I'm in pain.

Like the title says, I'm in pain. My teeth hurt, and I can't do anything about it. It's actually pretty bad. Painkillers are running through my system, as are about eight beers, so I can only imagine how bad the pain really is. It's a combination of wisdom teeth that should have been pulled ten years ago and just plain old broken, rotting teeth. It happens to all of us, but most of us, these days, have either extra income or dental insurance to take care of this kind of thing. I don't. In Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut asked, "What chain of events in evolution should we thank for our mouthfuls of rotting crockery"?

It's a good question. Our mouths just don't work properly, do they? Even with all our knowledge of tooth care and modern dentistry, orthodontics, periodontics, and other -dontics that I'm not aware of, we all end up toothless, eventually. Our teeth are evolutionary casualties of all the other stuff we upright bipedal primates got right. We have binocular vision, we have opposable thumbs, we can walk upright for, well, our whole lives, we can reason and empathize and invent civilization (and, eventually, Civilization, the digital simulation of civilization). But we're stuck with teeth that fall, inevitably, inexorably, into a painful fucking mouthful of rotting crockery.

I only read Galapagos once, when I was on a Vonnegut bender a few years ago, and I barely remember the book. But that one phrase, "rotting crockery," lodged itself into my head. It's just the perfect description, isn't it? It floats back into my consciousness whenever my teeth start hurting again, which is fairly often.

Look, I'm no martyr. I want to get 'em fixed, but I don't have the means. The extra money we just don't have, we're paycheck-to-paycheck around here. We have insurance at work, but it's a group plan. We needed one more person for it, for at least a little coverage. $1,000 per year for something like $20 per 90 days. But my retard roommate Richard (who I work with and is in fact the way I found out about the job in the first place two years ago and I don't know to this day if I should be grateful or burn him in effigy for putting me at that place) didn't want to pay it, because he gets his own dental work done at a local fucking dental college for a bargain. And then he wants to gripe -- endlessly and repeatedly -- about how awful they are and how long it takes.

This is my life.

So I'm sitting here unable to sleep on Thanksgiving night because my teeth feel like they're trying to wrench themselves free of my skull to do, I don't know what, put on a musical production about making me miserable and unable to enjoy my turkey (had no problem with dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, or green bean casserole) or something equally fucking stupid.

I'm going to watch another episode of Dexter and try to ignore the pain for another hour. Then I'll watch another one. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Please give thanks for all your loved ones and whatnot, and be thankful your rotting crockery has a professional looking after it. I wish mine did.

Here's a belated movie review.

So tonight I finally got around to watching Zodiac, which I've put off for a couple weeks. I'm normally pretty vigilant about clearing out our one-disc Netflix queue, but the last few weeks have been hectic, to put it mildly. With my mom in and out of the hospital (mostly in), my schedule has been all kinds of fucked, and I'm a creature of routine. It's a long movie, and I didn't want to commit to it.

Anyway, I finally watched it, and yes, it's very long. Overly long, in fact. Like all David Fincher movies, I liked it, but good god, it is long. 158 minutes long. Like the actual Zodiac investigation, the film sort of peters out from a great start and goes nowhere for awhile. Then is does some stuff, which you think will go somewhere (again, like the true story), but it doesn't. Then some things kind of start to happen, but don't really, and then it's over. Finally. There's historical accuracy, and there's entertainment, and the two don't mesh when you make sure your movie is as dull as the fifteen years the case it's based on was dead.

Again: very good and entertaining for about an hour. After that, not so much. I love Fincher's movies, but I haven't seen the even longer Benjamin Button, or that new Facebook movie that I just realized this afternoon he directed (why didn't I know that? He's one of my favorite directors...). But this is not a good precedent. Zodiac is highly recommended by the Flyer's Chris Herrington, who I consider a go-to local reporter for both film and Griz news, but he must have much more patience than I if he didn't mourn the death of the nearly three hours of his life he spent waiting for Zodiac to reach its inevitable, unsatisfying end.

