Crenellated Flotsam

Today, in a little over two hours, I lost count of the number of new experiences somewhere around six.

It was, for me, dentist day, and I got to meet my student dentist, whose name is Shervin. I have a loose tooth (note spelling), which I expect to get worse, so I signed up to be a candidate for dental students at UCLA. I was accepted, and today I went down for my first visit.

They explained that the process may take some time, and they aren’t kidding. Today I had an exam that lasted over two hours and was more thoroughly examined than at any time in my life. I can say for a fact that no one has ever seen the underside of my tongue quite as well, nor as long.

One cool thing was the slowly spinning plate x-ray that covers the whole mouth. On my preliminary check-out, about six weeks ago, I was seated in a chair with one plate on each side of my head. The plates revolved slowly, maybe fifteen seconds, and today I got to see the results. I look a lot like a monkey undergoing g-force testing.

In addition to have my tongue wrapped in gauze and pulled every which way and having no fewer than three people simultaneously staring into my mouth, my skin was checked, as were my lymph glands, blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rate. Also, I got to close my eyes and respond to some sort of tactile sensation test. Another doctor, Tiffany, administered this one. She stroked my cheek with a cotton swab and said “soft,” then poked the other one gently with a toothpick and said “sharp.” I had to close my eyes and answer correctly what she was doing as I was stroked and poked all over my face, and I’m proud to say I got them all right.

I also had to sign some papers acknowledging receipt of a four page, 137th generation copy of a list of dental materials and their properties. I’m glad I’m not a woman since they’re more apt to have an allergic reaction to nickel.

I also completed the most detailed medical history inteview I can ever recall. Of course, I got many of the dates wrong, but I didn’t attempt to explain to the students that five or ten years no longer represents a huge percentage of my life. It all happened “a while back.” No other dentist, ever, has noticed the scarring of my lower lip, the result of having been hit by a car some time around 1980, and that produced a lengthy explanation of the suture scars that I didn’t even know still existed.

Also, I was distinctly aware of a generation gap. Before Shervin or Tiffany were even walking on the planet I was up and doing things, and in those more innocent times, doing things that earn you a lot of raised eyebrows nowadays. It was the late sixties, dammit, and we didn’t know any better.

The students were concerned about some things in parts of my mouth and gums that I didn’t even know had names, but when the Professor arrived to check over their work, they were told that it “sometimes happens, but to keep an eye on it.” Since I can’t, I expect them to do just that.

The good news is everyone’s convinced I’m in reasonably good health. No, I don’t know the names of all the things that are wrong, but I’m not worried about most of them, either. I don’t expect dentists to worry much about my knees, but, as I said, these University Dental Schools are nothing if not thorough.

I may not see Tiffany again, but I offered my condolences that she’d lose access to all these neat gizmos when she went into private practice. She seemed to understand, but Shervin promised to call me soon with a day and time for my next appointment.

It looks to be three or so visits out before anything actually starts happening. I guess the second thing these students learn, after how to greet a patient (“Hi! I’m Shervin!” – Extend hand) is paperwork. Only after then can they begin practicing on me.

For the past day and a half I’ve been back in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, watching a very sweet dog and that same, comfortable home I was in back in June. Little here has changed, but I didn’t expect it to. Still, of course, no idea where the scissors are kept.

But in spite of that there’s been some great news. In two days I’ve twice seen what a drunk version of me might consider UFOs, but that, in fact, were blimps.

And, not the same blimp twice.

In addition to overlooking downtown, this house is situated so as to see the hills surrounding Dodger Stadium. When there are fireworks shows there, you can see them from deck, but on days like today you can see the blimp circuling overhead.

Well, that’s what I think it was doing, describing lazy circles for hours on end. I was a bit unhappy to see that it was a white Sanyo blimp since I consider the Goodyear blimp to be the only real blimp.

Last night I spotted a very colorful one, but it was too dark to see whose blimp it was.

Not many people see two different blimps in two days, so I must be doing something right.

