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.

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).