You get used to the pain after a while. You start to think that maybe, just maybe, you could live with it, but man, that would suck the soul away. You know it will go away, but in the meantime, you just want to lie down and just cry it all away.
I’m on day six of my post-wisdom teeth removal and I think that perhaps, the times, they are a’changin’. Well, Bob Dylan slowed to about a quarter speed my be a more accurate representation of exactly how fast these times are in fact a’changin’, but at least they’re moving in a forward type direction.
The pain medication I’m on helps a little. I’ve taken to popping a pill every 3.5 hours, instead of every 4, which probably will cause brain cancer when I’m 45, but in my extreme inability to think caused by the four additional holes in my head, I could probably be induced to sell my car for three magic beans and think it’d be a great deal. That’s how illogical and anxious the pain makes you.
That’s not the only thing. I’ve noticed I now have an extreme patience for some things I’d normally explode about. Par example: last night, I went to bed early, and lay on my leaning futon attempting to find a position that only caused a quarter percent pain increase in my head, as opposed to a 65% or even 80%, and behind my closed door my roommate’s computer repeated an ambient chill beat loop. Probably a minute aspace, and unbelievably hip, but hearing this loop over and over and over and over and over and over again made me crazy. Part of it was the sexy, sly way it would arc into the main “theme”, a kind of stealthy drone with some flange and wah-wah to give it a retro-vibe, and then slink back to a steady, suffocating syncopation of cloud-like ambience. Whatever that means.
Describing music is hard, I just realized. But I noticed that I used a lot of words beginning with S to describe the sensation of the sound. Probably also to impart my own sensation at hearing it, a glam of hip appreciation and stark psychosis at hearing it repeated.
But back to my enduring patience. Normally, after about five cycles of this particular piece I’d have shot out of bed and calmly asked my roommate to play the next song. Calm exterior. But my heart would be seething. Well, that’s a bit strong.
I instead gritted my teeth and focused on the pain, and then realized immediately why the music was not so bad after all. Puts lots of little occurrences like this into perspective, I think.
At any rate, it’s not forever that I expect to endure the suff’ring, though it sometimes seems that way. A good lesson I’ve learned: never mock solid foods, or put a better way, appreciate what you have. I think in my pre-removal days, halcyon days of youth and intemperence with rash expressions of vanity and cock-walkery, I was prone to express my dissatisfaction with this or that which seemed in some way deficient, or otherwise unexciting.
Sadly, I overestimated soft foods’ appeal, once believing that a diet of milkshakes, jello, pudding, and rice was the life for a king, and that anyone with the privilege of eating such fare on a daily basis was the luckiest person under the sun.
Amazingly, it only took me one day to realize the error of that way of thinking. Best to get it now, whilst I’m still young. My future seems brighter already, knowing the truth now as I do.
See you on the morrow. And excitement of excitements, I’ll post a review of the new and deproved Amityville Horror. I know, you’re just dying to know all about it…