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Anyone who suffers from migraines knows that they have a set of stimuli that can, but not always, ignite a dreaded migraine. These triggers can be visual, flashing lights or patterns, taste, consuming the wrong sort of food, tactile, a sensation that sparks the terrible pain, olfactory, a powerful scent can trigger one for some people (marijuana prompts one for me), or auditory, a particular sound, set of sounds, or sometimes sounds in the just wrong frequency.

Sounds are my bane; for me the noise created by chewing or speaking with one’s mouth open can start a migraine. As a child, without a diagnosis for my condition, one of my criteria for true wealth was having a place to eat where I never would hear anyone else chewing. Along with the food noises, sounds at the high frequencies can also be trouble for me.

The trouble with migraine triggers, or at least mine, is that they are terribly inconsistent in causing the headaches. What might set one off on Monday is utterly benign on Tuesday. I can say that sounds at the treble end of the stereo might start a migraine but that is not always the case. Which means while avoiding the triggers is preferable, even when I can’t, that doesn’t mean exposure is a pain sentence.

Last Friday I got some more experience in that department.

At the day job we were having our ‘All Hands’ meeting on Zoom where achievements were celebrated and the plans for the next very busy quarter were disclosed to everyone in the Medicare department. These large meetings can span two and a half hours or more, but having them on Zoom has been much better than the pre-pandemic routine of crowding into a massive hall for them. So, there I was, at my desk, headset on listening to the presentations when a new presenter came on and BOOM, migraine trigger.

This presenter’s mic clipped to just the wrong part of the treble frequencies. My head began pounding almost immediately.  Their presentation wasn’t very long but the length no longer mattered. I held on for another 30 minutes or so, hoping, vainly, that once the trigger passed, I might slowly wind down from the migraine, but the inflammation in my brain refused to cooperate. I did not last to the end of the meeting before I had to crawl back home, double dose on my prescription medication, and suffer for another eight and a half hours before the cycle broke.

It is the inconsistency of the trigger that I find so maddening. If it always caused a headache, I could always avoid or take steps, such as taking my meds ahead of time, to stay safe. This works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t. Still, I know I can count myself as more fortunate than many. My migraine do not come with visual distortions or powerful waves of nausea that many suffer, but still, the sensation of having my head split open and lava poured in is a less than pleasant one.

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For well more than a decade I have been utilizing CPAP therapy to treat my severe sleep apnea. While most people take a couple of weeks or even more to adjust to sleeping with a mask that forces air into the passage throughout the night in order to keep those airways open, I found relief from the terrible effects of sleep apnea from the very first night. In all those years that I have strapped a mask to my face I have only gone without it a couple of times, when the machine or power had failed. CPAP had made a radical improvement in my life from the night in the sleep lab when I was first exposed to the therapy.

But it has not been without its own issues.

I am what is called an ‘active sleeper’ in that I toss and turn constantly throughout the night. I am asleep but I am quite active. Once when I was something like seven or eight, I awoke not having been roused by my mother for school and with a black eye that I had given myself by some unfortunate combination of thrashing and falling from the bed. Because I also tend to breathe through my mouth in my sleep my CPAP therapy requires the use of a full-face mask that goes over the bridge of my nose and down across my chin with the air hose connecting directly below my nose. Using the full-face mask as an active sleeper has always been challenging. Having a hose stand that functions much like an IV stand has helped, dropping the hose directly down to my head and helping avoid, but not entirely, getting the hose tangled as I toss and turn. Maintaining a good seal across the nose was another trouble spot. When the seal wasn’t good there the pressurized air often blew directly into one of my eyes, causing me to wake the next day with seriously dry eye.

A few months ago, I came across a new, at least new to me, design for a full-face CPAP mask. Instead of going over the bridge of the nose, the mask fits under the nose with either ports or plugs that feed air directly to the nostrils and a much smaller portion that covers the mouth. Tubing connects this smaller mask design around the face to a port at the top of the patient’s head where the supply hose connects by way of a rotating connection.

Two weeks ago, when the schedule allowed, I called my durable medical equipment provider and requested to switch to the Resmed F30i and they sent me this new mask design with a 30-day trial period that would allow me to switch back should the new mask fail to meet my needs.

I have gotten all the benefits I expected from the F30i, no leaks because this one no longer tries to go over the bridge of my larger than average nose, and complete freedom to toss, turn, and rotate in the night without ever getting the supply hose wrapped around something.

