01 Wednesday Dec 2021
Posted in Depression, Fear, Human, Mental Health, Migraines, Pain
as the harpoon travels
straight through flesh it tracks
quickest path to bone it makes
splitting skin as sinew severs
all soft tissue — forced.
to the hilt and to the core
barbs gouge and deep dig
snaggle-hold the deepest
as to flesh, so too memories
a scarred retreat from each
left in the wake that’s left unhealed
23 Tuesday Nov 2021
Posted in Brain Droppings, Dandelion Break, Migraines, Observations, Open mind, Spirituality
I came up with a new term this morning. I was talking to a friend at work and telling a story. In this story I needed to refer to someone as Christian. But I didn’t feel like saying the term because, well… I’m me.
But here’s the thing. As the constant migraines dissolve my brain into a puddle of gelatinous goo, with the occasional ZAP! of synaptic activity fizzling across it, I come out with odd term to replace the ones I can’t think of. And that muscle is getting stronger every day. And let’s not forget, I have been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa lately as well.
So, as I was blabbing along I referred to the person as an anti-heathen. Everyone paused and looked at me and asked, “What?!”
“Anti-heathen!”, I exclaimed. I pointed to my own chest and said, “I am a heathen. They are a Christian. That makes them an anti-heathen.”
04 Friday Jun 2021
Posted in Brain Droppings, Cannabis, Healthcare, Medical Marijuana, Mental Health, Migraines, Pain, Psychedelics, Recovery, Spirituality
A migraine isn’t just a bad headache. A migraine is a big chunk of time where I can’t do life. I can’t cook, drive, shop, eat, or even talk well. And if I am not careful, I can cause much bigger problems for myself just by the way I act when I have one.
I don’t build up any sort of tolerance or immunity when I have a migraine. When I recover from one, that doesn’t influence whether I will have another at all, as far as I know. Yes, I have tried everything: plenty of water, OTC meds, meditation, acupuncture, dry needling, vitamins, adding and removing different foods, etc. And no, those essential oils won’t cleanse my salty chakra.
I don’t even look at migraines the same way as I used to. Even with all of the neurological and physical symptoms I have, and everything I have learned about how they work. A migraine has just become nothing more to me than a multi-day long period where I am a useless lump.
A migraine is that time period where I don’t get to do any of my daily life, that extends through to being a partner, a parent, an employee, or a even a reliable friend. And there’s a whole bunch of other side-crap I let pile up as well. I also don’t make lots of long-range plans, because everyone gets kind of sick of me breaking them.
Each time I have a migraine, I also get less healthy because I don’t move around as much. I certainly don’t exercise. I don’t eat right. I give in to cravings a lot more, and reach for easy stuff. And of course I end up taking lots of medicines. Eventually, those take their own toll on your internal organs, surreptitiously damaging my health in other ways. And, so many of the medicines that are designed to abort a migraine have such horrid side-effects for me that I realized I suffered almost as much with them, as I did without. Hey! How’s about a little dose of serotonin syndrome for your entertainment pleasure? Good stuff man!
Opiates have helped in the past, but they have a problem built into them. One, the body’s tolerance to them can climb like a caffeinated squirrel up a tree if you don’t use them exactly the right way. And even you do, you can still very quickly find yourself with a very persistent monkey on your back. Since the death of my own brother from an opiate overdose, I quickly realized that regardless of their effectiveness they must remain a “For Emergency Use Only” medicine.
Then there is medical marijuana. I mean, pot! No, wait… cannabis, right?!
How cannabis has been working for me on chronic migraines is a post all it’s own, since it’s deserves detail. And whether I personally think it can continue to be successfully prescribed as a medicine, I think, depends a great deal on what we call it (something I have already talked about before. It is a more important topic than most people give attention to, I believe).
Anyway, as I was saying: Migraines suck.
16 Friday Apr 2021
Posted in Brain Droppings, Healthcare, Mental Health, Migraines, Pain, Uncategorized
i woke today to the sound of
my own single soft whimper
one eye open a crack/gasp
searing pain thru gritted teeth
migraine… fuck.
27 Wednesday Jan 2021
Posted in Cannabis, Healthcare, Medical Marijuana, Mental Health, Migraines, Pain, Psychedelics, Recovery
One of the bigger problems cannabis faces as a medicine is that it has a few street names, such as Marijuana. That particular name comes saddled with serious baggage. Baggage that will likely require the slow erosion of time in order to really shake off such an entrenched reputation, even if it’s used only for the phrase ‘medical marijuana’.
Of course, none of that won’t stop millions from visiting dispensaries, chomping down edibles, packing a bowl or three, spinning up a few blunts, and vaping themselves into a Doritos fueled fervor. So, what’s the big deal right? As long as the people finally have some sort of legal access to some kind dank nugs at 4:20, what does it matter? Am I right?
Outside of the fact that I’m likely off by a couple decades on some of my nicknames, my point is that cannabis have had to exist ‘outside the margins’ as a street drug long enough for that whole paragraph to be written. The main problem with that is that we are beginning to learn just how much the demonization of certain substances because of their street profiles has caused us to ignore some very beneficial medicines, because we have been too busy watching Cheech and Chong.
It turns out that this whole thing isn’t so much a drug problem, as it is a challenge for all of us to learn how to open and change our minds about things we think we understand.
