Concentric · 27 January 2003
Well that was a fun weekend. On Friday night I sent files to those picking apart the current explosion-prone version of Textpattern, and then this server’s router got pounded by the SQL worm for a day or so, thus no email, no testers forum, no nothing (‘Thanks for testing my software, I shall now disappear completely’). Once it cleared up, the server, which was running perfectly while the internet melted down, crashed for entirely different reasons.
And we entered the third book of the tooth epic, during which infection is staved off, teeth subjected to years of pressure scramble to rearrange themselves to newfound space, and pain, lots of pain.
Everyone goes through these, of course, the agonies of the mouth. And I have scant credibility with which to complain: I never wore braces, and I’ve had maybe four cavities filled. Contrasted, say, to my mom’s long list of root canals and crowns, or my dad’s dentures (first fitted when he was a little older than I am now), or the long cruelty of headgear, mouthpieces, tightening and adjustment that my brother went through as a teenager, I’ve had it easy. But that’s no reason not to talk about the morning on which bad became way too worse.
She (efficient, on the case) woke me up at 9:30 to say she’d been on the phone, and I could get in to see a dentist in town in fifteen minutes. I (infantile, self-absorbed) snapped that I couldn’t possibly get ready in fifteen minutes, and what was she thinking. Then the fog began to lift and, oh right, someone was driving a railroad spike into my jaw.
Elaborately hung over from slapstick self-anaesthesia, and revelling somehow in the sheer size of my misery, I rode without a seat belt, squinting at the hills, as she took me and my tooth to St Hippolyte.
All five senses get serviced during an extraction. You tell me which is worse: the dry brittle snapping sounds at the end, or the burst of fumes, the smell of death and toxic waste, the superconcentrated rendition of the nauseating taste leaking into your mouth since things went bad? It’s the latter, hands down.
Later as I moaned and howled, stamping my feet like a child, the woman I love (under stress from a deadline, generous beyond compare) went back to the dentist, where she had to wait an hour for a chance to demand something stronger than the fucking Advil originally prescribed.
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