There have been some downsides, but they were part of the adjustment period. The most acute was that after the first night of having plugs in my nostrils, the next morning my nostrils felt as if they had been set aflame. My nostrils have a large number of nerve endings and having a foreign object in them for 7 or 8 hours certainly irritates them. However, two weeks on and my nostrils seem to have nearly fully adjusted, with only minor touchiness that seems less each morning.

All in all, the Resmed F30i has proven to be the upgrade to my therapy that I had hoped it would be.

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In 2010 I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. The severe part of that diagnosis really surprised me. To treat the condition where you stop breathing due to obstructions in your airway while you sleep, I was prescribed CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) therapy, where, by wearing a mask over your nose and sometimes your mouth as well, air is forced into your airways, keeping the flaccid tissues from closing off your breathing. I am told that many people can take weeks to adjust to the therapy, but I took to it from the first night in the sleep lab where I stayed overnight as they monitored and adjusted the machine.

Before CPAP I struggled to be wakeful and fully alert throughout the day with many a Sunday requiring that I retreat to the bedroom for a 60 or 90 minute nap, a situation that vanished literally overnight.

Over the now many years I have been on this treatment I have learned a number of ways to make it more comfortable and successful, using a holder that supports the hose from the machine to my mask allowing an active sleeper like myself to toss and turn and change positions with less trouble, using a full-face mask that covers both my nose and my mouth because I am such a mouth breather at night that not even a chinstrap can stop it. I also learned that any interruption in the therapy is felt instantly the next morning.

Which is why August 31st is going to be a trial for me.

We have been alerted by San Diego Gas and Electric that on that evening from about 10 pm until about 3 am, our entire complex will be without electric power while vital and overloaded equipment is replaced.

This has happened once before and on that night, I decamped from our condo and spent the evening in a local hotel proceeding directly to work from there the next morning but this is not really a great option this time around. WorldCon, the World Science Fiction Convention, will have just ended and it would be best to limit expenses following the hefty ones the convention will incur. On the bright side, I will have September 1st off so there is no need to be at my most alert the following morning.

I think the best that I can hope for is that I can go out to a movie that evening, come back around or just after midnight and hope that the work has been completed earlier than expected, a situation that my sweetie-wife’s co-worker reported happened with them when this same sort of repair took place in their neighborhood. And if not, well, I can put my mask on, go to bed as usual and when the power is restored the machine will detect my breathing and turn itself on.

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After some recent beta read feedback, I decided a few weeks ago to revisit my first horror novel The Wolves of Wallace Point for some minor revisions, edits, and corrections. The beta reader had enjoyed the novel but commented on some aspects that I thought were worth at least considering and since it has been a few years since I wrote the thing the only way to fairly evaluate this feedback was by reading the entire manuscript from front to back.

Plot, setting, and the mechanics of a story are pretty much the easiest things for me to craft, I work a little bit more on dialog, though this beta reader had praised that in this novel, and struggle the most with the apparently simple elements of titles and character names. I often joke that there is a blood-stain spot on the wall next to my desk where I routinely bash my head in search of those things. As such none of my novels have ever had titles for the chapters. Coming up with 20 or 30 titles was simply something hardly worth the effort.

While revisiting this book, which is written in the 1st person point of view, the character’s voice in chapter one leapt out with a title for it, A Priest at an Orgy. Once my fevered brain latched onto that concept I couldn’t shake it, but you can’t title only one chapter, either they all have titles or none of them do. So the process began that while I re-read the manuscript, making tiny adjustments here and there to the prose, I tried to keep my senses tuned for sardonic and ironic things that protagonist said or thought, like the orgy commentary, that might serve as a title for the chapters.

And now, 27 chapters later, I have titles for each and every one in the book. Most I am satisfied with, some I think I need to revisit again and see if something better doesn’t hide within the text, and a couple, like Fuck David Lynch and Camp Crystal Lake I am very happy with even if their applicability tickles only me.

Now, I have a new epilog to write, with a new ending sentence and mood that came to me last night and after that some serious thought about self-publishing the thing.

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It is Monday morning, and this past weekend failed to be executed as I had hoped it might. Still, it was not a disaster of a weekend and there were many fine elements and several routine errands completed so it ranks as a so-so couple of days off.

