FOOD… For us Migraineurs, for we chronically disabled denizens, food can really contaminate one’s vitality, leading to longer slumberings or frequent naps. I eat the largest meal in my day very late, after everything is accomplished & I’ve settled down to watch DVDs. This is often just before dawn, when I'll be sleeping soon after. I eat so late because if I eat earlier, no matter what the fare is, I get tired. I have certain necessary tasks I call “my dailies” to accomplish every day or I don’t feel I have at least partially lived my day: meditation + a poem-a-day + a sketch-a-day + reading someone else’s writing (even if my eyes are blurry, I try to read a page from some book to feel connected to the world) + at least one walk with my little dog out to the country road or out in the deep backwoods. These are essential to my sanity, indispensable for my stability, & primary to refuse depression too big a serving at the supper table (so to speak).
It's been nice, in the upper 60°s when we roam before dawn. The moon has had enough glow to sustain us without use of the flashlight. Such amazing star patterns! Us being out of any city is mostly unrestricted. Well, unless I go close to one of my neighbors who have their floodlights set on sunlight.
Sluggish these day. Dragging across the gloom of fatigue. Difficult to adjust to wakefulness, to reason beyond my bellybutton. But I've also when suffering a terrible rash all over that might be first a side effect to my daily dose of Aleve (the new label foretells what I have), then reactions to a lotion I've just started to counter the rashes. Now, done with both, I'm noticing a reduction of both itching & the rash. Had to give in for a few days & use Benadryl to get any sack time, but that also creates this lingering muddled state I despise.
“Slowly getting better. Slowly regaining myself. But for how long? I dunno. A day, a week, never?” – I wrote that a few days back to my PA pal, but have had an entirely reversal away from health, bringing out the fatigue, leading me to total exhaustion. I slept 11 ½ hours on my last sleep, 11 before that, & roughly 10 ½ the preceding days. I try & stay up, but have to return to my bedding with my mind scrambled, my energy pilfered, & my balance uneven, forcing one to believe horizontal is the only way to be… What a curse it is being chronic ill.
We are beasts that eat our lives: forced to be cannibals, feeding on ourselves to make it from dawn to dusk or the reverse as in my case. To be sick in society is to be shoved to the back so the healthy folks can keep going, not being slowed or frustrated by our lack of abilities. Disease is a curse one tries to hide until there is no place else for it or we to hide.
Eight years after K@trina... Seems like forever ago. My entire life has changed. Besides the storm/human damage, there is the murder of a good friend/artist, the loss of my Mom, then my mother-in-law (the best person I have ever known), & my sister, plus the extinguishing of my marriage, then the death of three canine children - Flapjack, Jojo Bean, Ridgeway. And there has been more Grand Mals than ever before, advancing chronic illness, & now my isolation in the backwoods, where my only friends beam across the internet or occasional phone calls. Most people simply cut me free & let me drift down stream. Once out of sight, I am out of their minds & they are better off...
Been watching my K@trina DVDs to commemorate the anniversary: When the Levees Break, Harry Shearer's Big Uneasy, & season one, episode one of HBO’s Treme. But I have a lot more video I can watch. There is a great one about the exiled musicians of New Or'lins (Robert Mugge’s New Orleans Music in Exile) before they had their Musicians Village. There’s a lot more in my collection I can turn to: Geralyn Pezanoski’s Mine (about lost pets during the storm), PBS’ Frontline: The Storm, National Geographic’s Inside Hurricane Katrina, PBS’ American Experience: New Orleans, & Dawn Logson & Lois Eric Elie’s Faubourg Tremé: the Untold Soty of Black New Orleans.
Tonight I strum the low swinging Blues. Make it into a slow fire burning deeply into the marrow of existence. Here I learn how to bark & howl, to dig below & communicate with the ground traveling crawfish & burrowing fire ants, beneath further to where worms have learned how not to drown in such wet soil. They teach me how to dwell without expiring, how to keep one's Dread awake in the shadows of an uncertain gloom.
Labels: Chronic Illness, Hurricane Katrina
