The above work was done with oil pastels and watercolor pencils. It's a self-portrait from a few years ago, when my hair was still long. I did it from a reference photo taken during a cluster headache. Even though I make for an unhappy subject here, I always liked how this portrait turned out. I can't recall if I've posted it here on Hive before.
Yesterday I went to an event hosted by the Minnesota Blockchain Initiative. 
Shortly after I got home from this meetup, the worst cluster headache attack I've had in years began. It was easily an 8 on my 1-10 scale, possibly a 9. Coffee, cannabis, and oxygen therapy all failed to put an end to it. When the attack was at its peak, with tears streaming from my left eye and phlegm from inflamed sinuses getting into my lungs, I started coughing uncontrollably until I threw up. That hasn't happened for maybe 5 years.
The whole episode lasted 3 hours, which is 2 hours longer than normal in the current headache cluster. It was more horrific than I can even describe. 
Psychologically, headache attacks like this are difficult to process. They're unbelievable, but refusing to believe that they're happening doesn't stop them from happening. Getting mad doesn't help either. Nor can the attacks be bargained with or accepted. Other people definitely don't understand, no matter how good their intentions, which makes the condition socially isolating on top of everything else.
Today, the left side of my head feels like a giant bruise and it was a struggle to get my errands and work done. But I did get these things done, which I feel good about. It means that my life hasn't stopped completely, despite the difficulty. Hopefully last night was the peak of this current headache cluster and things start getting better from here.
One thing I've been thinking about lately is the weight of information. Not in some intangible sense, but the physical weight of it. There's a school of thought that considers information to have mass, a prospect which may be scientifically proven or refuted in the near future. Some even believe that information constitutes its own state of matter. Testing these ideas will involve destroying information in a very particular way and seeing if heat is released.
Regardless of the outcome of these tests, I think information is something, existing somehow separately from the matter into which it's encoded. In my imagination, I see information as more fundamental than matter, rather than as its own class of matter. More specifically, I imagine that consciousness gives rise to material reality as we understand it. This is true in an epistemological sense, because consciousness gives rise to theories of knowledge and not the other way around. But I also imagine it to be true in the sense that all matter can be viewed as an arrangement of states in an information system. I like to think of this system as part of an incomprehensibly larger ecosystem of consciousnesses.
When cluster headaches make my brain go haywire, this is apparently where my thinking goes. Pressure from within my skull reminds me of Johnny Mnemonic being implanted with more data than he could handle and I start wondering about information theory. The solution to Johnny Mnemonic's data overload problem involved decrypting the contents of his brain with help from a cybernetic dolphin. I feel like making a cybernetic dolphin in the first place would be unethical. But if someone did make one, I'd be willing to seek its help in decrypting my brain to relieve the cluster headaches.
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