Eyes Half Open
I was going to call this blog Siege of Headaches, but then I thought, 1) Who wants to read about someone with headaches? and 2) What if I want to write about something other than headaches? So instead, we’re going with Siege of Words, which covers just about everything, except the pictures accompanying the words, which are, contrary to popular misconception, worth not a thousand words, but ten thousand. But I would rather write thousands of words than take pictures, despite the astonishing quality of your basic cellphone photo.
For a long time (December 2005 to February 2017), I wrote thousand-word columns for two local arts and entertainment papers here in river city, Iowa. For years, these came out biweekly, with a brief and hair-raising segue into weekly which just about did me in, and that was before the headaches. About a year before my columnul retirement, I slowed to monthly, and then one day, as I sat down to crank out yet another letter to the world, I realized, that No, I was done. I will write about all that some other time. Writers love to write about writing, and also about not writing, but navel-gazing has its limits.
BUT . . . I just wanted to say that all of those columns are here, or rather there (under the Columns link, but you knew that), should you want to read them. Use a tag to find them by subject. These range all over the place, from Chambers stoves to dogs in guitar shops to April 20 birthdays to high school reunions to having relatives who voted differently than I did. I mean, I could not just let them go, all these little essays. They are not all there (I mean here) yet, but I’m plugging away at posting them, all 300+ of them, so they will be. Any month now.
Among the other new things I will write about, in no particular order:
- Books I’m reading (Ann Patchett! Terry Tempest Williams!)
- Books I wish my head would allow me to read (Universal Harvester! Hamilton!)
- Poetry I’m writing (Free verse! Villanelles! Just kidding about the villanelles)
- Getting an MFA after 50
- Food I’m cooking (Chez Panisse Almond Torte! Homemade Hoisin Sauce!)
- The mini-arboretum I’m maintaining in the back 40 (Hostas! Allium! Fiddlehead Ferns!)
- Podcasts I’m listening to (Night Vale! The Hilarious World of Depression! RadioLab!)
- Twin granddaughters I’m in love with (Vera! Jane! Jane! Vera!)
- Family matters I’m contending with (Being my sister’s guardian) (nope, no exclamation point)
- Breaking my 5th metatarsal and not really recovering
- Being a librarian, and then not being one anymore
- Losing my job & prematurely entering retirement
- Pet peeves
- and more, so much more
But mainly, or predominantly, I will write about navigating life with my eyes half-open, which is what people with chronic migraines do, either metaphorically or literally. Photophobia is common in migraineurs, and while it sounds like “fear of light,” it actually means having a hideous sensitivity to light, either before a headache sets in (when it acts as a trigger) or during a headache (when it sends a person to a dark room, pulling the blackout shades, donning an eye mask, and so on).
The ironic thing, the highly ironic thing, is that using a computer is my main headache trigger. It is the one thing that just about guarantees I will get a headache if I don’t already have one, and will twist a headache meter up to Unreasonably High if it’s already getting started. And yet, here I am. And I will be back. Until they pull this keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.
After retiring from a column-writing gig lasting eleven years and yielding over 300 personal essays, I find I still have something to say. My thoughts range far and wide, and occasionally deep, on subjects including being an Iowan who misses Colorado; surviving marital violence; raising an amazing daughter and an equally amazing son; being justifiably angry about the world “these days;” writing poetry and plays; wondering if I’ll get Alzheimer’s like my mom and her two brothers; wanting to write about my twin granddaughters without sounding all Hallmark-y; fixing OCD-ish food; making sense of pants that come in shorts / crops / ankle-grazing / bootcut; being a librarian in public, academic, archival, and medical libraries; waiting 46 years to attend my high school reunion; having a gorgeous garden I can’t take care of; seeing a shaman; loving good men despite all the bad ones; and trying to wrest a little joy from life despite an 11-year-and-counting chronic migraine.