What a piece of work is man?

I can't explain to you what it's like to live with chronic pain. I can barely gesture at it's effects. The pain itself is immense, but it is the wrenching of my life's normal path that I find truly devastating. These past two days I have been blessed with an odd reprieve in certain measures of my emotional clarity about this headache, but it has not come without a price. I am joyful to feel the sun shine on my soul's face, but this illumination has also shown me how much I am wasting away in places where I was once so full. Numbness can hold off feelings of bitterness, frustration, and alienation, as much as it can bar joy, passion, and humor.

I am being torn to bits by this headache, scourged and starved by a war within my skull. This may sound titillating, dramatic, or otherwise attention seeking, but I assure you this is not my intention. I need only point to a frightening discovery these past days: I have ceased to be able to sing. No, no, my voice itself is working fine, but it has so seldom been used to sing that I have lost control over it's workings, lost all sense of texture and tone. I do not sing because my spirit is wracked, and thus I have lost touch with it.

Could not the same thing be said for so many things in my life that once were common, even near constant practices? Eye contact, confidence, and a sense of my own self-worth are partners gone these long months. I cannot concentrate on reading, and writing, and my mouth struggles over familiar words. My hearing and eye sight have weakened, even teeth brushing hurts from medication side-effects.

I'm losing this campaign and I'm weakened by these years of war. The clouds will surely return and so these terrible and triumphant feelings will go with with them. I merely hope that my desire to see the sun does not pass on too. I wish to sing again.

The quick and dead.

Here's the skinny of it.

My headache has reached a peak so terrible that even the great Ranier is caught in its shadow. It is slowly converting my soul to a sort of Golgotha, an execution ground for everything I hold dear. If I seem hopeless, it's because I feel it.

Here's the narrow of it.

I cannot persist in this. Something has to give and I dearly hope it is not me. I praise the Lord that I studied enough philosophy to know that whenever a problem seems unanswerable, that you must merely change the standard you are using to answer it. While imagination amidst migraine pain is a challenge, it is not an impassable problem.

It's time again to set my self, by hypostasis and ousia against this enemy. It cannot win against me. I will not let it.

I will not die.

Vintage 2009

I think perhaps the great David Hume must've had headaches too, for temples held in vice-like grips make good bedfellows for doubt and skepticism.

When massive crab claws (most certainly unearthed some Lovecraftian abyss by the force they can exert) squeeze my head most tightly, the pressure can like grapes crushed beneath heels and toes produce an acidic but addicting drink.

God and Christ and unbelief are smooshed beside my boiled brains and hazy eyes, spurted out and pulped (skin and all) and left to ferment in a cask for 2 years (give or take a month or so). This process will produce unerringly a potion best not quaffed by the faint of faith.

They say that David Hume was a connoisseur of these variegated vintages and the hangovers needed to produce them. It would seem that I've inherited the palette, and accompanying production line.

Heels up and bottoms up, good friends. Here's to the vintage of 2009.