Oh, okay, I'll find something positive here. The acting is uniformly excellent, with a lot of "hey it's that guy" actors turning up and doing a fantastic job. Jake Gyllenhaal (I had to look him up to spell that fucking name right), Mark Ruffalo, and Brian Cox were, as usual, fantastic. Anthony "Stop calling me Goose" Edwards turned up unexpectedly, and was terrific despite the awful, awful wig they put on him. The Howard Shore score is so low-key that I didn't even notice it, but the more memorable soundtrack was perfectly selected. And they did a great job setting the film in the late sixties/early seventies. I'm getting nostalgic about the seventies in my old age (I just turned 34; holy shit I'm 34 now), and I love movies set or, even better, filmed in the seventies and early eighties. It was a weird time with weird fashions and decor. I want my future kids to know how bizarre my childhood was compared to today.

So, on a scale of Buy, Rent, or Don't bother, Zodiac gets a Rent. That's what I did.

Your mom's birthday is coming up.

The Lovely has gone berserk with the crafting lately, digging through her boxes and boxes of beads, strings, jewels, and whatnot. Suddenly she has dozens of hand-crafted jewelery... things. I don't know how she does it, I'm just sitting here playing Half-Life, and I look over and boom! Three more pairs of earrings or a necklace or bracelet or something.

The best part is, she's made a new blog where you can see it all and even friggin' buy it! Want a jade colored necklace with a genuine bone Shiva carving? She's got it. Suddenly realizing that you need some silver and black earrings for... baseball practice or whatever? No problem. Jenny's hand-made jewelery is perfect for any occasion: court hearings, Christmas, Civil War reenactments, grocery shopping, Arbor Day, she has you covered.

Check out River Rock Jewelry and buy some kickass custom jewelery today. You'll find something you like, or my name ain't Nathan Arizona!

LeBron James says "ME!" really, really loudly.

I hope the Miami Heat miss the playoffs for the next decade or so. And I hope they win an NBA Championship exactly one year after James, Wade, Bosh, and Riley retire.

See, I have nothing against the Heat or their fans. I just really, really hate it when a bunch of players individually decide to join up on some random franchise solely to win a title or three. It's the absolute antithesis of team sports. They don't give a good goddamn about the Miami Heat any more than Bosh gives a shit about Canada. If Memphis had better winter weather and a larger television audience (and tons of salary cap space) they would have signed here. It would have had nothing to do with the Grizzlies, it would only be about where these three egos could go to win themselves some rings. The team doesn't matter.

It's the same reason I was sickened when Malone and Payton took, on their scale, pennies to play with Bryant and O'Neal in Los Angeles a few years ago. They weren't just bandwagon-jumping, they were influencing the balance of the league for self-advancement. Karma caught up with them by pointing a sniper rifle at Malone's knee during the playoffs, and the league was turned right-side up. I was thrilled.

Now it's happening again, only worse. These aren't aging stars trying to add a championship to their already-Hall of Fame legacies. It's three superstars in their prime, aided by a prima donna GM/coach, forming a Velvet Revolver-esque supergroup just to fuck with everyone else in the league. Well, fuck you, too.

Dynasties aren't supposed to be born this way. The New York Yankees way. That's fucked up. It's why everyone is screaming for MLB to do something, anything, to restore parity before baseball turns into the NHL, which, slowly but surely, it is. Dynasties are traditionally born of franchises with passionate fans who build teams the right way for years and years. They recruit players who want to be great and who believe in A. the team, and B. the franchise. Players who want to contribute to the legacy of, say, the Celtics, the 49'ers, the Packers, whoever.

Evidently that's not how it works anymore. Now, we have players who believe most of all in the overwhelming need to advance themselves and their individual agendas. Players who buy hour-long infomercials on ESPN to showcase... what, exactly? Themselves? Yes. Themselves. "Look at me! I'm going to win a championship! What? Oh, in Miami. Why, does that matter?"

I still remember my Blogger password. Neat!

It's Father's Day, but I'm broke so I called my dad to tell him I'll take him out for dinner next weekend when I'll have a small amount of disposable income. But he didn't hear the phone ring, so I left a message saying, basically, gimme a shout. He did a few hours later, and I'm going to pick him up after work next Sunday to go get some awesome Italian at Garibaldi's. It's basically a neighborhood joint near the U of M, but it's friggin' sweet. He loves it, I love it, I took The Lovely Jenny there a couple weekends ago and she loves it, it's just all-around a very cool place to get a pizza or a nice plate of ravioli while watching the Tigers on TV. Can't wait for next weekend.

