Sometimes, in a worst case scenario, I get migraines from flying. I arrive at my destination with onion skin thin tolerance for food, water, light, and especially noise. When this happens, I imagine my head as an overripe tomato, barely containing its contents. I imagine brushing up against something and having the tightly contained throbbing insides of my skull splatting out in a messy, oozing puddle. Disgusting, I know, but when your head genuinely feels like it’s going to explode, comparing it to over ripe produce is a coping strategy.<\/p>\n
Because I flew with the remnants of a cold and sinus “thing” this morning, I arrived home in a pathetic state. I crawled into bed and waited to be settled enough to stomach my migraine meds, and then, started cataloging the times I’ve completed a journey with a not by choice heightened sense of sound.<\/p>\n
I once lost it in a shoe store in rural Austria, of all places. One minute, I was shopping for footwear, the next, I was hanging my head out the car window. There were some restless kids in the store, I remember very well, still, the sounds of their voices, getting louder, shriller, and the feeling of that as something physical crawling up my shoulder blades to the back of my neck. I drove to Eugene once at night during a rainstorm and arrived with the dizziness and blurred vision of a monster headache, unable to greet my family on arrival. After an epic haul across the Pacific to Hanoi, I climbed in to a rock hard bed in a dingy hotel and wept with frustration about the demolition work going on next door until the husband up and moved us to another part of a the building. In these fragile states, sound becomes a physical burden, it’s not just ambient noise or something happening in the background.<\/p>\n
I do not thrive on the discomfort of travel. I’m no sissy, I’m actually game for just about any type of accommodation or situation, but I don’t travel to participate in some kind of endurance test. I have read Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson — Theroux seems almost giddy to be confronted with a disgusting railway meal and an unsavory selection of companions and Bryson’s glee at another day slogging in vile weather is immediately obvious.<\/p>\n
Today while I tried to hold down a cup of tea and enough food to absorb the stomach burning contents of an Excedrin migraine tablet, I thought about those famous writers. I imagined the romantic misery that they seem to thrive in, I wondered if I could transform the excruciating crackle of every waffled tread on the street outside my house into the kind of “bad trip, good story” stuff that they seem to so enjoy. The sledge hammers in Hanoi. The scrape of the windshield wipers in the central Oregon rain. The whine of the jet engines as they spun to a halt while I sat, sweating in seat 15B.<\/p>\n
People who don’t get migraines always respond to my remarks about them with, “I can’t imagine.” It’s funny, because whenever I get one, it’s all I can do: imagine, that is. My brain goes to the weirdest places — to the net of space junk wrapped around the planet, to the irony of socialist Radio Hanoi broadcasting lottery numbers every morning, and today — probably from spending the last 48 hours in the company of travel writers — to big name story tellers and their relationship with bad travel.<\/p>\n
And each idea has a weirdly physical state. As I lay in bed, trying to remember if Bryson had, indeed written about a bitter argument between his boots and his feet while on the Appalachian trail, I also imagined each idea as a living thing, hammered into the side of my head with a rusty railroad spike.<\/p>\n
It takes two or three hours to get a migraine under control, I’ve learned, maybe a little more if I can’t stomach a bite to eat, a glass of soda. But the results of a migraine, of an afternoon lost to pain and obscure concepts, that’s harder to measure. I write my migraines now, though not for pleasure. I write them so I don’t forget what my mind was doing while my body was so very unhappy. Maybe there’s a way to string all those headaches together in to something bigger — which is, I suppose, as good a metaphor as any for the work of guys like Bryson and Theroux.<\/p>\n
Maybe I like to be miserable, too, just like they do. Just a little bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes, in a worst case scenario, I get migraines from flying. I arrive at my destination with onion skin thin tolerance for food, water, light, and especially noise. When this happens, I imagine my head as an overripe tomato, barely containing its contents. I imagine brushing up against something and having the tightly contained throbbing … <\/p>\n