Anakana Schofield

Had a very satisfying exchange with a man about a hoover today. We both agreed on the art and achievement that is hoovering. And he had informed, discerning opinions on the various machines and their uses and flaws.

I am not impressed by the Robot round vacuum. I don’t quite understand why you would want to take the arms out of hoovering?

And the lengths. Each of those rolls of the machine forward, is a pause in which to pour a thought (or half thought) if you can usurp the noise that surrounds it.

Last night I had a very strange headache event.

The physical body interests me a great deal, especially challenging the limits of it and watching it challenged by others. And strangely at a certain point my interest ceases when it comes to my own body. Some pain and muscular impediment one can work with but once you’re up in the neurological pain attic, well, balance, direction, even vision, who can rail against it?

Earlier in the day I had listened to an insightful telecast on neuroplasticity, had enjoyed an invigorating walk with a friend, and shared a lovely family dinner with my family. I was in prime condition at the end of an otherwise delightful day and went to gymnastics.

Except I would later discover, I had forgotten I was supposed to be somewhere else entirely, engaged in a totally different commitment.

At gymnastics during the warm up I felt strange and then stranger. Fever. Fever is not easily to discern when you’re throwing yourself about the place. But this was fever. Things settled slightly after a chat with a woman who told me all about her ambitions to become a tattoo artist and how she draws all the time. But every time I did any move I became uncoordinated and wobbly and hotter and hotter and weaker and weaker.

I had to leave and driving home the lights approaching just bore through my eye sockets. I have never seen such brightness. I took a tylanol, but the headache would not abate, so I took another one. It was like a pineapple express of a headache since it arrived so fast and intense. What I did not like about this headache was the affect on co-ordination. The way my brain couldn’t send messages properly and the unnatural pauses and wincing that resulted waiting for them to arrive.

I couldn’t imagine that it might end. But this morning I woke and it had gone. Until it revisited in a much milder incarnation around lunchtime. Luckily I was out with my sunny son and the other sunny sun that visited us today. His chirpy spirits and a discussion about the imminent election figures and a bunch of jokes rolled me back up the hill.

I’m not satisfied with this inability to precisely document the descent of that fever and headache. I’d like to be able to separate each strand of it and nail it and examine it. I think because it was so unusual.

“The great hope, desire, yearning to reach  — in a state of intoxication — the new, the untouched, scarcely takes wing on this occasion; instead they are attained in a weary, submerged, indolent, inert stroll downhill. ”

On Hashish. Walter Benjamin.

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