3 a.m.

It's 3 a.m.. How are you supposed to end a sentence with an abbreviation like that? I am in Reno, having arrived last night after a ridiculously long day of travel. I had two plane changes and an almost 2-hour delay. Ivo came to the airport in SF to lessen my woes, and while I gave him medicine for his headache, I failed to take any for my own. This is a recurring failure on my part. Somehow I persist in the belief that the headache won't get any worse, and once I get to where I'm going it will go away, and I really don't need to infuse my body with foreign substances. The only over-the-counter drug that works on these headaches is Excedrin, and that has the rather unfortunate effect of imparting to me a serious case of the queasy-tremors, which can last hours and hours. I just got up and took two anyway. At this point the queasy-tremors would be a joy, comparatively speaking.

I know you think that people with migraines lie still in darkened rooms, and naturally you wonder why I would instead sit at a computer in a cold room, squinting at the too-bright computer screen, which my brother has set at some ridiculous screen size so that he can have 20 applications and every web page known to man open on it at the same time, in consequence of which the letters I am now typing are very nearly invisible to the naked eye. Well, I have no explanation. I just couldn't lie in that darkened room any longer. There are migraines that produce pain so severe I cannot even move without help, and those send me to the hospital, where after I lie perfectly still for several hours on a rolling bed, listening to the cries of the baby whose eardrums are about to pop and the struggle of an old man who has no idea what medicines he has taken today and is therefore being reprimanded by a nurse who practically threatens not to treat him at all if he can't be responsible enough to bring a list of medications with him to the emergency room, as if before he came he should have made a packing list and ticked off each item: "list of drugs that help me remember who I am and why I have undertaken this trip to the hospital to be treated like an unwelcome child, check." Oh, uh, I was saying, after I have lay perfectly still listening to the cries of the baby whose eardrums... uh, after I have lay there, a doctor I don't remember ever seeing comes over and says, as if he'd been comparing my complexion to a series of paint chips, "oh, good, you're much less green now!"

Why was I telling you this? Oh, because there are headaches that are that bad, so bad that I have to crawl to a telephone to whisperingly wake someone somewhere who might be willing to drag themselves out of bed, drive to my house, get me in a car, leave me at the hospital, and come back on their way to work to deposit me back into my bed. Several hours later, after whichever creative treatment the ER staff-of-the-migraine bestowed upon me has made me feel either better or worse, I emerge from my room feeling either like life was never better, or like I should go to Sherwin-Williams to have them match a paint color to the green "blush" that remains on my cheeks, despite Happy Doctor's delight at my recovery and my readiness to take on the world. If I paint my surroundings green, maybe I will believe that I am not so green myself, in comparison.

I don't think I am green right now, though. As I said, this headache isn't that bad. But you know those Excedrin commercials that claim you'll start feeling better in just 15 minutes? They're just not true. I mean, maybe they are for your casual headache sufferer, but for me, the Excedrin kicks in about an hour and a half after I swallow it. From that point forward my headache lessens gradually and my queasiness increases proportionately. So far It's been 45 minutes. Help.