Saturday, while I took care of getting my car smogged, for those outside of California that means having its emissions checked and verified that it does not overly pollute the atmosphere, and stopped by the pharmacy to pick up more salt-infused drops for my eyes, my sweetie-wife attended the Scottish Highland Games held for the first time in River Park very near our Mission Valley home. It turns out me not attending was a fortunate decision. I have no issues with bagpipe music but multiple pipers playing at the same time, but different tunes would have ignited a migraine. (though one of those was to come soon enough).

In the evening, I ran my table-top role-playing game of Space Opera and managed to get in two and a half hours before my chest signaled that the chronic cough would soon return and my head began feeling peculiar. After a meal of take-out food, I began to suffer a migraine and by the end of the evening it had grown quite intense, forcing me to leave a note for my sweetie-wife that I would not expect to be taking part in our customary 2 mile walk in the morning.

Sure enough, that was the case when I awoke Sunday. I canceled plans for lunch with friends, and to see The Death of Robin Hood in the theaters and stayed home taking my prescription medication and nursing the headache that eventually subsided, but left me without the ability to think clearly forcing me to cancel attending the virtual writers group meeting that evening.

I was recovered enough that in the late evening I made my customary trip to the supermarket to purchase lunches and fruits to take to work and even return a wallet stuffed with cash that had been lost in the parking lot to its owner before retiring for the night.

Hopefully this coming week will be better than its preceding weekend.

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I am the youngest of ten children and for a good deal of my life I knew four brothers and four sisters, one sister died in infancy long before I was born. Now the time draws near when I shall have no living brothers at all.

There is a fairly decent number of years that separate my youngest brother from myself and as such my childhood is not one where I spent hours with them in roughhousing, or anything approximating sports. Perhaps that is why sports of any kind never really appealed to me. They were, for the most part, already teenagers when I was still very much a child. I am told that two of them used to, when I was something like 4 or 5, take me along so my then exuberant personality could be used to break the ice with girls that they wanted to meet. This I have no memory of; what I do have memory of is drive-in horror movies.

They would want to go to the drive-in and were forced to take me along while promising to see something that was suitable for a young child, a promise that they apparently broke quite often, hence one of my earliest memories is of a Hammer Frankenstein movie in all its glorious color. I don’t recall ever having nightmares about the movies and they did kindle a life-long love of the genre.

It was the summer of 1980 when my first brother died, a victim of being the wrong place at the wrong time and shot to death because someone wanted to kill another person at that poolside table.

The next, after conquering his own alcohol-fueled demons, died from cancer. Another, who never found a way to overcome his substance issues, died from a body that eventually could no longer suffer that treatment.

This week I learned my oldest brother is being released from the hospital into hospice. The end may come in days, weeks, or I am told even possibly months as his aged physique surrenders to the accumulated damage of the years.

I fancy myself a writer, but I have no words that accurately convey the turbulent emotions of this time, yet I am not the first nor the last to suffer them. This is life as much as the happy times and all of it is to be known.

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90 days ago, I embarked on the less than thrilling adventure of trying to lose weight by way of dieting. I make no judgment against people who are employing the GLP-1 agonists to help them curb their appetite and shed their weight it is simply that I would prefer to at least attempt my weight loss by way of diet first.

What had worked for me in the past, though there had been a few bumps and minor issues that I had found annoying, was using the Weight Watchers app. The program, though not very expensive, is not free and works by a fairly simple process. Each food is assigned a point value, roughly correlating to its calories, fat, and simple carbohydrate composition. Some, like fresh fruits and vegetables, are given a value of zero points. Participants log their meals and snacks, tracking the points and attempting to remain under a daily allotment. To give a person ‘wiggle room’ should they choose the less strict program, which I have, there is also a pool of points known as ‘weeklies’ that can serve as a buffer for any time a dieter exceeds their daily limit. Any surplus points at the end of a day, up to no more than four, rolls over into the weeklies pool, providing a little more flexibility. There is a vast database of processed food that can be easily searched by way of their barcodes on the packaging, making logging them quick and easy. In the newest version of the app, one can even take an image of your food and have the estimated point values located by way of an A.I. engine.

