a day at the dentist

I can see that the general drift of bloggishness on our spot has moved inexorably towards the gratuitous and the inane: listmanias, intertextual language and what did happen to Valli Moosa?.
This all makes me realise that I am becoming a boring old fart taking the whole world so seriously that one loses all sense of rational perspective. Nothing actually matters at all unless we choose it to.
So here is a bizarre experience I had this week at the dentist. Those seekers after meaning may seek what they wish.


I'm sure that like most people you don't much like going to the dentist. I am told that dentists have a high rate of suicides largely because people so dislike dentists and too many tend to take it personally. I don't know if this is true.

[Incidentally for the list mania types out there Psychiatrists are also reputed to have a high suicide rate as do retired cricketers of all people. One would never have thought that such an idler's activity could generate sufficient stress to warrant high rates of suicide-[Of course this may all be a lie.]

So, to this dentist thing. I was at one time hostile to this particular dentist because my jaw would hurt for weeks after visiting him. I went off and tried a number of other dentists for a year or two and found them all to be worse. There was even a fellow who practiced what he called 'new dentistry' where they eschew some of the traditional inject and drill stuff for a clumsy arrangement involving some kind of scraping spoon. The filling fell out three days later, and so did its replacement, at least Mervyns's fillings never fell out.

So eventually I went back to my 'old' dentist. I knew he could tell from checking my mouth against his X rays that I had cheated on him, and although he never said anything he communicated intense depression-more depressed than usual. I must admit that I also like him because he is the only person I know who drives an older car than mine. Anyway something must have happened in the meantime; perhaps or he went on a sensitivity training course or whatever in the interim because he had become so gentle that on that return occasion I fell asleep while he was working on the inside of my head.

Anyway this time I wasn't going to push my luck, I was going to listen to soothing music while he worked. I had given myself the biannual upgrade cellphone for a change. The kids have had the last few and I was still using an old brick. This thing that I gave me for Christmas [from me and my bank manager-a jolly wonderful person] can apparently do everything but bark. So far I had worked out more or less how to make a phone call and discovered that I had earphones and apparently that I could listen to the radio. So I decided I would lie in the chair and listen to the finest stuff that Classic FM could throw at me.

Like a lot of other bloggists on the 'spot' I have become disenchanted with the radio over the past few years- loads of 'realgoose' [propaganda right], endless inane chat shows on channels a b and c-scatterbrained psychobabble and hysterical advertisements cluttering the 'rock n roll' stations, d through z to the extent that music has become an afterthought-obviously everyone is saving money on royalty payments. Gareth Cliff is ok but it was ten o clock in the morning-so Classic it was.

I've vaguely listened to the kinda stuff they play on classic for decades without it ever having become a turn on [well except for Johan Sebastian Bach and Mr Purcell] but since the great radio station implosion of the past few years I find it the most pleasant station. It is also most uncluttered with hysterical advertising and inane chatter and while the occasional operatic piece will see me hit the change button mostly the tinkling of ivories is soothing and some of the local players are more than world class.

So I had a set of earphones and plugged them where the phone manual said it must be plugged. I think the manual went through GaryM's translator programme because I had to do some improvising to get sound -but eventually it came and I plugged into that superb Julian Bream version of the Concerto de Aranjuez that has been almost played to death over the year or so that I have been listening to the station. [Deep down I still prefer the Miles Davis version that I first heard nearly forty years ago and was the first time I ever had an orgasm from listening to a piece of music-not that it does that anymore mind.]

The earphones are tricky and the left one fell out so I jammed the right one in a tad harder wondering why it was the kids never seemed to have such problems. Then i lay back to let the man begin his task.

He had that huge needle n syringe thing they always have and he did that little squirty thing dentists do in front of you to let you know they are not about to pump two kilolitres of air into your bloodstream. Then he smiles that little half vengeful, half apologetic smile. You know that you are about to get a two-litre bottle of sense numbing muti zapped into some part of your inner skull.

And then he loomed into my space over my right shoulder and at the precise moment that he inserted the needle into wherever it goes by mirror and choke into some previously unexplored part of my upper gums the concerto ended, and instantly my peace seeking intention was abruptly violated by a 'a party political broadcast that does not necessarily reflect the views of the station concerned'

Un-knowing his steely bicep locked the earpiece deeper into my earhole. Before I could do a thing, trapped into my chair, unable to access the earplug for fear of bashing the dentist's injecting arm, I was doubly numbed by a ghastly tirade from the so-called self styled 'leader of the opposition' for a full thirty-second blast of petulant prevaricating reasons why I should vote against the present government and give favour to 'his' team.

Now you must understand that I have never been a fan of this man once dubbed the 'Chihuahua' of parliament. I had a neighbourhood run in with him once in the eighties when he was still a city councillor and my feelings about him are therefore personal and have always been influenced by the events of that incident. In addition he always manages to sound like an outraged hysterical schoolmaster faced with a farting epidemic in an undersized classroom.

I always think of him as a roadblock in our political system, holding his demanding finger in a dyke that should be allowed to burst so we can come to terms with the New: uncluttered with the baggage of a less than glorious past.

I was attacked once a dozen years ago by a gang of hijackers while I was getting something out of the boot of my car and we had something like a thirty second/ lifetime, full-on close quarter gunfight, rock n roll party if you like, during which they fired seventeen bullets at me and hit me four times and I fired thirteen back at them and hit them nine times [so I 'won'] and I remember somewhere in the middle of the entire horrific incident having a momentary despairing thought that this was all over and that it wasn't a movie and that I was on my way to darkness-The same thought assailed me then when I could see by squeezing my eyes that the syringe was half gone and that screechy voice was about half way through the message from our 'Mr Klean as kleen...hoho' Some evil thought out there, I decided, has chosen this moment to intrude on my secular peace-can there be much worse than the prevaricating ghastliness of professional politicians.

Then I thought-At least the gunmen were honest bandits.