going on a vic ride

I have just swallowed 2 vicodin to help ease the dental horror of a root canal, which marks the grand finale of a year of brand new trauma in my mouth. I didn't have any problems through the first 10 months of the year, and then the dentists called me to remind me about a little procedure known as scaling that needed to happen about a year ago and never did. Scaling's not terrible in and of itself, really, because you get so numbed up that they could be stapling your gums to your lips without giving up the gag. What they're actually doing is shoving tools into your gumline to clean out all the excess tartar. Apparently, if you leave that stuff there, it just keeps building up, leeching calcium from your saliva, until it pushes your gums away from your teeth. My dentist then related the tale of the worst case scenario, a woman who came in and, before they got to work, reached up and removed one of her front teeth and set it on the table like a piece of flair.

But the worst part comes afterwards, as I would sit around and rub my teeth with my tongue, obsessed with how the smooth enamel now felt like licking a sandblasted wall. That eventually goes away and the pink glory of the gums revels in their own cleanliness.

So the root canal just got sprung on me last week, because I have insurance left to use up and, hey, what better way to finish up the year than lying prone on a dental chair with my mouth proppedwith a plastic doorstop wedged between my back teeth. After shooting me full of novacaine and then deciding to drill a quick hole and fire some straight into my jawbone because i'm a pussy, the drilling happens.

My dentist lets his patients watch movies if they want, on a headset device that looks like eyeglasses with TVs for lenses. Today it was broken, so I opted for the discman and listened to The Life Aquatic soundtrack as eight million pieces of sucking plastic, poking metal and whirring machinery were shoved into my mouth. The awfulness of the burning-hair smelling smoke climbing out of my mouth and trying to figure out what to do with my tongue made a nice counterpoint to serenading my brain with Portugese David Bowie songs and the metal ward dulcitones of Scott Walker.

After the intital procedure, during which they stopped to shoot me up with more novocaine, somehow, without me even realizing it, they slapped some strange metal and rubber contraption on my face, making me feel like the poster for Saw. After that, it's all a blur. I kept dozing off as they kept shoving little weird needle things into the hole in my tooth and scraped away. I couldn't feel it, and I couldn't really hear it, but I could sense it, the same way abductees just know they've been anally probed. Eventually the CD ran out and I woke up to me just laying there and my dentist saying "Hm. There's bleeding. Okay, we're gonna let that do it's thing. I'll be right back." Then I lay there, something bleeding on the other side of my rubber mouth truss, and cued up Devo's Gut Feeling over and over again to keep from falling asleep.

The procedure took so long that when I left, the numbness had already started to wear off, a sensation I'm not used to happening until I wake up on the couch a few hours later. That's the worst part of the whole experience is the foreverness of it all. Prone in this chair, mouth harnessed lockjaw wide, the endless array of different needles that get inserted into your tooth one by one, doing little circuits and then being exchanged for one just like it.

Fortunately, I somehow got him to write me a script for Vicodin and I confusedly drove my way to the pharmacy, waiting in the nice blue chairs reading John M. Barry's The Great Influenza (thanks, mom) and feeling that old familiar throb starting to kick in.

The pharmacist recommended I not take more than 8 in a day, and we both laughed at how stupid people are that she needs to say that in the first place.

Now I'm doped to the gills, or I'm at least well on my way. Remembering the last time I took Vicodin, this week of work, which looked to be shitty before I left for Christmas and still looks that way, and this last week of 2004, which looked to be about the same as the other 51, will be a beautiful little dream of floating brainspace, Seu Jorge, Influenza and total, complete chemical joy.

don't despair just because it's christmas

My friend Katrina, erstwhile yodeler, sent out this picture of herself on the job, extending her big-hatted, bright-feathered Las Vegas wish for the happiest of holidays.

Everyone here at the Thoughtpeach.com wishes you a Merry Christmas, I guess. Omaha here we come.

shitload of new entries, top 10 blah blah of the year and what have you coming before 2005 crushes our brains, promise.

-the management

btk: oh shit

A package of items believed tied to the BTK serial killings was found Tuesday by a local resident in a Wichita park, police said.

A man whose identity was not released found the package, wrapped in plastic and held together by a rubber band, then contacted local television station KAKE-TV. The station subsequently called police.

[...]

KAKE-TV showed film footage of the contents of a package, including an unidentified wrapped metallic object and blurred images of three pages purported to be a list of chapters of a book entitled "The BTK Story." The station said police asked them not to disclose the specific items in the package.

However, KAKE reported the package contained what appears to be the actual driver's license of Nancy Fox, who was found tied up and strangled in her home on Dec. 8, 1977.

merry go bye bye

After a five-year recording break, experimental rockers Mr. Bungle are officially done. "I'm at a point now where I crave healthy musical environments, where there is a genuine exchange of ideas without repressed envy or resentment, and where people in the band want to be there regardless of what public accolades may come their way," says singer Mike Patton. "Unfortunately, Mr. Bungle was not one of those places."

[. . .]

"We could have probably squeezed out a couple more records but the collective personality of this group became so dysfunctional," Patton says. "This band was poisoned by one person's petty jealousy and insecurity, and it led us to a slow, unnatural death. And I'm at peace with that, because I know I tried all I could."

Oh, oh, oh, that smarts. Can I nostalgize for a sec?

I still remember the first time I listened to the first album, sitting in the smoking section at college, wedged into one of those awful study carrols, trying to figure out what my newfound friend Vinny had gotten me into. Or the night Disco Volante came out, I had to work my busboy job until about 1 in the morning and I'd left Vinny money to pick it up when it came out at midnight, coming home to my tiny studio apartment and listening to it all night while I banged out a term paper, until the sun slowly came up on me still listening to it and trying to watch the Naked Kiss and being weirded out by the confluence of Fuller's film and Bungle's After School Special. Or hanging out in Spanish Harlem with Glasson and God the Band and bongs o' plenty and California playing on the stereo, me trying to emphatically explain why this was so very very brilliant to anyone unfocused enough to listen.

There's the shows, Vinny and me crowded into the Metro just before Thanksgiving, a ramshackle set-up and Bungle somehow translating the orchestral mess of Disco Volante into a compelling show before busting out the last song, a cover of "Everybody's Working for the Weekend," and I coulda swore when he pointed around the audience, saying "You. You. Yeah, you motherfucker," his finger landed on me for a second. Same venue a few years later, California like Brian Wilson digesting John Zorn, a pop extravaganza, disturbed children's songs to God. Front row, covered in sweat. The last time, the House of Booze, The Monkees' Headquarters playing on the overhead before the band came out.

While so many bands tried very little, Bungle tried way too much and often succeeded, they never sounded the same twice, they never bothered to sound like they gave a damn whether anyone was listening, and from them came Secret Chiefs 3, every Mike Patton solo project and a whole generation of Slipknotian morons who will forever ape, but never emulate. Godspeed, gentle musicians of Eureka, California. You'll be missed.

imperial jumbo lump