Monday, January 26, 2009

I Owe it to You

I'm sure you're just dying to know about my teeth. Well, as it turns out, so am I. I got the one crown; on the theory that it's better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, I wasn't going to ask the insurance company a second time after the first refusal, since by now the tooth had entirely fallen apart and was cutting my tongue, causing the entire staff to cluck their tongues in some kind of sympathy that they couldn't believe that the insurance company denied the need for a crown. There are so many gathered interests in my teeth.

But, on some kind of arcane schedule, the opposite tooth on the opposite side flared up in a mind numbing toothache just the night before, while skiing, so I went into the dental chair fully expecting a wallet ripping root canal along with the known crown, and some kind of cascading series of unfortunate events which would take me well beyond the cost of just tearing them all out and replacing them with dentures.

Sort of like with the car. (Brakes, thermostat, a bunch of simple decisions all adding up to a lot of money I don't have, but also don't feel much choice about). So, my theory is that the tender side (the crown I knew I needed) caused shifting of bite to the other side, where a latent misalignment lurked, and new pain triggered by bite-shift. Made sense to the dentist too, but he gave me an antibiotic prescription just in case his realignment of my bite didn't do the trick and I would still require a root canal.

That's the backstory. Hanging in limbo up against some balance among enthusiasms and the means to address them. Except that there's no room for enthusiasms any more. Just room to hang on.

So, this thing with teeth is just about the boundaries between in and out, and the grinding ways in which passages are made. I'm interested in the Freudian vagina dentata in that regard, and with regard to my sister who apparently has issues with her emotional skin. Prickly anger management issues combined with being hoodwinked into allowing rape. Perpetual rape.  She needs teeth, of some emotional/metaphorical sort.

But here in the hinterlands, where my daughters assure me that I own most of the teeth -whatever their cost or artificiality - in the collective township, I recede ever inward, successfully ducking all social commerce, seeming back into my wombspace, ever to emerge? I continue to work, nervous as we all are that my job too will disappear down the wormhole now opened in the fundament of collapsed capitalist machinery.

But I wonder what difference it could make? The balance between income and outflow is exquisitely made, with some magic guarantee that there would never be room to exercise enthusiasms , even if I had them, apart from those which are directed toward work, and recompensed therefore.

Should I shave comforts? Would it even make a difference? I make a comfort of my wood stove, really to save money. I drive an ancient car, into the ground, even though my mileage is reimbursed, mostly to realise the 35 mpg, with some heavenly reward for avoiding the cost to earth of manufacturing another.

So, I do wonder if I have retracted all enthusiasms in response to the impossibility to exercise them. The boat sits beside the garage as a kind of tooth gap in my life's story. Politely unnoticed. Bothering me if I pay it any attention, which I studiously don't. 

Or is age my main comfort, leaving me content just to sit and read, which I think and mildly fear is somewhat the case? That is what I look forward to. That is what I scramble my logistical efforts toward accomplishing. That is even where most of my disposables are directed, just to keep my widipedia-reader's-companion access energized, not to mention book purchases. As well as to keep open the possibility for telephonic social commerce at the remove I seem to prefer. There is truly a perfected price/value equation, all about indenture (!!) to the company store.

The gaps are all apparent in my narrative.  Clearly, I can't ski without some sort of social existence. Still more clearly, I have and exercise more choice than almost anyone on the planet has ever experienced. And yet my skin grows tight as something transforms inside me and I feel constricted by everything about my self definition. I want to molt and fly (again?). I want actually to experience something more human than this perpetual treadmill of only apparent motion toward some truly nutty apolcalyptic endpoint. (And if you follow that link, you tell me which and who are the nutjobs!)

I know that the flight will be a joining of narrative trajectories. I kinow that it is all about social commerce. I know that somehow I have been burned by my own betrayals and disappointments, which cause this worming in. But damned if I know what to do about it.

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