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.