The Friday Morning Listen: Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish - A Tribute to Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band
I’m thinking that this will be short, because I still feel like part of my brain has been removed. At around 11AM yesterday, I developed a migraine. This is a very rare occurence for me, but brings back memories of my teens and on into my thirties, when I had one or two per week. When I reached my mid-thirties, the headaches vanished (so did my first marriage, though the two things are probably not related, no matter how amusing the idea is).
My symptoms, aside from the actual pain (which I perceive as being both dull and sharp), usually involve light sensitivity, nausea, slowed reaction time, warped perception (which I’ve discovered has a name: derealization), and partial memory loss. I’d never heard of derealization before but one part of the definition fits me perfectly: perceiving that objects are unreal or cartoon-like. Some of this came on very strongly on the (brutal) drive home, when the trucks I would pass seemed like they did not did not belong on the highway. They were no longer trucks, but floating metal boxes. It was all sort of dreamlike.
So I made the (very bad) decision to try to make it through a lunch meeting, hoping that food might calm things down. Unfortunately, the nausea had taken over by then, turning the act of eating a couple of slices of pizza into pure torture. The food did not help, and I spent an hour or so after the meeting worrying about things like why I was sweating and unscheduled trips to the men’s room. I decided to bail at 2, when the letters in the document I was attempting to read started moving around on the page.
Migraines put me into a kind of fugue state, in which it seems like I can and do function, but remember only bits and pieces of my actions. The drive home, about an hour, seemed like half a day. When I got home, Stepson #2 happened to be visiting so he helped me pop the air conditioner into the bedroom window. I cranked that sucker up and collapsed onto the bed. For two hours I was gone.
When I woke up, the migraine was gone, replaced by a sense of calm. Shaky calm. As usual, I only had a vague memory of driving home. As the pseudo-fugue subsided, a bunch of seemingly random thoughts emerged: Wow, they were right, the boss’s daughter is incredibly good-looking…can I hold this pizza down? the sun is burning a hole into my brain, floating boxes, old woman sweat/young women glisten, the shiny beast of thought…
The last two items are actually lyrics from the Captain Beefheart song “Dirty Blue Gene.” Apparently, I was listening to Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish on the way home. I’ll have to listen again this morning because I don’t really remember it.
First published as The Friday Morning Listen: Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish - A Tribute to Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band on Blogcritics.org