journal features

migraine while traveling

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Paris, ON, 2004.04.03

What would a visit with my girlfriend be without an awful migraine for company. I woke up with one this morning, and couldn't shake it. After two clinics, I managed to see a doctor in a place in Brantford. Surprisingly, I was in and out with my prescription in fifteen minutes.

The headache was bad enough that I was having trouble seeing, and I'd been puking all night. So I was quite pleased to get a coctail of things to treat it and to get on with everything.

When I'd recovered, we hopped in the rental car and toodled down the Grand river as far as the far side of the Six Nations reserve in Niagara. Since we'd gone that far, I showed my girlfriend some of the places where I'd lived, starting with the farm in Beamsville and also stopping by my Grandparents' respective places. We picked up some wine in the ridiculous Yuppie hangout that they've made in Jordan Station (a Christmas store?!) and then headed back to Cambridge for some Greek food.

It's great just to get a chance to be a couple and to take it easy.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton