Tooth is pulled. It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Not that my dentist did a bad job. Quite the opposite. It's just that, you know, the thought of getting a bit of your head removed is a little uncomfortable.
There wasn't enough tooth left to just grab and yank apparently, so they had to break it apart, and pull all the little roots out individually. I was in that chair for over an hour, fingers in my mouth, listening all these cracking and drilling noises. Halfway through, I could feel the Novocain wearing off, so instead of just feeling a bit of pressure, it also took on a sore quality.
Once the Novocain wears off completely here in a few hours, I expect I'll be having the time of my life.
At least the waiting for the extraction itself to happen is in the rear view and you're outta that dentist's chair. Well done! But I sure do know what you mean about waiting for nerve endings to catch up with insult committed under anesthesia.
So to riff on that idea and distract you for a couple seconds... did you ever stub your toe really badly on something immovable, like a set of weights you didn't put back where they belonged? You KNOW what's coming... and you CANNOT stop it from happening because "it" already happened and your brain is just waiting for the news: just enough time for so much info to traverse such an amazing "grapevine" and deliver a punch with the heft of an all points bulletin kinda NYT headline.
All I could think of when that happened to me was a quick "this is gonna... OWWWWWW".
Speaking of typography and NYT headlines... and front pages... at least you were't featured in this one. Back in May when US covid-19 deaths passed one hundred thousand, the Times printed the names and a brief humanizing note from the obituaries of 1% of them on their front page. It
was the front page that Sunday. No graphics. Solid typography top to bottom. And that was back in May. Now it's September and the death toll in the US approaches two hundred thousand.
The newspaper publishes its first purely typographic front page in modern times, acknowledging a grim milestone in the Covid-19 pandemic.
fontsinuse.com
I remember staring at that thing in May before starting to read it and a lot of things flashed through my mind.
Not just remembrances of how media had taken note of assorted milestones of death in the Vietnam War, for instance, either by the numbers with photos... or as singular photos like that of Eddie Adam's snapshot of the execution of a Viet Cong soldier, or the May 1970 photo by John Filo of Kent State student Mary Ann Vecchio crying out and kneeling over a fatally wounded Jeffrey Miller on the day the National Guard killed four student protestors and wounded nine others.
But I was thinking on that day last spring more about how the USA in its popular histories has basically sanitized by summarization and statistics what happened to economies, cultures, to human civilization itself on this planet during the 1918 flu pandemic. This time around at least the USA media outlets of record just aren't having that. Part of that I think is because the US owns such a high percentage of those deaths for a "first world country" and part of it is just disbelief that our top level elected leaders have shown themselves so bereft of leadership qualities.
So yeah on this day while commiserating with you over that tooth gone to the dustbin but still plaguing you by its exit --and hoping you feel better soon! !-- it's impossible not also to commiserate with the whole planet over an affliction the end of which we can't even predict properly yet. I long for the time when we can reminisce on what we were up to "back during the pandemic of 2020..." and feel certain that covid-19 is in the rear view.
Meanwhile we've no clue what history will make of this era, but social media is certainly full of plenty notes on how we've all been trying to cope with the spinoff of such a society-disabling illness: everything from risky grocery-shopping expeditions and ghastly experiences of trying to home school kids of different ages to sublime virtual concerts and dance performances. Not everything about the internet is a disaster after all. At least we know we're providing historians with plenty input. Maybe this round of a viral pandemic will knock some political heads together for the next time.
