The dentist’s office called me at work late this morning, asking if I’d please switch my appointment from next Wednesday to today, to cover a cancellation. My boss said OK, so I said OK, and two teeth came out, one on each side.

They were just jagged stumps anyway, useless for years, painful when chewing, and they stank of death. I’ll be better off without them, and hooray for surprise double extractions! They called at 11:30 and I was in the chair at 1:00, so I skipped a week of miserable worry and fear, compressing it into a quick bus ride.

My chair kept sinking, though. You know those hydraulic chairs you sit in for dental drilling? I’m heavier than it could handle. It’s unsettling to suddenly drop an inch, just as the dentist is about to pierce your jaw with a big needle, so he fiddled with the chair’s controls, but when it dropped an inch again, he gave up. They moved me into a different chair in a different room — the heavy-duty industrial-strength chair. The dentist and his much skinnier patient who’d been in that chair moved into the chair that couldn’t hold my 300+ pounds.

Then my face got shot full of Novocain, and during the yanks I only had to open my eyes a little wider, and they’d give me another shot of the painkiller. Good system for medicating the reality away. Something like that should be available every day, only without the dentist.

When the tooth-pulling commenced, we’re knocking on the door of the 21st century, so maybe there’s some high-tech tool for tooth extractions? If there is. my dentist doesn’t have it. He pulled both teeth with his bare hands, basically.

He started with a glorified wrench, clamped it on a tooth, and pulled and grunted. Shattered and stained bits of tooth emerged, and then he used a screwdriver-ish chisel thing to gouge what was left out of my gums.

Eyes open wide, more Novocain delivered, thank you.

Doc stood there, hunched over, and pulled and pulled, his veins pulsing, while his pretty assistant cradled my chin in her palm, pushing my jaw in the opposite direction, toward the dentist. It’s difficult describing it, but it seemed … precarious.

He was putting so much torque into the effort, if his grip had slipped he would’ve punched me full in the face, maybe sliced a hole in my cheek with his tool. His arm was quivering with the work, and he was so close to me I could count the whiskers on his 1:00-shadowed face.

He didn’t slip, though, neither did his chin assistant, and I held firm between them. It’s dentistry not much different from the 1830s, just with better drugs, but so long as I’m doped up and not in agony, what’s to complain? No lollipop was offered, but they gave me a prescription for something wonderful, because Doc Dentist says it might hurt tomorrow.

♦ ♦ ♦

I always buy a Chronicle on my walk to work, and usually buy an Examiner on the way home, yet I’ve never read any coverage about labor troubles at the newspapers in the newspapers — only in the weekly Bay Guardian.

Anyone who doesn’t read the Bay Guardian must’ve been baffled to find no newspapers this morning. A strike is on, and when it’s eventually settled please remember that the Chronicle and Examiner didn’t think it was newsworthy. Seems curious, yes?

There was a recent labor dispute at BART — a strike was threatened but averted — and the newspapers reported every step of it. Here’s what the union says, and here’s what management says. For weeks.

The papers couldn’t report on their own labor dispute, though, because reporting both sides fairly would’ve made management look like greedy assholes. Thus, the threat of a news strike never made the news, and now — surprise, there’s no paper on your porch.

Newspapers report the news, but they also decide what’s news, and the millionaires running both papers decided that you didn’t need to know a strike was coming.

Ever wonder what other news the newspapers have decided you don’t need to know?

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Doc Dentist was right. My mouth hurts. Pill time, then bedtime.

Pathetic Life 
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