Woke up with that in my head. Hey! I'm having oral surgery tomorrow! I'm fifty-four years old, I'm getting a wisdom tooth yanked out. For fifty-three years I thought my wisdom teeth painlessly impacted and dormant, then my top-right wisdom tooth headed south suddenly, need to have it - and only it - extracted. I don't know if I'll have the opportunity for a dental selfie like the one that is this blog's header from 8:00 PM EST 12/11/13 until 8:00 AM EST 12/12/13 that I took last root canal earlier this year and if I do if I will.
My oral surgeon, who both looks and talks like Colonel Flagg in MASH (but is highly recommended, Washingtonian Magazine approved), tells me two shots of novacaine, five minutes, two stitches, two days of Aleve, shazam. Uh-huh. My regular dentist, who looks and talks and scrapes his face with his hands like Brian Keith in Family Affair (but is highly recommended, Washingtonian Magazine approved), tells me get the tooth out now or die a long and sinus-infection afflicted death. So.
Doctors and dentists tell me I have a remarkably high pain threshold, which is no comfort when things hurt, so I'm hoping to avoid opiates (decades ago I enjoyed my recreational experiments with opiates so much I was quickly scared into quitting) because as pain-killers the RX opiates make me throw-up. As I said, I'm assured the surgery will be quick, relatively painless, with extremely low risk of complications, I can even eat and drink after midnight tonight as only a local will be used, but still, should something go horribly wrong, I will be wearing my emergency medical bracelet.
- Which is to say, I may not feel like link-farming tonight, writing tomorrow morning, and link-farming tomorrow night. Maybe I will, maybe I won't, maybe I'll post, maybe I won't. Regarding link-farming, it's fucking December, people aren't posting more than they never post anyway. Blegsylvania: Deader Today than Yesterday, Not as Dead Yet as Tomorrow.
- As I've already written, call me when Pope Francis grants equal status to women and sells the Vatican's riches and donates all proceeds to the most impoverished before I think him anything but a Corporate barker, but it does make me smile that he makes right-wing assholes' heads explode.
- Buy me dinner here + train to NYC & hotel room for Giftmas.
- John Waters on Giftmas.
- My soccer team sucks and is run by morons. If the over/under on games played by Arnaud next season is ten, I take the under.
- Johnny Cash and Neko Case, with songs.
- Peter Broderick.
- Serendipitously, this amazing song's title (I heard the song first time yesterday while listening to Berger's show from last weekend) sounds like a pain-killer.
- My apologies, editing this post reminds me to not assume my reflexive shortcuts are not necessarily your reflexive shortcuts.
- And yes, when I hear the beginning of this next Fuck Buttons song the Kate Bush song below the poem starts playing in my head.
MEDS
Cynthia Huntington
1.
Living from pill to pill, from bed to couch,
what doesn’t kill me only makes me dizzy.
Pain dissolves like chalk in water,
grit on the bottom of the glass.
Waiting takes forever,
throbs to the soles of my feet, Bella noche . . .
Hives as large as mice hump up under my skin
(“no more barbiturates for you, Cynthia!”)
—itch, stretch, I don’t fit my flesh—
sting, tingle, prick, the sorcerer’s threat.
There’s a knife stabbed through my left eye.
My right foot is made of elephant hide
and weighs in at roughly one cartload of potatoes.
Oxygen twenty-four hours; I’m swelled with steroids,
prednisone buzz in the brain; a motel room
with sixteen foreign workers sleeping in shifts,
playing reggae at three a.m.
2.
Oh I love my white pill
that makes the black fist of pain unclench,
unspasming the nerves. I float,
released to darkness visible,
worlds dissolving.
And the yellow pill, bitter on my tongue,
that wakes me at 2 a.m.
writing out plans in Arabic
to organize an expedition to the Pole.
Drug of hubris searing my eyes,
my scrawl unreadable in daylight: foil my enemies.
Bitter taste of fugue,
my hand shakes: some foreign being in my brain giving orders.
You must You must You will.
Later, the pungent brown liquor
shoots the dark with threads of gold behind my eyes.
One flash as the mind goes out.
3.
I must elude pain
float past clarity
pain in the brain
slammed down like a housefly.
It’s a big dodge.
Fly on a stovetop
sizzle and ash pop.
This is illusion,
mental confusion
born in the synapse.
What can be undone
down to the last gasp.
It’s a hodgepodge.
If you kill pain
you will become pain;
pain does not feel pain,
no nerves in the brain.
It’s a mind-fuck.
It’s just your bad luck.
A torpor sealed my brain
I felt no humans near
it seemed to me I could not feel
or touch or see or hear.
I don’t know who I am
without my medicine.
My skin will crawl with bugs
if I don’t get my drugs.
My brain’s a maelstrom,
singing a sad song.
Reality is so cruel.
Prednisone oh prednisone
so fast my mind racing, never tasting
rest.
Razzle-dazzle razz
Fist bitch piss stitch witch . . .
(only wait, the fit will pass.)
fast, gash, lash, splash—QUIT!
(I saw a werewolf in a white suit, walking
past the tables at the Full Moon Café.
Floppy bow tie, big furry hands.)
Percodan, Percocet, let you go, let you rest.
When the grip lets you go and you float like a note
on the flow, there’s your life, there’s no worry—
(yeah, it’s funky how the night moves.)
Barbiturate babykins, narcotic slut,
black oil of opiate. Chatty Cathy, dirty brat,
bed-wetter, nasty pants.
Painkiller, painkiller, I have a new friend,
better than my old friend,
plugging holes in the brain:
Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Cocaine!
I want a soft landing; let me float.
Once the seizure lifted me and threw me down.
I did not like it. I did not like lying there
on the floor looking up
through air like green water.
4.
And there is one so dark, a ghost,
it passes through the mesh of thought
without tearing a strand, whispering
destinies perceived true, pronouncing
sentences of death.
5.
A cloud, the absence of a noun, no name,
roaring far away in the summer
dark like a train, or a giant fan, or a highway that never stops.
The mind explodes in the dark of space,
unnursed by atmospheres,
as air raid sirens scream for blood
and I am only nerves, strung on constellations,
meridians and vectors quivering. A red and yellow
capsule invades the chemistry of thought; cathode rays blast
from the television screen and signals pass deep into space
until the stars are singing “Rosalita.” You
will not remember this night.
