Day Seventeen and the Stream (of Consciousness)

Day Seventeen and the Stream (of Consciousness)

As I sit in my comfy blue recliner, with my laptop open, Donnie Darko plays in the background on my writing room TV.

The sound is low.  So low that it isn’t a part of the pain I’ve had in my skull since… well, this pain started yesterday, with the borrowed dog we’ve been sitting since Sunday, and a particularly piercing bark that I have never in my life of knowing dogs, heard before. 

So, have you ever imagined what it would feel like to have a tiny buzz saw cut a straight line from the bottom left base of your skull, upward, then over your head and down, to just above your left eye socket, then string together dozens of teeny-tiny firecrackers, and set them into your freshly-cut skull-groove, so that all of them can be lit one-by-one and exploded, for six consecutive hours, while at the same time editing a blog post on an otherwise beautiful November day?

Yeah, me either. 

Until yesterday.

Now I sit, in the same comfy blue recliner, with the same laptop open, almost exactly like yesterday, with the pain diminished just enough to appreciate the deadness in my brain, after a yesterday, and yesternight, of over the counter pain meds, followed by an overnight of nonsensical dreams that, to my meat-tenderized frontal lobe, must’ve made, in the moment, made sense. 

It was almost 8 am, when the full-daylight of morning woke me from my final dream, after a shitty 8 hours of sleep.  I sat up, pulled on what was left of the clothes I didn’t fall asleep in the night before, and gently moved myself from the edge of the bed to the bathroom, then from bathroom to the kitchen, and finally, to the coffee maker on the counter next to the fridge.  My morning routine, set in motion twelve hours earlier, like always, so I don’t have to endure the self-shame of spending two extra minutes scooping coffee from a can in the morning. 

As I completed these actions, a thought hits me. 

What if someone unfamiliar with the kind of headache I was still in the afterglow of… say, an extraterrestrial being unfamiliar with the lengths a species such as ours goes to, every day, to feel, you know, like this species we already are, but without caffeine… were to ask me how I was still functioning in the aftermath of said debilitating headache from the day before, even prior to the coffee said human was going to consume hits the chemical receptors in that still hurting human’s brain?

(My apologies for the complex construction of that sentence.  Apparently my red-underscore spellcheck liked it just fine.)

My response to the extraterrestrial in my kitchen, as the coffee slowly dribbles from basket to pot, would’ve been just as complex, and though it would’ve done nothing to help human/extraterrestrial relations, it would’ve explained it perfectly for a species as simplistically complex as ours,

“What about getting hit with a baseball bat makes no sense to you? 

Now I’d like to tell you that this was the moment when I woke up from that last dream that make no sense.  I’d like to tell you that this wasn’t an ill-thought out blog post with a strong beginning, a weak middle, and no ending at all.  I’d even like to tell you that I’m a famous writer and, because of that, I’m going to be a contestant on the next season of Dancing with the Stars.  But what I’m really going to tell you is, before I could finish whatever kind of blog post this was giving us its best attempt to be, THAT was the exact moment that my head stopped hurting. 

So I stopped writing.

Mid-stream-of-consciousness.

Because, after the last 24 hours I’ve had, now that it feels like that borrowed dog headache of mine has finally moved on, I’m going to make me a snack, watch me some General Hospital, and enjoy what’s left of this day that’s almost over.  Maybe something less painful will come to me between now and then, and I’ll share it with you.  But in the meantime…

Talk to you tomorrow.