, I am pretty certain that the period is pathological, left over like belief in a vengeful god or patriarchy.

god is in the stem cell

Sometimes I think about things like the nutritional content of menstrual blood.
Don’t be squeamish; let’s try to be scientific, though I confess there is not a quick link to any such topic on Google so maybe I am alone in my curiosity. But it seems one more resource possibly going to waste. Menstrual blood does apparently contain stem cells. It is my belief that if there is a god, a god for people, then that god lives in the stem cell.
.
If a woman’s menses is rich enough to feed and cushion a developing embryo, aren’t we overlooking it as a source of something life affirming? What about the blood pudding and blood sausage and blood soups of the world? And the brave and enduring Maasai who have lived in challenging conditions successfully for a long time by utilizing the blood and milk of their cows.
Maybe I think about these things because I am childless and have been bleeding monthly for almost thirty years.
Taboos. I am also someone who loves cats and dogs and wish I could adopt all homeless pets, but who thinks that if we as a society are just going to euthanize thousands of these mammals a month, it is truly shameful that we not use their meat and fur.
Wastefulness.

There is an artist, Ingrid Berthon-Moine who did an interesting series of portraits in which she had women wear their menstrual blood as lipstick.
It’s art. It’s a start.

Meanwhile, if I reincarnate as a mammal, please sign me up next time for covert menstruation, where the uterine lining is resorbed at the end of each cycle instead of hemorrhaged out. I would like to do fieldwork with animals in Africa. Especially the beautiful hyenas.

Bulgarian Cherry Cheesecake

Each day I face pain. I know I am not alone in this. Many people face this too, and even worse perhaps. I don’t want this to be the pain blog, or even the pain avoidance blog, but today* the music is playing so loudly I can’t not mention it. I figured the blog could be one more way to get away from myself, get outside myself, as contradictory as that may seem. Anything to take my mind off me is good. Tiny snow is falling. It had melted off this morning but now has resumed. As if it missed itself.

In the meantime, a baker’s dozen of red-winged blackbirds appeared at the feeders, followed by a small sharp-looking army of red finches. The backyard was filled with starlings.

My primary accomplishment this morning was to prepare a beef and gravy dish for the crockpot, so that my hardworking mate will have a hearty meal when he arrives home after dark. To be eaten over biscuits, and accompanied by fresh crispy raw veggies with a homemade buttermilk dressing I got out of The Pastry Queen’s Christmas cookbook.

Nancy Mairs has been much on my mind. I first began reading her in my early twenties. I was nannying in NYC and raiding the library with the lions out front as often as I could. “Remembering the Bone House” was my introduction to her, and even then I knew she spoke for me, and I sympathized with her, though I did not share her MS diagnosis and challenges.

Will this blog be a Search for a Cure? A celebration of all for which I am grateful each day? It is still taking shape, finding if it has a voice, if it has a leg, what is this thing all twisted and wrapped in on itself?

Yesterday I made a cherry cheesecake, topped with gorgeous pale purple cherries all the way from Bulgaria. They floated in their glass jar for weeks and neither my mate nor I could open them. He sprained his hand. I felt I herniated my head. The jar went back in the cabinet. For whatever reason, we did not give up. Yesterday, after a month of trying, they opened almost without resistance. And the Bulgarian cherry cheesecake, sprinkled with brown sugar and cherry juice which made it shine, was delicious.



(*Today is a misnomer, I wrote this perhaps around the seventh, still figuring out blogtime.)

Surfacing

The theme of my inner season seems to be “surfacing.” When Alice was lost in Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts yelled, “Off with her head,” Alice escaped by simply waking up. I think my own ascent involves facing a lot more dirt. Somehow years of deaths and relocations and personal health issues have left me unemployed, carless, without local friends, in a state of what feels like permanent pre migraine, in suburban NJ, and yet I count myself extremely lucky. I am warm, well-fed, and loved. And I have a computer. I have learned to keep myself company. So, I talk to you like you exist. You are reading this!

