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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.

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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.

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One of the least fun things in life is waking up with a headache already in progress. Which is, of course, how I started this particular Tuesday in May. Adding to the woe is that this headache is not a severe migraine that would keep me home. No, this is just enough of a pain to make life unfun but not enough to get me out of work. So, I will spend the day in the office, under those terrible fluorescent lights, because I am the only member of my team that remained in the office, staring at my twin monitors for the next 9 hours.

Oh, I have some NSAIDs here at home that I can take and usually work on lesser non-migraine headaches but this week that course is closed off to me. Last week my doctor’s office called because my liver protein test was elevated but only slightly. Perhaps it was a single test result, perhaps it was from pain killers and supplements, or perhaps it’s from the medications I take for my psoriatic arthritis. So, this week it’s cut out the NSAIDs and supplements so I can retest on Saturday, leaving this particular headache free rein to bang on the backside of my eyeballs.

At least my newest novel has now passed 13,000 words and perhaps soon I’ll know where the plot is actually heading.

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The weekend has ended and it’s Monday morning with another work week stretching out before me.

All in all, this past weekend was decent, but I did not manage to do everything I had hoped. Between running my tabletop Role Playing game Saturday night and a writers group meeting Sunday evening I did not find the time to get out and see Sinners a horror film that fascinates me. It is so nice to see movies that are just another episode of a franchise and a horror movie that isn’t just another masked deranged killed slicing up wayward teens.

Sadly, my long COVID cough continues to hamper my life. The game session lasted a mere 90 minutes before the spasms became too intense to allow me to continue. The days of 3 hours runs are clearly in the past.

The writers group was easier to navigate since for the majority of the two hours I can be quiet, eat cough drops, and listen to people read from their selections, minimizing my talking time. I even had enough endurance to read myself, and it was decently received, and I got useful notes back.

I have no Sunday Zoo photos because my replacement camera came with just one battery, and I failed to have it charged. Of course, that mean a few of my favorite subject were more active and or closed to the walls of their enclosures providing photo ops that I had no decent camera to use.

Still, I can’t complain and remain overall happy.

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January of 2024 after nearly four years of dodging the virus I finally contracted COVID. Because I take medication that tunes down my immune system response as a treatment for psoriatic arthritis my doctor proscribed the Paxlovid therapy to keep the COVID from becoming very serious.

That worked wonders. My run with this disease, which killed a good friend of mine nearly four years earlier, was quite mild, hardly more than an intense cold.

After the disease ran its course however I discovered I have a fast new friend, a persistent cough. At first, I simply waited for the damaged tissue in the airways to recover and the cough to leave me.

That did not happen.

The tissues recovered but the cough persisted. Treatment after treatment was tried and none managed to dispel the cough from my system. I didn’t cough all the time, most of the time it simply wasn’t there, but prolonged talking, like running a tabletop game, always brought it out. Eventually I learned to just live with and try to avoid irritations that provoked such spasms.

Last month while researching at the City Library I discovered that strong aftershaves and perfumes provoked an intense irritation. After the three hours in the presence of those scents I wound up coughing for 12 hours.

Yesterday I got another lesson in airborne irritants. Heating my lunch in our tiny breakroom a new employee to the building came in with a modestly strong perfume. My exposure lasted only six or seven minutes but something in this scent proved terribly adapt at irritating my airway.

Soon I was coughing nearly uncontrollably and after nearly two hours threw in the towel and went home. The air at home is free of all perfumes and after another six and a half hours I finally felt my airways open up again.

This is long COVID, a persistent effect from my infection but I know people who suffer it far more intensely than myself. Brain fogs that make thinking difficult, exhaustion that make everyday activities nearly impossible. While this cough is troublesome and curtails some aspects of my life, I know that all in all it could have been far far worse.

This weekend presented very little that was outstanding but a lot that was quite nice.

Saturday in addition, to our routine early morning walk around the condo complex with my sweetie-wife and a neighbor, my sweetie-wife joined me in walking around the neighborhoods of Kensington and Normal Heights as I took photos to help inspire my next novel.

These neighborhoods were two that I have been familiar with since the early 80s and lived in for a few years in the 1990s. The point of the photos is to help with atmosphere as I write and jog memories from decades earlier about what has changed since the time of Reagan. I also discovered, with my sweetie-wife’s help, that the location I thought had been a fabric store throughout the 80s only became one in 1988 and in ’84, when my book will be set, it was a punk rock music venue.

In the evening, I ran my tabletop role-playing game of Space Opera. Sadly, a coughing spasm reduced the running time to just about 90 minutes. The ‘long covid’ I acquired is far less debilitating than what many people suffer, and I’m glad for that, but it is annoying as hell.

Sunday morning was a trip to the San Diego Zoo, another opportunity to break in my new camera. (It’s not brand new; it is a used DSLR, but at a great price and in great condition, replacing my former camera that began killing lenses.)

While the controls are a little different and a few shots came out a little underexposed, overall things went swimmingly.

Robert Mitchell Evans

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Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering a health care executive, will face a federal death penalty if the DOJ and Pam Bondi get their way, and I admit that doesn’t sit right with me.

Now, it is not that I am ideologically opposed to capital punishment. That debate is far more complex than the space here would allow me to elaborate on but in closely defined cases I think it is warranted.

Nor is it that I think the troubles and evils of the for-profit health care system in any wayjustify that murder, Our  for-profit health care system trades lives for cash and that is fucking repulsive but Mangione’s actions, if guilty, saved not a single life. I understand the rage that propelled such action, but understanding and condoning are very different things.

I can see and even condone the use of the death penalty for calculated premeditated acts of murder for political purposes.

What I know for a fact is that this Department of Justice, this vacuous-headed Attorney General, and this administration has zero interest in fair, dispassionate, and unbiased justice. Luigi Mangione is facing the death penalty not from any sense of justice or cool logical conclusion but because this is the sort of crime that has deep personal meaning to the corrupt people of this administration. While conversely, they liberated the criminals that they see as allies and fellow travelers. The violent terrorists that attempted to overthrow a free election received pardons, allies under investigation find those investigations dropped.

This is the fascist heart of the Trump administration.

For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.