this too

IN A STRANGE PLACE

Here or there? Mending or not? The yellow woman or the blue? Not sure yet. Sometimes the body says: stop! A vicious virus kept me in bed for more than two weeks, divided from thought as much as from action. Recovering, but not yet recovered. Walking around, going to work, but coughing, aching, heavy still and mostly divided still from thought. Few words, few pictures. Not much of anything, except lying down with the radio on, muttering fear and disaster from Iraq, Virginia and the Dover Straits into my left ear. Drifting, spinning in the world's woes without the usual solid, selfish sense of me planted in the foreground of consciousness, keeping them at bay. Badly needing now to reattach the rest of me to that left ear. Coming back to mind and body and routine, unfamiliar and disoriented. Nearly there. Not quite.

LIKE THIS

Not sure why I like this photo so much. But I do. Even better if you click on it to enlarge.

Perhaps because it was a pathetically failed photo with the new camera, but with a lot of fiddling I made it into something satisfying. Underneath the poor light and muddy colours was a skeletal composition that I liked.

Minimalism rules.  At least in my present mood.

I succombed on Saturday to three days of terrible migraine. Three or four weeks of working like shit, excessively long hours in front of the computer, disturbed sleep, feeling very stressed because no matter how hard I work it's never enough. The migraine kept returning and I kept taking drugs, far too many drugs, and it kept returning. Eventually, the drugs didn't do their job any more.  It's as though when pushed too hard something very deep in my body, very fundamental to my constitution, starts screaming, "No, no, stop!". I can put a pillow of medication over it and hold it down hard and it will go quiet, but every time I take the pillow off it starts screaming again, and my arms aren't strong enough to keep holding down the pillow for ever.

The pace at which most working people in my society live is impossible for me. It makes me very ill. And perhaps this is a blessing (although it's hard to see such vicious, relentless pain and nausea as a blessing). A lot of people just keep going until it kills them. Whether it's a blessing or not, I don't have much choice about it. This is the only person I can be.

Well, the Easter break starts soon. I'm going mostly off line for a week, or ten days, or two weeks.  Then we'll see. I've said this so many times. But  if I don't do something soon, I fear that one day the agony will start up and it won't stop in a few days, my body will have been pushed too far and will no longer be able to rediscover its equilibrium.

Scary stuff, but good, perhaps, to recognise it. Probably good.