I do feel like I have lost my head, but that my head was overrated at best.

Do you know the earthworm’s skin is covered with light sensitive cells and that some worms have five hearts, or aortic arches? Oh behold, the five-hearted earthworm. Earthworms are also hermaphrodites with complicated love lives. With their muscular contraction they are essentially swimming through the soil, making friends and composting.

When I was a child my mother and I raised earthworms in a giant bed we kept covered. They lived in a luscious darkness and we fed them scraps from our table, bread crusts and orange peels and coffee grounds, and they made beautiful soil for our garden which grew tomatoes and greens and cucumbers and melons and flowers.

So I woke up and realized I am deep underground, but rising, slowly, and so I identify with the bulb aspect of self, and not the flower, not even the root. I am planted with bulbs. We all are.

Right now the bulbs are sleeping.

I am working on writing novels. It prevents me from writing more poems, though not a blog apparently. Thanks to a friend Nita who back in October nonchalantly sent me a link to NaNoWriMo, (National Novel Writing Month) saying we should do this, she had once before and she was going to do it again, I found myself writing my first novel in November 2009. It had no plot but I achieved the goal of 50,000 words and then some, officially uploading 67,218 words though more floated in the computer, and it kept me out of the hospital by helping me tune out my bizarre migraines which make it so that sometimes I don’t recognize my own elbow.

I highly recommend Nanowrimo. Don’t say you can’t. Just do it. Start and continue.
I had so much fun that now that the New Year rolled around I decided, ‘Well, better write another one.’ And so here I am, at 3000 words, and this time I have a plot. No outline and no real skill, but this time I have a plot, a thing which proved elusive in November. In November I learned that I could sit in a chair and do the writing, and I began to learn how and when to use first and third and even second person perspectives more effectively, like a child with her first three fat red, yellow, and blue crayons. This time I am learning how to order events so that they make some sort of sense to the rational mind.

The bulbs are storing their sugar, dreaming sleep. Dreaming awakening. I raise my cup of tea to you.

In The Beginning

About ten years ago a friend suggested I start a blog/a weblog and I thought, “Why on earth would I want to do that, to talk at people? How rude,” I thought. And now here we are. A new decade, fresh at the start, and a blahg now seems like a good way to spare my family and friends the ten page missives I was flinging at them through the air. Apparently I do like to talk at people! Who knew? My preference is still dialogue, which is why I respond to myself. How about you?

Facebook is for Scrabble and looking at people’s photo albums. It is hard for me to not start each status update with, “”Oh come now, who on fb isn’t thinking me, me, me, me, me I, I, I, I, I.”

So here I greet you on a frosty morning in the suburbs of the world. New Jersey where I look over a frozen pond which yesterday was covered in skaters and today rests idly in the sun. Winter light blasts through the window, illuminating a crystal I had forgotten was there, and casting dizzying rainbows all over the wall in front of me.
The mate has left for a new job. Here we go.

Isn’t coffee a dream? Apparently my mate brewed a new pot and then ran off with it, but how can I blame him? One needs such a fortifying friend for the wee hours of the frigid morning. I try to coerce the cat to join me. In his sleigh the mate will likely be listening to Rebecca, the Daphne Du Maurier classic which irks him with its lily-livered main character as much as it thrills him with its atmospheric language. When we were rushing about on a brief stop at the library neither of us could think of the author of Fahrenheit 451 (We no longer have access to our own brains. What we cannot think of scares us.) and so he is finishing Rebecca before he moves on to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Red Badge of Courage. He now refers to listening as “reading.”

So this is just forming. It’s two cells, me and you. And you may even be imaginary!
Let’s see what we have in nine months. Or what kicks us in the belly or causes our heart to flutter in the meantime. Elephants and angels all.

Let us praise small things. Today, coffee, sunlight, warmth, and libraries. Also new jobs, bosses who communicate and advocate, and the utter convenience of email. Any day we are not in pain. Or moment. Our friends. You.