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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").
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Work-Sleep-Work Sunday, December 15 1996 For uninteresting reasons, I worked until half past noon today. That made for an 11.5 hour shift. This was not a challenge for me at all, however, since I was doing only that which I enjoy doing. Near the end of the shift I chatted some with Comet's Webmaster, Jim Hoff, when he came in to defrag his hard drive. We compared notes on our intestinal surgeries. He told the horror story of "reticulitis" wherein a part of his large intestine went through necrosis and died. This required the removal of an eight inch long section. What's more the abdominal incision had to be left open for three months as it slowly healed, during which time a dreaded colonostomy bag served as the ever present bathroom facility. Of course the details of the story were every bit as horrifying as you might imagine. There was the incredible pain, there was the ordeal his wife went through, there was the morphine drip. I didn't feel too pleasant in my own bowels once I'd heard the tale. By contrast, my intestinal surgery had been relatively trivial...in the Fall of 1983 I found myself shitting black decomposing blood in copious quantities and it turned out I'd burst an artery adjacent to my small intestine. The cause? No one knew at first but at UVA medical center it was soon diagnosed as an ulcerated Meckel's Diverticulum. A Meckel's Diverticulum is a rare birth defect in which a piece of small intestine, an embryonic vestige of the yolk sack, has the ability to, like the stomach, secrete stomach acids. But without the protection of the stomach's mucosa, these acids can eat through adjacent tissues. In my case such tissue included the walls of a respectable artery. The surgery was a short affair and left me with a six inch scar and an inch less of intestine (and, thrown in with the deal, no appendix). But there was none of the persistent abdominal incision that the Webmaster spoke of.
I slept from about 1am until 11pm. I was bothered by another dream featuring broken glass threatening me. I have a feeling this broken glass thing is symbolic of my "punk rock tooth" (the left most top incisor) which was smashed into a jagged triangle during an incident at a punk rock concert in Blacksburg, Virginia in the Fall of 1994. One of my friends, dancing with beer bottle in hand, had inadvertantly gotten me from behind. Now the tooth, which had been restored with a composite filling, is obviously abscessed. It has turned a rich grey and needs a pleasant procedure known as a root canal to be performed upon it. I don't think I can just keep putting it off anymore. It feels funny now and the texture of the gum abutting it has changed. My body doesn't seem to want to keep it in the family anymore. I went to work two hours early, in as much as I had nothing else to do and couldn't really go start something like drinking, socializing or mayheming. As you can see, then, the layout of the day was more or less one of work-go home-sleep-work.
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