Why can’t the Jerry Lewis Institute build a nuclear-powered time machine, and go back and fix it?

This, for some reason, was a key repeating line in the dream I had. But it was said in jest, as in “here’s an example of dialogue you never hear in a serious piece of work. I don’t know why it was important to recall it. The main objective in the dream was to wake periodically and ensure that I didn’t have a fever. If I didn’t have a fever then the infection hadn’t spread and I didn’t have sepsis, which would use the bloodstream as a royal road to every organ, and then last Friday’s Bleat would be the last.

Unless I could dictate something from the hospital, and instruct my wife how to upload it No, leave that for daughter.

Then again, you know how that turns out. Did you post my final blog post, dictated from my sepsis-ridden deathbed?

Oh crap sorry no I’ll do it right now

At present it is 8:30 AM Sunday morning and I’m waiting to hear from the dental office where maybe I was supposed to get my tooth removed next Tuesday, if the antibiotics hadn’t worked. On Friday, a day that was appreciably worse by all possible metrics, I thought, hey, you know, let’s commit to yankery ASAP Monday morn, so I can get in by Tuesday. On Saturday I looked in the mirror and realized that I’d either stuck in a chaw-wad the size of a golf ball, or I had full-blown swelleration. Verdict: get it out Monday morn.

These were very productive days. Friday is my favorite night of the week, because I get to have a bourbon, and some ice cream, watch and old movie and some favorite old TV shows while working on the website. No bourbon, of course; not with Vicodin. That makes you stop breathing. Or so they say. They tend to err on the side of "not dying" when they write up the warnings. So I transfered all the Bourbon calories to the ice cream, and ended the night sitting at the kitchen table, unhappy, spooning it in, wincing when a chunk hit the wrong side of the yap.

Saturday, as I noted, was worse, and so I got a lot done. In the Minneapolis Hotel section there are about 150 pages; I redid them all. Felt marvelous. Completed two other site revisions. Felt elated. Bit down the wrong way; saw a spectrum of light I don't believe has been identified yet, and heard a note best described as the top-note harmonic that hung in the cosmos after the Big Bang.

By the end of the night the lower right half of my head looked like a punching bag, and after consultation with some family medical people, I decided to get it out by whatever means necessary on Sunday.

Not as easy as it sounds. Of course, they’ll do it at the Emergency Room, but that requires sitting in a waiting room watching small children sneeze flu germs on a copy of Highlights. I wanted a place that was dedicated to the task. Called the place where I had been tentatively scheduled for extraction of ol’ No 30, got the night triage nurse. She sounded exhausted and had a cold. She said someone would call me back, but if they didn’t, call again in 40 minutes. No one called me back.

Went to bed, dreamed the above-mentioned dream, got up, smacked my palms together and said “let’s find us a dentist at 8 AM on a Sunday morn!" I found one easily enough, down in Eagan, and they had a 10 AM slot.

“Do you do sedation?” I asked.

“No, but we have nitrous and novocaine.”

I would think that’s a given, but never mind. Well, we’ll just have to grip the chair arms and soldier through.

So here I go.

LATER

That was interesting.

Strip mall dentist’s office in far-flung Eagan. It was an ordinary dentist’s office that just happened to be open on Sunday, which is a brilliant business strategy. It’s like car dealerships offering service hours on the weekend. They also do ordinary dentistry, but I suspect that OH CRAP OUCH GOD HELP Dentistry is their speciality, especially for people who have been putting it off for years. There’s a big market for that: “We won’t judge you, and we will give you drugs.”

Two bright cheerful young women at the desk.

The procedure, not including the paperwork, has three phases.

1. The first is nitrous oxide, to get you comfortable with the idea of very sharp things in your mouth. This relaxes you nicely right up until the point when there are very sharp thing s in your mouth.

2. The Novacaine poke-stix. The first one was really quite . . . bright. The entire injection lasted about 27 minutes, I think. I had dreaded that the most. Yes, that’s pure wimpery. But I don’t think it says anything particularly laudable about someone that they don’t blanche at the thought. Sure! Ram that needle in my tender, infected gums and shoot me full of silvery cold fluid! Or give my cheek a little lovin’ pinch, all the same to me. I hadn’t had a shot of the stuff, while awake, since I was 18. I did not move while it was being administered, by I believe I braided my big toe and its neighbor togheter/ There were two more of those, but after the first, meh.

3. The Excavation. For some reason I thought it would take a while, but of course it’s easier to remove a tooth than fix it. First step seems to involve clawing out the middle, then the tugging. So much tugging. Things you don’t want to feel or hear: SNAP, which means a portion of Former You has been left in Current You. I had my headphones on and hit the PLAY button to listen to something to take my mind off the part of the head below the mind, and shuffle turned up this.

Which was PERFECT.

Anyway. I’m sore and tired and it still acheth like a mofo, of course. Still swollen. Can’t have a little cigar and can’t have a drink. Well, could, but dasn’t.

How times change:

Usual updates; usual work blog; usual tumblr. Just one less tooth. See you around.