To begin with, the name is a little snooty for a poofed up handful of flower, talking Southern-style soda biscuits here. Although soda need not even be in your recipe, they’re pretty much thought of as soda biscuits. My recipe is a little flour (white), baking powder, salt, a little grease (sausage or bacon will do), milk. I add an egg just to defy the sawbones who nags me about cholesterol.

Doesn’t sound much like the biscuits Mama made but they taste just fine. Mama’s biscuits were light and a little doughy in the center, just right for a slice of butter. Of course back then, we had a couple of cows, so we had fresh made (though frozen to preserve) butter.

Butter was safe to eat by the spoonful because there weren’t any labels painted on its side proclaiming lethal content. Mama didn’t serve it up in a skinny little stick, it sat stout in the middle of the table elbowing aside the salt and pepper. Maybe that’s what set my mouth to watering, it reminded me of ice cream. Wish we’d had enough left over to waste on cheese.

The best biscuit of all, though, like pizza and lasagna, maybe vengeance too, is best served cold.

Mama would place leftover biscuits on a plate in the fridge. My brothers and I snuck in and stuffed our pockets full, then headed out for the fields. Cold biscuits on a hot day — better than that first kiss, Saturday afternoon hamburgers, meatloaf gravy or ice cream.

Well, maybe the first kiss, but not the second.

That’s what a migraine feels like, only it doesn’t go away after aspirin or Tylenol or fitful prayer. I’ve had migraines for thirty years now – thirty years. You’d think you could get used to something after that long. I’m still waiting.

Some folks get some kind of aura or smell something strange or get a hot rush. I can feel one coming, but it’s not like that. I start feeling a little antsy, like you do when you look outside and you absolutely know it’s going to snow or rain. You can feel the crackle in the air. Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like — a crackle in the air.

It drums over an eye, kind of behind it and to one side. I’d like to attribute it to tension and have tried acupressure and those mysterious pressure-points massages to no relief. I’ve had a CAT scan and all that medical crap that costs a fortune so the insurance company can approve a diagnosis of MIGRAINE. Yeah, done that.

Long time ago, I used to get dragged to a Doc-In-A-Box on a regular basis and he or she would squinch up an eye when I said I had one drink. Yeah, right a hangover. One drink makes me have a hangover? I stopped drinking and that’s what they still thought as I ran for the restroom to gag on that last dribble of bile.

I am the world’s foremost expert on barfing. It’s the one good thing, if you can call it that, that’s come out of my disease. I can pretty much barf on command. At the time when I made frequent trips to the ER for migraines (usually after the Doc-In-A-Box sent me home with hydrocodone – because that shit REALLY upsets your stomach) and they said it’ll be an hour before the ER Doc could see me and have a seat over next to all the junkies reeking of their cigarette smoke (smells can really set a migrainer off) — all I had to do, to get thrashed to the head of the line, was barf in a trashcan. Good grief, you’ve never seen people whipped into a frenzy of action. You’d have thought I opened an artery or something.

An old porcelain hugger, that’s me.

I was supposed to be writing this morning, the great American novel, just can’t seem to get started. I feel antsy, jittery. Thanks God, I have Imitrex. It makes migraines almost as lethal as wet puppies. Miracle. If the drug companies, blood sucking, scab eating, ghouls that they are, ever did anything worth beating their chests over, Imitrex is it. Bless you, every mofo that had a hand in it.

Now, if they could only make something to reverse hair loss, make me taller and give me back all the time I spent fighting stupid doctors because I did not have a hangover and am not a junkie, I’d say make them all saints.

Yeah, right.

I know, folks who know me, have seen my dark office, will probably say it won’t work. Let’s just wait and see.