It looks now as if Rita didn’t do anywhere near the amount of damage we’d feared. In fact, the biggest problem they’re talking about is how to get all the people back into Houston.

Those people need to work, you know.

I must have slept through the reporters trying to state the obvious, although I got up at four and switched on the news. A few minutes later, I went back to bed. Perhaps they’ve learned that there’s no news to be had in reporting a breaking A&W Root Beer sign.

Oh, sure, there was one guy with his hair plastered on his head, but nothing much better than that. Perhaps this has all been done to resurrect my humanity, to teach me not to laugh at my fellow man when he or she is being made a fool of, I really don’t know.

I’m going to be dog and house sitting the rest of the weekend, so I may not be able to update as much as I’d like. Hell, everyone else is taking some time off, but there’s the offside chance I’ll bust another coffee maker and have some news.

In the meantime, you may want to take an hour and watch this. It’s a program about genetically engineered food and, in spite of the title, isn’t boring. In fact, it changed my whole way of thinking. It does exactly what it should and makes a very convincing argument. Even if you don’t agree with the guy, I think you’ll look differently at the whole hoopla surrounding “natural food.”

This morning, before the sun had risen on the west coast and twenty-four hours before hurricane Rita was expected to hit land, there was already a slickered and capped reporter in New Orleans fighting the wind and rain.

I just don’t get it.

I know people consider me insensitive and calloused, perhaps even uncaring, but they’re missing the point. The absurdity of standing someone on a corner in the midst of a hurricane has nothing to do with news and is ridiculous. Hurricanes are far too large to cover from a street corner, and no one — not even me — can ad lib for thirty seconds without sounding like an idiot.

I expect tomorrow will bring a massive, cataclysmic storm and will destroy many lives and buildings. That’s horrible.

It will also bring silly looking and acting people showing us exactly what we’d expect to see. I predict there will be shots of street signs flapping in the wind, of trees bending and roof being peeled away. None of that is news, it’s what happens when a hurricane hits.

Also, since there won’t be any sense of the scope of the disaster, reporters will ramble on about the one or two little things they see and treat those as if they were news. Not until the helicopters can fly and the extent of the damage surveyed will we know anything, but that won’t stop the flow of dribble.

If there was a purpose to having someone stand in a parking lot and be whipped by the wind and rain, we’ve already seen that. There’s no news in seeing some poor shmuck huddled behind a trash can or acting foolishly brave, but we’ll see them, nonetheless, pretending to be serious and important.

And I’ll probably laugh. They look so dumb out there.

Yesterday was my other sister’s birthday, and I bought her some socks.

It’s possible I could have found a less interesting present, but I only had a day to do it. Yes, I knew the birthday was coming up, but there was too much rain the day before for me to seriously consider riding my bike. Or, walking.

I stumbled on this socks idea, one of the worst birthday presents I’ve ever gotten anyone, by being Mr. Aware. Normally when I need to get someone a present what I do is this: I go out to stores and look around until I see something that’s pretty cool. Then, I picture the umbridled joy on the face of the recipient and hurl wads of cash at the clerk and invariably end up disappointing whoever gets the gift.

Sometimes I do all right. At least I think I do.

This time I took the easy way out. It may be a new family tradition or it could be an old one that I never noticed before, but in the week leading up to her birthday my sister spoke a lot about socks. She’s begun wearing these silly kids socks, ones with animals and whatnot on them, and showing them to me. She’s been complaining about not having enough socks. She’s been doing all this knowing full well that her birthday’s coming up, but she acted as if she was happy with the fourteen socks I got her for her birthday.

What she wisely did NOT do was make the mistake one of her daughters did one year at Christmas. Gina told everyone she wanted slippers and, well, you guessed it. It was hilarious watching her open one damn set of slippers after the other. I think the moral of the story is not to tell everyone that you want the same thing, or, at least, mention a few things to everyone who asks.