What else. It's been hot here, like Africa hot (Biloxi Blues reference FTW). Well over 90 degrees every damned day for weeks. The only break I've had from it at work has been driving out of town, and those jobs have been scarce. Last Wednesday I drove out to a prison a stone's throw west of Reelfoot Lake with Richard to install a new forklift battery and bring back the old, scrap battery. That was a decent day of air-conditioned truck cab, brief, beautiful views of a soon-to-be-gone lake, and random talk of our addictive MMO's (LotRO in my case, WoW in Richard's).

Tomorrow I may be sent to another prison in something called Able, TN, which is apparently a town a little ways past the Tennessee River, to do the same job. That's going to be an all-day trip, and as easy as that will be for me, I don't want to do it. Driving east on I-40 is like hypnosis for me. It's two lanes, straight as an arrow, for hours. The most boring drive on earth. Nothing to look at but lines of identical trees on both sides of the road, for mile after mile after soul-sucking mile. No curves, no hills, no nothing. Hopefully, I won't have to go alone. I could do the job alone easily. But I tried to convince my boss that another person is necessary, so I don't have to drive all the way out there and back as well. I'd rather ride back, so I can read a book and not fall asleep and plow off the road into a fucking tree.

What was I talking about?

Look, I'm going to pretend it hasn't been four months since my last post. Are we all okay with that? Yes? Good, moving on.

Today we had some hellfire and brimstone-style storms blow through the city, and because of reports of widespread flooding in Raleigh, I drove Jenny to work in my truck for her three hour shift. I decided to spend the time shopping at Poplar Plaza rather than driving back home, and that was not a great idea. Walked into Spin Street and immediately found $20 special editions of Serenity and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which I really, really wanted. I didn't need them, but it was close. I settled for a couple of used CD's. First, Live's Throwing Copper, one of those seminal Gen-X albums that I always meant to own but never got around to picking up. Sure, I could download it, but that's not the point.

Second is Lewis Black's classic live CD, The White Album. Ten years ago, when I was living in Germantown with a couple guys I worked with, we Napster'd this record, and spent night after night laughing at it while we Quake III'd the night away. I've tried to find it a number of times recently, both in record stores and with things like Soulseek. Never came close, but today there it was, for $7.99. Money well spent, my friend. I'm going to rip this fucker and put it on my cell phone so I can inappropriately laugh my way though a few days of boring, grinding work on industrial battery chargers.

So after spending a few bucks at Spin Street I spent a few more at McAlister's, where I got to meet Jenny's new manager and get a very good lunch. Then I went to Bookstar and forced myself not to buy at least a dozen books I really wanted. I've become so used to randomly finding cool books for next to nothing at places like Goodwill and Salvation Army and that used bookstore in Millington (latest buys: Band of Brothers, Life on Earth, and Harry Potter 5), that I forgot what it was like to find exactly what I want for full price. I won't list all the stuff I had to make myself put down, but the last one, Hell Hound on his Trail, was a real struggle. I stood there and read the entire first chapter. I'm not kidding.

What else. Oh, I'm loving this Netflix thing. Jenny talked me into it a couple months ago, and damn if it isn't worth the nine bucks a month. Even setting aside the fucking awesome instant, unlimited streaming of all kinds of movies and TV shows whenever we want, I'm just hooked back into renting movies again. I'd slipped into a mode of selectively buying cheap DVD's that I really wanted, which severely limited what I got to see. Now we're throwing whatever seems interesting into the queue, and with a 2 to 3-day turnaround, even getting just one disc at a time is plenty. Right now I'm watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Two days ago we watched Where the Wild Things Are. Next up will be Kindergarten Cop and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. It just makes having esoteric tastes for movies so simple to satisfy, and it comes wrapped in the convenience of never having to go out in public to rent something. Okay, that was a joke, since there's nowhere within 20 miles of here you can actually go to rent something in person. Seriously, every Blockbuster, Cinemagic, and Hollywood I was aware of is shuttered now, excluding the Blockbuster outlet store on Summer. That would really suck if I didn't have a Netflix subscription, which is why they're all closed in the first place. Is that good or bad?

Anyway I'm off to my new obsession, The Lord of the Rings Online. Wait. Fuck. It's three in the morning. Okay I'll play all day tomorrow. Wait. I have to go to Aldi, the awesome low-price grocery store for 70% of the stuff you need from a regular grocery store. Right, so I'll spend an hour doing that, then it's LOTRO for the rest of the day. If you need me I'll be on the Meneldor server. Don't look for me. I'll find you (creepy, but true).