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Two interesting personal developments for me this week.

Almost a month ago I wrote about my less than thrilling or relaxing trip to the wonderful city of Seattle for this year’s World Science Fiction Convention. As I said, the convention itself was really good but losing my wallet and keys during the trip up cast a pall over the entire week that left me terribly stressed and unable to thoroughly enjoy my vacation.

Monday of this week, I arrived at my desk to begin another week at the day job and after pulling out my laptop from my backpack/computer bag I heard something shifting inside. I reached deep into the bag and the tips of my fingers touched …. leather?

I grabbed the leather object and pulled out my wallet. I reached in again and my fingers found my key ring with an assortment of keys.

Clearly what had happened was that at TSA in San Diego after passing through the check point, I had hastily grabbed everything, laptop, iPad, wallet and keys and shoved them all into the bag. The heightened stress and emotional stessors disrupted my memory formation just enough that I had and still do not have a memory of pushing the items into the bag.

It’s good to know that they were not lost and no one got ahold of them, but it is frustrating.

Yesterday, in a quest by my pulmonologist to quiet a persistent cough I have experienced since February of 2024 I underwent a bronchoscopy, a procedure where they put a camera down into your airways and lungs.

The nurses at Kaiser Zion Hospital were excellent but let me tell you having lidocaine sprayed into the back of your throat is a terrible, terrible experience. It prompted gagging and coughing and had a taste I would not wish upon my worst enemy. The procedure itself was hardly a bother, though apparently from the sedation I was out for about half of it. The test results indicated nothing abnormal in my airways or lungs and so the search for a solution to the coughing continues.

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Yesterday, Tuesday, was by far not my best day. The night before I found it impossible to get decent restorative sleep, waking constantly throughout the night, suffering nightmares, and finding the air from my CPAP machine had suddenly become far too warm and wet.

It was no surprise that when my alarm sounded to rouse me for a day of work and writing, it brought me into a raging migraine headache.

I called in to the day-job, took my medications, and waited for nine hours for the pills to finally quell the headache. They normally get it done in two hours, but this stress-induced attack proved stubbornly resistant.

Needless to say, in addition to missing a day of work, I got nothing done on my novel, which only made me feel emotionally even worse.

I still have high hopes of completing the first draft, this very rough draft, by the end of September and perhaps having a completed manuscript before the end of the year—provided the evil migraine demons are not too vigorous in their assaults.

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While I suffer from migraine headaches, I recognize that mine are generally far less severe than many people’s, but that does not alleviate the pain or the unpredictability of my triggers.

Yesterday morning I had a quick follow-up visit with my dentist for her to check the sutures from last week’s minor surgery. Sitting in the office waiting to be called, I passed the time playing games on my phone when a mother and her little girl came in. The little girl, a strange child, was excited for “the doctor to look at her teeth,” and when told she had to wait, shrieked in frustration. Yes, from what I saw, it really looked like the little girl was upset because she had to wait to see the dentist and not from fear of the exam.

However, her single piercing shriek instantly ignited a migraine attack in my head. For me, this is one of the most difficult things to manage: when and if a migraine trigger will actually start an attack, warn that an attack may come, or leave me untouched as though I do not suffer from this condition.

There are times when the triggers, and they are nearly always audio triggers, start a process deep in my skull that I can feel and now recognize as a potential migraine. In those cases, I can flee the stimulus and often avoid the attack itself. Sadly, for me the triggers can be as mundane as the mere sound of someone eating. (I have never watched The Substancebecause I know that there are disgusting shots of people eating and talking as they eat, and the risk of a migraine is simply too great to ignore.)

Other times there is no warning that the trigger will ignite the attack, and from the very first moment of the trigger, the migraine starts. Pain exploding inside my skull, the sensation of pressure builds in my head, and a slowly growing dissociative detachment takes hold.

Yesterday I suffered for most of the workday with a minor to moderate migraine, moved slowly through my tasks, and had very little cognitive ability once I returned home to my sweetie-wife.

If these were more predictable, life would be more manageable, but as it is, I simply have to deal with the triggers and whatever they decide to do on a case-by-case basis.

28 Years Later, the second sequel to pandemic/zombie movie 28 Days Later picks up where the title implies, 28 years after due to well-meaning but idiotic animal rights activists caused the release of the ‘rage virus’ the islands of the United Kingdom are under a strictly enforced quarantine populated by the infected and survivors attempting to scratch out life and community on the British island.

Sony Picture

28 Years Later is centered on a small nuclear family, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his clearly ill mother Isla (Jodie Comer). Jamie takes Spike across a causeway that keeps the island community safe from the infected for an initiation into what life on the mainland, infested with the infected, is like. The trip into the mainland alerts Spike to that his father is not entirely honest and that a man considered dangerously insane living there is in fact a physician. Desperate to save Isla Spike takes his mother to the mainland on a perilous quest to find the doctor.