23 Saturday Jan 2021
Posted in Cannabis, Change, Conspiracies, Corruption, First Amendment, Healthcare, Heroin, Medical Marijuana, Mental Health, Migraines, Open mind, Pain, Psychedelics, Recovery
Cannabis has been proven (not only by modern science, but by thousands of years of human history) to be an effective medicine for many things humanity is plagued with, pain being one of the main ones these days.
Yes, CBD is one of the compounds getting a lot of attention as something that is helping folks. But THC actually plays a very big part in pain relief as well. The problem is, it faces that bane of all middle aged children: A bad reputation!
It’s the compound in Mary Jane that gets you high man. It’s the part of the drug that got saddled with one of the worst parts of adolescence, a nickname. THC is the stuff in Dope that got it the memorable nickname “gateway drug”. And if any 12 year old can tell you, a bad reputation is harder to get rid of than booger on the tip of your finger.
The worst part is, it turns out THC wasn’t the real gateway drug. The real gateway drug it turns out, is and always has been, the pursuit and hoarding of wealth.
26 Saturday Dec 2020
Posted in Anxiety, Depression, Mental Health, Migraines, Poetry, Writing
each word draws the poison
suffering and anger leach
angst and puffed the same
the way I rid yourself from me
ink lathered in blood on page
tear-soaked paper scraps
shriveled napkins tinged with rye
a collective act to ward off life
20 Friday Nov 2020
Posted in Healthcare, Mental Health, Migraines, Open mind, Psychedelics, Quantum
This particular migraine has been going for a couple of days now. The other night I walked into a dark room and for the first time during a migraine, I experienced what we used to call “strobe vision” back in the neighborhood. Strobe vision is just like it sounds. There’s just this flashing light on the outskirts of your vision all the time. It’s just there pulsing out in your periphery, just enough to mess with you. And in complete darkness, it’s quite the light show. Back in the day, we used to get it when we dropped acid, or ate some other psychedelic. It was a common enough experience that we even gave it its own name. That tells you something, I guess.
So, with everything I’m reading these days about migraines and alternative treatments, it has me wondering what areas of my brain these little electrical storms called ‘migraines’ are screwing with. And it sure makes me wonder even more than usual about psychedelics.
19 Thursday Nov 2020
Today I woke up with an even worse migraine than I went to sleep with. This one has a roller coaster attached to it. It has been it hijacking my vestibular system and turning them into a rocking horse with afterburners. On it, it will ride a glorious steed to Valhalla on.
Days like today make me consider every little factor just to decide if so should take the day off sick, or should I force myself to power through it. I have found that, depending on how freely I can treat the symptoms dictates how well I can function. Since there isn’t a “cure”, I’m really left either treating symptoms, or working on prevention.
Prevention is out the window once the storm hits (outside of taking note of any factors that may help you avoid migraines in the future), now it becomes triage time. It’s pretty much always triage time when one hits. Right now is one of those. Enough for now…
19 Thursday Nov 2020
Posted in Anxiety, Brain Droppings, Cannabis, Depression, Emotional Intelligence, Grief, Growth, Human, Love, Medical Marijuana, Mental Health, Middle Way, Migraines, Open mind, Pain, Poetry, Prayer, Recovery, Writing
This used to be a cohesive blog to some extent, until a few years ago. A few years ago I started to get migraines.
Actually, based on what I now know about migraines, I guess I’ve had them for most of my life. So the fact that I say it the way that I do means they got pretty bad. Bad enough to have screwed with every part of my life, in one way or another.
I always loved writing, but as the migraines got worse, the ability to string two thoughts together has gotten more difficult. Add to that the fact that most of it is written on a tiny little phone screen, and I fat-finger things when I trying to ride an epiphany and get the words out as fast as they roll through.
Then there was this thing I learned about that can go with migraines, called aphasia. I can ‘see’ exactly what it is that I want to say, but its word isn’t with it anymore. When I am writing and it happens, I give up. In daily life, I just come out with weird shit, like referring to a cutting board as ‘the under-the-knife block’. I get frustrated because I want the writing to be good. I’m starting to not care about that as much as i used to. Fuck it. If my typos bug you, there plenty of other blogs you can visit.
I’ve written a lot, but I think I deleted even more.
Poetry has helped me though. Because I don’t have to string thoughts. I have to evoke images and feelings, and tie them together in some sort of dance. And so, that’s been the majority of what I’ve been writing.
Many times I have tried to write about what I had been going through, only to delete it the next day when everything seemed to change again. If you know someone suffering migraines, you know what that means.
Much of it is related to chronic pain, and so a great deal of this involves dealing with that, when I wasn’t in migraine. And often with both at the same time. Although migraines tend to take over the show. Back pain is kind of like a guy who follows you everywhere playing a harmonica. He would be obnoxious and drive you crazy, right? But imagine if he were to then follow you into a Lou Reed concert or something. If you were even able to hear him, even then he would at best be mildly irritating. Migraines are like that. They’re so loud, they drown everything else out around them.
And with pain, comes pain management. And with pain management comes medicines. And I am in recovery. And it’s at that point that Pandora’s Box comes apart at the seams, as the scotch tape repairs let go again.
That’s been the juggle lately, anyway. Or at least it’s a good jumping off point for a few things.
The Middle Way 