Groan!

Man, after last night I can feel every bone in my body creaking and groaning. My mouth hurts less-- my tongue has been irritated ever since the dental work I had last week in preparation of having a wisdom tooth removed tomorrow-- but my upper lip is a bit swollen where Omaha shot me in the mouth. That tasted nasty.

But what got my attention this morning was the admission by author Raven Silverwolf that paganism is boring. No, she didn't really say that. But her new book, The Solitary Witch, looks suspiciously like a computer manual, one of those thick phone-book-sized types, complete with colored tabs on the side for sections and segments. Nothing shouts "We're boring now" than the output of massive, multi-thousand page tomes with charts and diagrams.

The New Age book-store near my home is also pushing the work of Sri Ramakrishna, with titles like The Amazing Disciples and They Lived With God. If I recall correctly, Sri Rajneesh is one of them, so I suspect that these are the output of his sect press. And yet, looking at the titles, I have to wonder: did they feed anyone? Educate anyone? Provide medicine, or fresh water, or housing? If not, what was the point?

And while I'm sitting on the bus, I'm watching a tall woman reading a book called The Messiah And The End of This World, which is in large enough print I can read it from here. She's almost at the end of the book, and it's a little more than a bizarre collection of interpretations of the Bible and associated materials into some strange occultic work. I can read from here the lines, "Someday, history will look back on these words as the seed that entwined the world." I bet every new religion says that.

A quick google reveals the book to the Black-supremacist stuff of the most banal sort, a rabbelous mish-mash of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and African Identity, with vegetarinaism, bad scientism, and Goddess only knows what else thrown in for good measure.

( Why I don't buy books like those much... )

Wrench! Twist! Tear! Bleed!

Oddly enough, it is my body that understood first that something very weird was going on. Despite all of the novocaine, I still had the elevated heart rate and subtle panic reactions of someone undergoing major physical trauma.

I had my lower left molar out, to complement the removal of the lower right several years ago. I have no opposing upper molars for those, so they weren't doing a whole lot, and they were just rotting away under the influence of caries. The doc was tempted to just fill it since it's so tight up against another molar, but he went in with a drill and broke it away from the bone instead of using the other teeth as leverage.

It's weird that my brain insists that I have a tongue where there are no functioning nerves and it continues to insist via properesis that it's moving and responding. I know that no feedback is coming through that nerve channel. I guess this is a subtle experience of phantom limb phenomenon.

When the novocaine wears off, I'm sure that I'll be able to tell everything's there. I have to rememeber to take the gauze out of the wound in a little bit and replace it with a fresh batch. And I'm not to take anything stronger than ibuprofen. Isn't that fun? And no solid foods for 24 hours, no hot food, and use the other side of the mouth for up to two weeks.

At least it doesn't hurt, yet. The new topical they're using did a great job of dealing even with the needle pain, about which I am the world's worst wimp.

Even in my current condition, I managed to write a 300 word LJ and another 700 words in Wishing Well.

And I am so hungry.

The novocaine wore off.

Owwww!

Thank you for your understanding.

Eating lunch was absolute hell. I managed to finagle eight stronger-than-ibuprofens out of my dentist. They're called vicodan and I picked up from the pharmacist down the street. Whatever they are, they work and they haven't made me loopy yet. My tongue is still numb-- oddly, it's the only thing that is-- and my jaw is pulsating with a disturbing rhythm.

My boss told me to go home as it was obvious that I wasn't going to get much done. But after taking all the pills, y'know, I feel better. If this paragraph is coherent, I might be functional enough to get some work done.