Recently I’ve been forcefully reminded of the fact that the planned two year interval in checking the state and health of my teeth had somehow stretched out to four years. This became painfully obvious a few weeks ago during the small hours of the night when my sleep was coldly interrupted by a very unwelcome eruption of toothache. It coincided with a new, demanding and extremely busy-scheduled work assignment starting the next morning. Since then life’s been just tremendous. The dental inspection revealed a wisdom tooth so filled with caries that it needed to be removed as soon as possible, in this case meaning next week because there wasn’t any open slots before that. So I had to make do with painkillers for 5 days. I’ve known all kinds of pain in my time, some of it physical and most of it emotional, being a bit of a poet after all and a former Refugee of Romance, but this was a new kind of pain altogether and something I didn’t look forward to experiencing ever again if possible.

After the tooth was removed it turned out the neighbouring one needed some tending too. This came in a guise of root canal therapy, performed on me a few days later in a most brutal and relentless way, by a dentist I’m sure knew very well what he was doing and did it in an utterly professional manner, with all the necessary little details like squashing my nose from different angles and injecting the aesthetic haphazardly here and there. After the anaesthesia wore off the real pain started. The tooth started throbbing horribly during the night (these things always start at night don’t they) and this time painkillers were rather useless. I popped what seemed like several packets of them down my throat but the pain didn’t go away, it only reduced for a while. I also developed a very painful sore inside my mouth. Eating presents previously unheard-of challenges when you are forced to skip the mastication part of it.

After the irritation on the dental nerve had subsided the ache also went away, to be promptly replaced by another kind of pain caused by a hugely swollen cheek. This phase lasted several days, as too had all the previous phases, and required antibiotics in the end to make it go away. At the moment I’m dubiously free of aches but I’m positive it won’t last since the next part of root canal therapy looms only a few days ahead in the future. Yay.

Here’s a tooth-related Happy Tree Friends video presentation.


RECENT EXPOSURE TO WRITTEN WORD:
“Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer” by Russell Hoban. This is the first book (not counting the one-offish “Medusa Frequency” published 12 years earlier) of a loosely connected series taking place mostly in London, and also my least favourite of his books. The whimsical and singular elements I like so much in his books are there, budding but not yet in full bloom as in the novels that followed this one. The main character is dumped by his girlfriend after his countless infidelities are exposed and in losing his “destiny-woman” crashes down hard. He spends the rest of the novel trying to win her back, and reading their conversations is at times almost painful as there is very little hope of reconciliation. He is unable to justify his deeds and his betrayal of trust has effectively ruined the relationship. In the end they patch things up enough to go on living together but clearly things are not what they used to be (“she doesn’t use the L-word anymore” writes the main character in the last page).

I’m not very fond of the way mr. Hoban continually portrays men in his books as very well-read and with a wide knowledge of arts and philosophy, but pointedly in the mercies of their sexual drives, only capable of making decisions based on which way their penises happen to point at at any given time. I understand his stereotyping sadly stems from cold facts and probably from personal experience too but I still find it hard to just accept it as a law of nature since I’ve spent most of my adult years avoiding the most obvious and unwanted aspects of maleness, with variable (but also considerable) success. This struggle with traditional masculinity has been the source for most of the lyrics I’ve written and will write in the future.

The story has other sides too. I didn’t find them as thought-provoking or stirring as the attempts to build a bridge over the chasm of unfaithfulness but since those “other sides” form the main part of the plot I might as well paste a brief description from Hoban’s home page:

”Mr. Hoban's 1998 novel is the tale of twenty-eight-year-old Jonathan Fitch, who's been dumped for infidelity by his girlfriend and thinks he's ready to die. As he sits despondently in the Underground, he's approached by Mr. Rinyo-Clacton, an immaculate, aristocratic opera buff who turns out to be a kind of aficionado of death (he tells Jonathan that his first initial, T., stands for "Thanatophile"). Mr. R-C calls Fitch's bluff by offering him a million pounds for the pleasure of "harvesting" his death in a year's time. Fitch is soon in an agony of fear, remorse and guilt as Mr. R-C's web ensnares not only himself, but a kind, sixty-something psychic named Katerina, as well as Fitch's estranged girlfriend Serafina. Although any synopsis of the plot (not to mention the book's cover) immediately calls to mind Faust, Mr. Hoban has said that he doesn't see the book as a Faustian story, and of course he's right. It's not a story about greed or temptation; it's about death, power and the complexity of human relationships.”

Despite my criticism Russell Hoban remains my favourite author for the time being, and when I grow up to be 70-something I would most definitely like to resemble him slightly in the way I see things (but not necessarily look like him). This wish has covertly replaced my earlier wish of some five years ago, to grow up to be a 50-something who might bear a passing semblance to Robert Rankin. And I wouldn’t mind the badass satanic high priest look either. Or maybe I would, we’ll see.

And speaking of looks and books and authors and satanism and whatnot, pictured below is the current 30-something me, with Sinisthra in a library (after the more heavy metallic photoshooting location of a graveyard wall), sharing a moment with mr. Mäkinen, both absorbed in ”War And Peace” we casually skimmed through in between posing maliciously for the camera. To make it more satanic we decided to read the book backwards, in search of hidden messages, but in the heat of the (shared) moment, actually read it upside down instead. As can clearly be seen from the big picture, with luck and a magnified enough view: the book is inverted, undeniably, like a cross might be, in a most satanic way. Sorry about that mr. Tolstoy.