My Head Tried to Kill Me

Remember this morning when I was all “I had a headache, but it went away?”

Well, it came back, in the shower, in waves that felt almost like the headache equivalent of a charlie-horse. There’d be great pain and then it’d subside and then great pain. It was as if every muscle over my whole skull was spasming. It hurt to touch it, but it hurt worse if I didn’t touch it. I thought I might throw up. I laid down until I could work up the ability to stand and I emailed Rachel and asked her if I was dying.

I called my doctor,  but I still haven’t heard back.

I made my way slowly to the kitchen, took some more medicine, and the pain seems mostly gone.

But I’m kind of terrified to set out to do anything with the rest of my day, considering how I thought it was gone the first time and it came back.

I’m convinced now that it was just some weird manifestation of a migraine I haven’t had before, but holy shit. I swear, it did feel more like a head charlie-horse. I hope to never have that again.

The Five-Page Blues

So, I took a big trip to Illinois, went to Watseka twice, for five pages in the manuscript. Five pages I’m not sure are any good. But they are rewritten now and better for it since I’ve actually been to town. After having lunch with the College Professor and talking books, I am still not sure that my manuscript is as good as my ambitions for it.

But I do feel like I am on schedule. Everything is moved around where it should be. I want to read over everything on paper once to see how that feels and then I’m going to ask some folks to read it and get feed-back. I’m nervous about that part, but I am almost done with the stuff I can find to fix on my own. I know what I mean, so it’s hard to see where things aren’t clear. I’m about to need other folks to look at it.

I’m still not sure it’s very good. But it delights me. And I do wish I’d had something like this to read when I was in my 20s.

I woke up with a terrible headache and ton to do, including getting the Watseka stuff in the book worked out while the town was still fresh in my mind. I have been up for three hours and the only things I’ve gotten done are to get rid of said headache and get the Watseka stuff worked out. And to notice that I have a daffodil in the front yard. The trouble with headaches is that, even after they leave, I still kind of reel from them for a while.

But I think the change in the humidity had a great deal to do with it. Even with all of the flooding in Illinois and Indiana, the air is so dry you can shock yourself just putting your hand in running water. And here, of course, it’s never that dry.

So, I was sitting in the College Professor’s dining room, where she has a whole wall of mysterious-looking cabinets, all of which are filled with different types of tea and she was talking about her writing and I thought, yes, this is how I’d like to spend my time, talking about creative things with the people who do them, myself included.

Ha, so I’d best get on that!