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slab of meat in my mouth
Monday, November 17 2003
After pumping the soft tissues of the right side of my mouth full of a legal medicine whose name ends with -caine, today my dentist replaced three of my silver fillings with plastic composites. In the process, he was very careful to determine how my bite operated. I couldn't tell when he was done whether he'd set things right, since I was far too numb and my tongue felt like a slab of meat in my mouth.
I went to Sears to order a replacement tire for my truck and had to argue through my temporary speech impediment that I knew for a fact that Sears does carry Uniroyal tires, they just have to order them. The woman taking down my information didn't seem particularly enthusiastic. Using a faintly ominous voice, she mentioned on two different occasions that her boss was on the phone having an hour-long conference call and it made me wonder if she was fearing a fresh round of layoffs. (Back when I worked at dotcom, I made sure to back up all my stuff whenever my boss was pulled into an unscheduled meeting.)
Then I was over at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary repairing a sick computer running Windows XP. I couldn't find anything wrong with it except for a small infestation of spyware, but it's rare to find a Windows computer that isn't at least a little infected. People who wear two condoms and slather on the Nonoxynol 9 before holding hands with their betrothed are often unaware that their computers contain more bugs and pathogens than a retiring Thai hooker. Hark: it's just a matter of time before they cross the machine-man divide!
As my mouth came back to life from its numbness, I could feel the nerves under the new fillings adjusting to their new reality. Nerves are inherently conservative entities and decry every change made to their comfortable world, but like everything, they learn to adapt. As they awoke from their slumber, the dumbfounded signals they sent to my brain were like the phone calls Rip Van Winkle placed after he awoke to find the Hudson Valley Mall across the street from the tree under under which he'd taken his legendary nap.
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