Drill, Baby, Drill!

You may have noticed a conspicuous lack of my ramblings last week. I assure you, I did not die, nor was I horribly maimed in some terrible accident that left me disfigured and without the use of my typing fingers. What did happen, however, was that the devil decided to swing by to do a little cloven hoofed tap dancing on my soul, and it’s taken me awhile to recover. In less dramatic terms, I had a toothache.

Well, it started out as a toothache, at any rate. It was the week before Memorial Day when it all began, and what was at first a mere dull ache coming from my upper jaw eventually transformed into a pulsating monstrosity of pain by week’s end. By the time Memorial Day came around, I was clinging to my face like I’d just looked into the Arc of the Covenant and I wanted to die.

I did not die. Instead, the left half of my face began to swell in the style of the Elephant Man, and the throbbing pain began to course through me with every beat of my cold, black heart. My little toothache had turned into an abscess from Hell, and it was out for blood. By Tuesday morning, I walked into the dentist’s office looking like I’d just gone three rounds with Ali, and left feeling a strange urge to run up some steps and start shouting, “Yo Adrian!” at the heart of the world. My dental doctor loaded me up with antibiotics and painkillers, and scheduled me to come back for a root canal a week later. Or, to put it another way: yesterday.

I spent the past week in a medicated haze of incoherence and misery, punctuated by the sharp staccato beats of soul-crushing pain whenever the damned tooth decided to remind me it was still there and still angry. The swelling didn’t start going down at all until Sunday evening, when it finally began to subside and return my face to its normal shade of pretty. It still hurt, though. A lot.

So I went to my dentist’s appointment yesterday morning (an appointment to which I’d been awaiting with the same eager anticipation a fat kid has towards an unopened Moon Pie) shouting “Drill, baby, drill!” like a crazed Republican, hoping to have the root canal and put this terrible experience behind me. Fate, it turns out, had different plans. My dentist advised me that not only was my abscess bad, but it was along the lines of the worst kind of abscess possible, then he set to work on numbing me up. This took some patience.

Eventually, I was loaded with nerve-deadening medicine and he clapped on the latex horror of the dental dam, then got to work murdering my tooth. After the numbing, it was a fairly painless procedure, although it took quite a bit longer than expected on account of the level of infection being so mind-numbingly pervasive. The tooth kept draining what I can only assume to be ominous bodily fluids that oozed forth from the tiny gateway to Hell that had opened up in my jaw, and it showed no signs of stopping. At one point, the dentist sort of pushed on my swollen gums to coax some of the fluid out in much the same way as I imagine a more foolish courageous type of person than myself goes about extracting the venom from a poisonous snake, although my reaction probably lined up well with the serpent’s: I wanted to bite the man to death.

Eventually, he concluded that the infection was just too great to finish the root canal with a proper filling today, since the odious infectious fluids insisted on relentlessly seeping from the freshly dug canals in my tooth. Instead, he packed it with some sort of medicinal concoction made up of antibiotics and at least 10,000% Extract of Cloves, and told me to come back next week for the finishing round. The rest of the day, he advised, I would be pretty miserable.

And I was. The throbbing was excruciating, the painkillers inexplicably decided to take up pacifism and stopped killing anything, and I spent the majority of the day again clasping my face and whimpering like a lost puppy. The good news, however, is that the throbbing crescendos of pain seem to have faded now, and a general dull ache has taken their place. I prefer the ache. The ache is good. It does not throb. The throb is bad. We do not like the throb.

Hopefully, this means everything is on the upswing now and I’ll soon return to some level of normalcy. I’ve missed a ton of work, which means I’ll be pulling some long hours in the newsroom to regain lost ground. I don’t mind that very much, although it will impact how much time I’m able to spend with Trey each day, which is something I’m always on the alert to maximize as much as possible. Of course, I thought I was on the mend last Friday too, until the PainGod decided he wasn’t done with me yet. Let us hope he hath been verily appeased and his appetite for cruelty duly sated so that he shant return again. So mote it be, etceteras…

I’ll be back Thursday with a regular essay that won’t involve me whining about my miserable dental problems. I know this sort of thing isn’t much fun to read about, but trust me when I say it’s even less fun to experience. Anyone who says an abscessed tooth is nothing more than a toothache has obviously never had one, and is in serious need of an education in suffering. If an abscess is a toothache, then a gunshot wound is a bee sting and I’m the King of the World. Kneel before Zod!

Want some books? 'Course ya do!

NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

Humor | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

Have you ever lived through an experience that was so humiliating that you wanted to die, but when you tell it to all your friends, they can't stop laughing?

Have you ever made a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you're still living with the hilarious consequences years later?

If so, then grab a snack, get comfortable, and prepare to have all of your own poor life choices seem just a little bit more bearable.

You're welcome.

Short Stories
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The nine stories of rage and sadness collected here range from the most intimate of human experiences to the wildest realms of magic and fantasy. The first story is a violent gut-punch to the soul, and the rest of them just hit harder from there.

Those who tough it out will find a book filled with as much hope as despair, a constant contradiction pulling you from one extreme to another.

Life might knock us down, over and over, and will the beat the ever-loving snot out of us from the time we're old enough to give it attitude until the day we finally let it win and stop getting up.

Always get back up.

Gaming | Nonfiction
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This isn't just a book. It's a portal to other worlds where there be magic and dragons and hilarious pirates. Okay, not really. But this book is about those portals, except they're called video games.

The Life Bytes series of books take a deep dive into one man's personal journey through childhood into kinda/sorta being a responsible, competent adult as told through the magical lens of whatever video games he was playing at the time.

Part One starts way back in 1975 and meanders down various digital pathways until, oh, around about 1993 or so.

If you're feeling nostalgic for the early days of gaming or if you just want to understand why the gamer in your life loves this hobby so much, take a seat in your favorite comfy chair and crack this bad boy open.

I'll try to not be boring.

Horror
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What you are about to read is not a story. There is no beginning, middle, or end.

What follows is nothing more than a series of journal entries involving shadow people, sleep paralysis, and crippling fear. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t follow story logic, and nothing works out well in the end.

You've been warned.