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.