Migraine day

Little to show, little to tell today. I did get out for my exercise walk this morning, but will not be going out for an afternoon ramble. I feel shitty.

Years ago, I was diagnosed by an inner ear specialist with "non-traditional migraine." My GP sent me to him because for several months through that winter I'd had symptoms that included mild vertigo, low-grade headache and, most distressing, a feeling of pressure in my ears, tinnitus and hearing distortion. 

The specialist did a bunch of tests and couldn't find anything wrong with me - possibly because the symptoms had almost completely abated by this point. Migraine was a "differential diagnosis," I was told, which means, if I understand correctly, that all other possibilities have been eliminated and this one is all that remains, although it cannot be verified in any other way. 

I have on occasion had a return of some of the symptoms, though rarely the uncomfortable feeling of pressure in my ears and tinnitus. Today is one of those rare days, possibly the worst. Extra-strength acetaminophen doesn't help. 

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My time with Frederick Douglass this morning was a bit uncomfortable because the earbuds I use to listen to the audiobook make the feeling of pressure in my ears worse. 

Douglass is preoccupied through the late 1880s and 1890s with the desperate plight of freedmen in the south. State governments have begun to bring in Jim Crow laws that limit their rights and freedoms and enforce segregation. And lynch law becomes an even worse problem. In one year alone, a monitoring agency records over 200 lynchings. The vast majority of victims are black, usually men, often accused - often falsely - of raping a white woman. 

Douglass meets one of the next generation of black activists, the Tennessee journalist Ida B. Wells. She becomes radicalized after three friends, including businessmen who made the mistake of opening a grocery store too close to a white competitor, are lynched. Wells writes about the outrage. Her newspaper office is destroyed and her life threatened. She flees to the north, where she eventually meets Douglass. He takes her under his wing and they form a team, writing and speaking out against lynch law and white supremacy in the south.

Douglass's other preoccupation at this time is his involvement as an honourary representative of Haiti at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He is appointed as "commissioner" for Haiti at the fair, designs the pavilion and manages it. But the way organizers run the fair, which is supposed to be about the family of man, only underlines the issues of race inequality in America. Indigenous people are exploited and humiliated, Blight says, and black people treated paternally or ignored.

Tragedy continues to stalk the extended Douglass clan. His youngest son, Frederick Jr., dies of tuberculosis in 1892 at age 50. It hits Douglass hard. But it doesn't stop him stumping for the Republicans that year. The GOP has increasingly become the party of big business, turning its back on the radicalism and support for racial equality that originally attracted Douglass and other blacks. They lose the election to the Democrats' Grover Cleveland. 

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I did do some photography, mostly backtracking through my winter 2013 photos to find pictures I'd missed yesterday and the day before. So many have been spoiled by file corruption that I was scrolling through them fairly quickly and missed a few worth working on. These were taken in Sedona on two walks we did, one through the iconic red rock landscapes just outside the city, the other along a mountain stream bed on our way out of Sedona en route to Santa Fe.

I also found this one, of an odd cleft in the almost shear rock face, taken at the bottom of Canyon de Chelly when we were on a private guided tour with a Navajo man.

I found this one among the pictures taken at the  Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. No idea where the mask is from, but I thought it was striking.

This one was taken at some church in or near Santa Fe, an altarpiece that looks to possibly date from the 18th century.

Yesterday - or was it the day before? - I posted a picture of the Rio Grande gorge near Taos, taken from an impressive suspension bridge. Here's the bridge.

And finally, an unremarkable picture of a crow. The  remarkable part is the circumstance in which I took it. We were staying in a refurbished 1950s motel in Taos - quite a nice place. Karen wasn't feeling well, had what she thought might have been a touch of altitude sickness. I went out on my own that afternoon. 

As I walked up a path that led from the motel to the town's main street, I spotted this crow up ahead, perched on some kind of utility box. As I came closer, it spread its wings and flexed its legs in preparation for taking off. 

I don't know what possessed me, but I spoke to it, saying, 'Oh, little buddy, don't go,' or some such inanity. The bird stopped, turned and looked at me, folded its wings and stood there for a good minute while I took pictures and talked to it. This is the only one of the bunch that escaped the corruption bug. 

My powers as a crow whisperer have not been tested since. I have read, of course, about how intelligent crows and ravens are, and about the special relationships they sometimes have with humans, sometimes combative relationships. Not long ago, I stumbled on this article by Lauren Markham  in Harpers magazine: "The Crow Whisperer: What happens when we talk to animals?" It's a good read.