Anyway, now my sisters and I are all a year older, all of our birthdays have passed, and we can ignore each other until next year.

Most people tire of me quickly, and I have a good excuse why that is. It’s not what you would think, the fact that I whine all the time and am rarely happy, that’s just what they say, but I think they’re just trying to be kind. To let me down easy. To assuage their own guilt.

The thing that drives most people around me crazy is that I’m very much at home thinking conceptually.

Let’s say I’m with a woman and there’s a pause in the conversation. She says something about the chair she’s in, and I start thinking about chairs. Then, about different chairs and what it is they all have in common. I’ve gone from the brocade chair she’s in to the idea of a chair, and she has no idea.

Then, I take an even higher, less specific, view and begun wondering about furniture. How did the cave man (one of my favorite things to think about) get from rocks to large rocks, that would serve the place of love seats or sofas? Furniture is fascinating, but it doesn’t take me long to get even more abstract and wonder about things in our homes, possessions, and things in my house and things in houses that I can’t have.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.
“Your breasts,” I say, if I’m truthful and need an immediate example.

And, really, there’s no way for me possibly explain it. It doesn’t matter if she looks at me with confusion, with a cold, dismissive look, or simply makes some sound and leaves the room.

I can see how dealing with me is tiring.

I’ve little doubt that Sunday afternoon is often the invalid of the week. It used to cut short my week-ends by forcing me to look forward to the grind about to begin, destroying the peaceful nature I’d cultivated over the preceeding forty-eight hours. That habit I considered treasonous. I still had well over twelve hours before beginning work, yet here I was at the end of another weekend.

It’s far too late to begin a weekend project, not that I would anyway. It’s made for watching football, only I don’t do that much, or returning from Sunday outings, which I also don’t take very often. It would be fine for looking for new porn on the Intenets, but, well, it is Sunday and it will be there tomorrow.

I tend to putter on Sundays and clean up in tiny bits. I may go through the refrigerator and see which foodstuffs no longer interest Minardi and toss them, and this brings me to a fortunate, but undeserved, coincidence.

Tomorrow is trash day.

Sunday, then, is a wonderful day for cleaning up things I don’t want hanging around in the trash. I can toss them on Sunday and they’ll be out of my life within a day. This makes them perfect. Whatever it is that draws flies and ants can be investigated, cleaned, and, if needed, left on the side of the street. I don’t care how many flies are drawn to the curb, I’m not like that.

This must be the reason Sunday papers are so large (tho not as large as they used to be). There are plenty of extra sheets for wrapping things up, and this is all to the good. Also, if I feel industrious (!), I can fill to overflowing the trash, recycling, and garden cans and not worry if I’ll have enough room to last until pick-up. I have no future on Sundays, only the needs of the moment.

I’ve thought a few times about creating a category about food. There’s no good reason for it, nor much in the way of effects, but food is on my mind a lot. I guess it’s just something that fascinates me.

I thought about it again today because I saw that Kurt Vonnegut’s new book is in the top ten. When I think of Kurt Vonnegut, I think of my first exposure to him, and that was about the same time I heard the saying “You are what you eat.”

When I first heard that I thought it was “heavy, man” and mused on it over chips and cheeseburgers. I had this picture of little tiny parts of food assembling themselves, building a big, strong Russell out of the tiny infant I was at birth, and considered the saying not only profound, but very, very true.

Trouble is, later on I learned I’m not composed of French toast, pork chops, and brocolli but, instead, chemical chains that make up amino acids, proteins, and other terms whose definitions I’ve forgotten.

What I eat goes into some magical black box and what my body can use, it does. What it doesn’t, it looks over, shrugs at, and tosses aside, much as I do feminine hygiene products, prosthetic devices, or pet rocks. Nothing wrong with them, just not for me.

Some will say that these things will kill you, or weaken you in some way, but there’s much quicker ways to do that. Also, considering the number of variables involved as well as the problems with experimenting on humans, I can never quite trust those studies as well as I can ones that reward me with quicker results. Also, there’s too much politics and money for me to be sure exactly what the results are.