I have been on this program now for 90 days and I have managed to cut out nearly all of the ‘bad’ snacking that had been contributing to my weight gain. To date I have lost 27 lbs and not felt overly deprived except on the occasional day when the craving for something rich and sweet hits particularly hard. The only week where I consumed all my weeklies was my birthday week and all in all I think that one is one I can let slide.

I still have a way to go before I am close to my goal but this time around, I am finding the process a bit easier.

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April and May turned out to be not so great for several of my electronic devices.  The first to give me troubles was my Xbox One, when it began dropping the wireless connection between both my controller and my headset. Once it progressed far enough that I couldn’t watch a complete YouTube video or play a single session of online Call of Duty, I bit the bullet and took the device in for repairs. It took two attempts and replacing the chips and transmitters for both the Bluetooth and WiFi components, but the repairs seem to be holding.

Next went the 55″ LCD Television. I have already documented that journey with a couple of other posts. While the screen had not failed completely, the faint, but growing in intensity, lines across the left quarter of the screen had become too pronounced to ignore. It was a blessing that the replacement OLED set ended up costing less than the set it replaced.

I had thought my device troubles were in the past and then after watching the Blu-ray of The Body Snatcher, still the best performance of Karloff’s career and a criminally underseen film, my region-free player went belly up. The power light remained lit and the tray refused to open. I tried to reset the player, even leaving it unplugged from power for more than a day, but nothing could cause it to cycle. Tomorrow the replacement player, this time one capable of displaying 4K discs in addition to being region-free (I had been using my Xbox One to play4K titles), arrives.

So, that is nearly my entire entertainment system either repaired or replaced in less than six weeks. On the bright side, this OLED television looks fantastic and hopefully the new player will complement it well. I have a birthday gift from my sweetie-wife, the 4K edition of Godzilla Minus One(A film that surpasses the 1954 original) that I look forward to watching once everything is set-up and running.

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A dear friend lost a person close to them recently and that has me thinking and pondering on death and all the various ways it has, from some of my earliest memories, touched my life.

I have no clear idea of how old I was, 5 or 6 I guess, when my puppy ‘Snowball’, a quite unimaginative name for an all-white dog, was struck and killed on the road in front of our North Carolina home, but the incident has stayed with me. Death came again to my life when I was 9, when my brother awoke and told me bluntly that Dad had died. I have no memory of being told that Dad’s illness was terminal and my impression from that time was that it came as quite a shock, but memory is always plastic and unreliable, particularly when trying to recall traumatic events of childhood.

My maternal grandmother, whom we, my mother and some of my siblings, lived with after my father passed, died at home after a long illness. After that I had a respite from death intruding into my life for several years until my brother Lonnie, having sat at the wrong poolside table to escape a summer heat wave, was gunned down along with two other men he had been chatting with. I was 18 and in the United States Navy and my sister recalls, that upon delivering the shocking news to me over the telephone,  that this was the first time she had ever heard me curse.

Death’s intrusions are not always deeply personal. While serving aboard the USS Belleau Wood(LHA-3) on a cruise of the Western Pacific, two men aboard died, one a marine who ignored safety regulations and fell from a helicopter in flight and the other a naval crew chief who was on a helicopter that crashed on the flight deck and then tumbled over the side into the ocean. I knew neither of these men and their deaths touched me only tangentially.

It returned to a personal meaning years after I separated from the quite unsuitable to me and to the U.S. Navy military service.

A close friend and gaming buddy, on the day he purchased his motorcycle, drove the machine after a heated verbal argument with his wife (One should never ride angry. Motorcycles are unforgiving vehicles.) and, taking a curve too fast, jumped the divider and collided with an oncoming truck.

In 1997, following a stroke and a prolonged illness, my mother insisted on returning home, despite the doctors advising her that she would grow weaker and die, who, like her mother, died at home, on her own terms.

COVID-19 took a close friend who perished in the hospital, counted among the more than a million Americans who died due to that disease. Another close friend and writing partner suffered a neurological condition that horribly took his voice and his motor control before taking his life.

It seems that I have experienced death in all the manners in which the Grim Reaper can claim us: terminal disease, homicide, accident, and sudden illness. I can say that there is no ‘easy’ way to experience the loss of a loved one, no method that robs you of their company makes the losing of that company even slightly more bearable. Death comes for all of us. I have known that in the pit of my stomach since I was 9. The best we can do is be aware of that fact and cherish the time we have with each other and not waste it on futile and pointless hatreds and petty disputes.