Oh right, but back to the prompt, which I plan to tweak significantly:
The thing is, migraine feels more complicated to me than just a simple old monster, and I want to acknowledge that. Besides, when I am laid out by a bad flare of migraine symptoms, I try to keep my sense of humor. And those the first three little words of the title given by the prompt (but that I did not keep today as my title) make me want to do a dance, but not the Monster Mash!
Don't get me wrong. Dr. Frankenfurter's birthday bash is frightening indeed--and the experience of migraine is astounding, and time does indeed seem to be fleeting as madness takes its toll. But the thing is? I can't turn away, either.
So more so than some movie monster, what migraine makes me think of is this:
It is not just Eugene Hütz's injunction to get your little migraine ribbon on already.
Part of it may be the seemingly orderly panel discussion at the beginning: this time they will explain it all to me. But then it all goes a little nuts, and the reality of the situation becomes clear. When migraine strikes me down with a fearsome attack, these people are partying in my brain but did not invite me.
Sometimes I feel great as an attack gets going--kind of elated, too amused by my own wits, too prone to say something that will get me in trouble. I figure that at that stage, I still believe that maybe this time I will get an invitation.
But it is all clear when the promise of vanishing sanity and wits comes: It's just a matter of time.
It kind of scares me how much familiarity with me these Migraine People seem to have with me--how long they have known me. . . .
And perhaps my own inability to find words I want, or sometimes even to speak, is my cue that I should be switching into primordial Ukrainian, which of course I do not speak, so all I can do is stutter.
More than anything, though, I love the sense of a cabaret at the end of the world--let's all drink and dance and fuck ourselves stupid, because we are dying anyway.
One thing I notice when I am experiencing migraine is that it feels less like a foreign occupation or an attack than it does like my own system turning on me, or turning with me. Rational or not, I feel complicit--I'm in the milk and the milk's in me! It's alienating and seductive all at once, that desire to succumb to what the disease is bringing--especially when I am in a situation where I cannot really release myself to it because I am, say, at work. What dancing! What fabulous shoes! People are holding chairs in their teeth! Someone has busted his head through a drum! People are wearing striped tights and playing accordion and shooting bows and arrows and taking off their clothes! And all the while someone keeps trying to close the door on them.
What do you mean, I'm not invited?
National Migraine Awareness Month is initiated by the National Headache Foundation. The Blogger's Challenge is initiated by www.FightingHeadacheDisorders.com.
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