I can understand seeing the Virgin on a piece of toast. I’ve been seeing my chihuahua in my bathroom tiles. I’d love to flip the tiles over, see who made them, if that info exists, and tell the manufactures what I see, see if they’ve seen what I’m seeing. But, unless I go without my medication for more than a week, I won’t be doing that. I won’t be ripping up my floor and writing emails. Calling my priest to get the Pope.
Glidden’s getting a nice email, though, or a little mention or a post for the hungry eyes of my tens of followers on social media, if the Glidden Premium line holds color on the south and west sides of my house. It has great coverage, as advertised. I haven’t even brushed two gallons on and am already halfway through the first coat.
It’s been every weekend of the summer so far, this project. My dreams are paint dreams now. Last night I was touring every farm I worked on as a teen and washing my car at each one, for some reason, and painting every exterior wall I saw. And then my dad would stop by and ask if I had work today.
I do.
But I’m not.
Do you resent Oliver Sacks for introducing you to the word migraineur? Or were you aware of it before reading Hallucinations? I wasn’t. For me, it was always I get migraines, said the person who frequently suffers migraines. That’s good enough for the masses. Call yourself a migraineur instead and someone is likely to ask how do you like it? Or, even better, how do you find it?
Exhausting usually, annoying at best.
The worst migraines I ever suffered were brought on by salt and by sun, individually. The salt one was because I had seasoned a single taco’s worth of beef with a seasoning packet meant for a family of eight. The shock to the system had me seeing varicolored worms and what I presumed were cracks in spacetime. It was neat for about ten minutes, the ten minutes I was a migraineur, then the headache part rear-ended me and I alternated between supine on my bed, stiff and postmortem, and face down on the keyboard:
ygbyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
The other Migraine!, 9 out of 10 on the pain scale, was strong enough to get a play canceled in the old Belltown neighborhood of Seattle. That’s not saying much, actually, it was a terrible play. An adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel. I played a role minor enough I didn’t need an understudy (in a company where no one got an understudy) but large enough it left significant gaps in the plot without me. There were six seats sold that night, so I might have saved four or five people a rotten Thursday.
Not a terrible loss in the grand scheme.
What was a terrible loss was that one of the cast was a nurse and she stopped the lead from giving me a couple oxy to ease my pain.
That would be a terrible idea! she said.
Oh! I’m glad you told me that!
Long pause.
Boy, so am I.
The headache, I was getting to it, the headache was brought on by about ten hours in the sun roofing a house, sunscreen trapping in all the heat in me, deep in my toasted skin, then I drove to Belltown in a purple van without a/c, undressed in an oven of a greenroom without a/c, and then suited up in tights and a full-body robe and a velvety crown.
The nurse’s diagnosis was sunstroke. I’d like to say the hallucinations accompanying the headache, since I was backstage of a play, that my hallucinations were pretty much the curtain scenes in Twin Peaks. Or like any scene in any Lynch film at all. But it was just more goddamn worms.
I went home to take a fistful of ibuprofen, nurse’s orders, and to ease my seminal vesicles, but that only made me feel worse. In fact, it’s never got rid of a single headache, migraine or otherwise. Is it rumored to do so? Or is this just something I, or someone equally unqualified, once told myself and never verified?
Anyway, it doesn’t work for me like it does everyone else. Different strokes, I guess.
I need to pick up some ibuprofen.
todd of tacoma 