A “twenty percent increase” sounds a lot more dramatic than knowing that out of 100,00 people, six had some effect instead of five.

So, my main consideration for eating is finding something that tastes good, then eating it. I try to avoid oleander soup as much as possible, but each day I’m presented with new fads, new results, and new hype. I avoid those, too.

Today is my oldest sister’s birthday. She’s the one in our family, I think, who got the lion’s share of creative talent. Not only can she paint very well (watercolors, primarily), but now she’s learning to play the piano as well.

I got to play the clarinet when I was young. Until it was given to me, I don’t think I knew what a clarinet was. I’m thinking, now, that my dad was a great fan of Benny Goodman, and that may explain things.

I was ill with something earlier this week and made an unwise comparison. Lance Armstrong, I was thinking, when he got sick, refused to go down and battled his infirmiries. I knew one woman, suffering from breast cancer, who pictured all the medicines and procedures she was undergoing like little knights, battling valiantly against the evil, invading cells.

When I get ill I want to die.

It’s not the symptoms, no matter how painful, that bother me so much as the change it makes in my attitude. When ill, I just lose all interest, just want to roll over and have it stop.

Of course, I get better, and then pick up right where I left off. Today, however, screwed me up again. Yesterday I was good, but this morning I woke at four and fumbled around until ten or so. Then, I laid down and slept until after three in the afternoon.

I have to admit, when I re-awoke, I had the distinct feeling that the day was already mostly over.

But, I did manage to write my sister an e-mail, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Today I took my bike and the bus up to UCLA to attend the Writer’s Faire, which I discovered will be happening tomorrow. Today the campus was as beautiful as it always is, some filming was taking place at Royce Hall, and it was quite tranquil.

This Writer’s Faire thing is a thinly disguised ad for the Extension courses, of which I’ve taken half a dozen or so. I’m not sure if I’ll be taking another (time and money), but they have some panels that talk about writing when they’re not focusing on getting you to sign up for the courses. Some of my earlier teachers, as well as some I’d like to study under, are supposed to be talking, but they knew better than to show up a day early.

To give the journey an excuse I wandered the halls of the physical chemistry department and looked at the posters and jokes on the professor’s office doors. These people know things, it seems, and some look to have a wry sense of humor. I admit I hesitated outside the windowed supply room, eyeing a smock and shelves of “research supplies.” I expect good people never consider sneaking in and taking things, but I don’t count myself among such decent citizens. I didn’t want to steal for the sake of monetary gain, but I’m sure there’s some cool stuff in there that I’d like to have.

To my credit, I didn’t even try the door. It was probably locked, anyway.

The water fountains and bathrooms worked, though, so I got back some of my tax money.

In order to justify my mistake in showing up the wrong day, I went to a bookstore that sells textbooks for the Extension classes. I was secretly pleased to see that many of the texts for the creative writing classes are ones I already own. I have this hope, you see, that I can study my way into writing well, that the writing process can be learned as easily as the periodic table.

The one affordable book I didn’t have, I bought, thereby compounding my errors. When I got home and cracked open this book on creating dramatic characters I quickly learned the book is for playwrites.

I’m frightened by plays. While I can like them, I have this chip on my shoulder that tells me they’re for higher-browed people than me, that I’m not cultured enough. I know that isn’t true, but I feel it.

On the bus ride back from the school a sad and confused man got on. Before sitting down he pulled a paperback from his waistband, a new book whose name I couldn’t see. It looked to be an airplane novel, but what surprised me is that after carefully unfolding the dog ears that he’d created when he shoved the book in his pants, he wrapped the front cover around, breaking the spine. That wasn’t as odd as watching him spend fully fifteen minutes trying to read the first page, which consisted solely of ten or so critics’ blurbs.

He reads much more thoroughly than I do. Then again, he probably doesn’t mistakenly buy books for playwrites, as I did.