Written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, the team that created the original film, 28 Years Later is a very competently crafted piece of cinema. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle handled the assignment of using handheld unsteady quite well producing the emotionally disjointed sensations without overusing the technique to the point of motion sickness. (At least for this viewer.)

That said, I never emotionally engaged with this movie. The first act, Spike and Jaime’s expedition to the mainland felt more like the introductory level of a video game that established the world and its rules and less like the opening act of compelling story. The father/son interactions are not enough to pull me fully into caring about either of them. Isla’s illness, while tragic, feels more like external motivation. The fact that she has good moments and bad moments mentally, but we don’t really, for the most part, see who she was before the illness took over her life, presents Isla as more of a hypothetical character than a fully realized one.

Without being drawn into a story that compels my attention emotionally I was left with time for my mind to wander which only exposed elements of the world building I found unresolvable.

The ‘Infected’ present the same narrative issues as the ‘reavers’ did in 2005’s Firefly sequel film Serentiy. I simply cannot picture how they function when they are not on the screen chasing down and killing the non-infected. In the original film it was presented that the virus, acting far too quickly for any actual infection, activated the emotion of violent rage in its victims. Rational thought vanished and whenever an infected person noticed an uninfected one, they chased them down with murderous intent. That’s all fine and dandy but after a few weeks there will not be any more active infected. If you are not maintaining yourself, food and water, you will die.

Okay, so maybe, just maybe, the infected possess enough of their faculties take care of such matters. 30 years later there should be no infected. In the course of this film, we witness an infected woman giving birth. That means that there has to be sexual relations between the infected, not a product of the emotion of rage. For there to be generations of infected that means the infected must be raising children and the raising of human children is a labor and cognitively intensive task. I simply found it impossible to suspend my disbelief for the basic core concept of the movie.

Others feel differently. 28 Years Later is being hailed among the horror community as a great film and you may find it so, I, however, while not repelled by it found it less than interesting.

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I had plans for this weekend. Saturday evening I was to run my Tabletop Role Playing game of Space Opera  I even toyed with the idea of going to a ‘No Kings’ march. Sunday was supposed to be a trip to the Zoo, a Mexican Horror flick, and in the evening my online writers group.

None of that came to be.

I awoke Saturday morning to migraines and while medication abated them for a few hours here and there they pretty much persisted throughout the weekend.

The attacks were not so intense that I needed to retreat to my bed and hide entirely from light, but they were more than strong enough to keep me indoor and away from even indirect sunlight.

The headaches are not yet entirely history, but the one I am suffering this Monday morning is insufficient to keep me home and away from my day job.

I hope to have better things to write about tomorrow.

James Cameron, the filmmaker behind some of the most commercially successful movies of all time is a fantastically capable director and technician but as a writer I feel he is at best mediocre. An example of this is the character Caledon, Cal, Hockley (Billy Zane) from Cameron’s box office monster Titanic.

20th Century Fox

In the film, in case the plot, beyond the sinking of the vessel, escaped you, Rose (Kate Winslet) is engaged to wed Cal as a desperate maneuver to save her family following the death of her father who left them with crushing debts. This plan is crushed by Rose meeting Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) with a love that turns out to be as doomed as the ship itself. Cal becomes the villain of the story, desperate to possess Rose, framing Jack for theft and chasing him around the sinking liner in the film’s final act.

At no point in the script does Cal display any trait or act that can even be close to being considered as noble or even fair minded. He is cruel and abusive to Rose, treats her as property, appears wholly uninterested in events that nearly took her life, and when she does leave him for Jack his only real concern and emotional involvement is about the loss of money due to the McGuffin jewel she has unwittingly taken with her.

With Cal depicted this despicably there is absolutely no tension in Rose’s relationship. She faces no serious choice, and it is doubtful that any audience member thought for a moment that she needed to honor her commitment to him. There is nothing, not even the prospect of financial ruin, that could generate any sense that she should do anything but flee from this monster of character, written with such little depth that he is better suited to some poorly animated cartoon where he can have a mustache to twirl. At no point in the entire film is Cal ever right. He proclaims, in blasphemous terms, the ship unsinkable and is of course too dull and stupid to see the emotional power of art. Even with Rose’s financial disaster, one that is purely hypothetical in terms of screentime, it is inconceivable that she would bind herself to this man. There are many rich bachelors in the world, and one does not need to choose an abuser, one who is abusive prior to the wedding, for salvation. Cal’s poorly constructed nature as a character seriously erodes all credibility in the story itself, making it into melodrama instead of drama.