Tuesday 7 November 2017

Things definitely keep on happening

I've missed a lot of highly blogworthy events. Having been doing this for a while now, I have grasped that what I have to do is just get them written down. Otherwise the pipe stays clogged, so to speak.


  • I went to Wodonga. Too long ago now to do more than acknowledge that it's a fuck of a long way to travel by train and kind of enigmatic when you get there. Who am I to expect Wodonga to reveal to me its inner self just like that, simply because I went there for a while? It rained a lot. 
  • The workplace day of 'thousands upon thousands of schoolchildren + unnecessary quantities of horses = ???' came and went. I am paid for my labour and as part of the contractual arrangements around this exchange I am obliged to abide by the Victorian Public Sector Code of Conduct and also by my workplace's Social Media Policy. So I can't say much, maybe nothing. Please feel free, nay feel positively encouraged, indeed, feel browbeaten, negged and gaslighted into reading between the lines. I feel how I felt when I was hanging out in Canberra with the people who run the J.A. Festival there - desperate and maddened by the ethical and pragmatic challenges of talking about what I'm witnessing. And so I've already put in a proposal for a journal article I intend to write about the whole biz. I shall have my venting, eventually (are those two words related?) but I will do it in absolute obscurity. It's not every day that someone like me gets to be involved in something like that. By 'something like that' I mean the deliberate and complete confection of an artificial festival of collective memory. Last year 31 October, nobody gave a crap, this year 31 October, Prime Ministers flopping around in Israel, episodes of Landline, the whole monstrous giddy catastrophe. 
  • I did something really stupid but I think I got away with it.
  • The same day as the horse thing was Halloween and there was a high level of activity on Canning St, much of really rather charming. But it all transpired on the footpaths and in the front gardens, not on the median strip, so no use to me, here, now.
  • One of my ancient metal fillings fell out and from poking it with my tongue I could tell the tooth was now a thin cuplike thing with a big crater in the middle. So at eight oclock the next morning I made a carefully not panicking phonecall and got myself an appointment at the nearest and most available dentist clinic which was 'Smile Solutions' in the Manchester Unity Building, instead of where I had been going before, which was to a likeable and overwrought Iraqi woman doing unusual dentistry out of a house in Preston that was evidently in recent use as a brothel. 'Smile Solutions' has six beautiful, heartless receptionists and a huge army of even more beautiful dentists and dental nurses. My dentist was called 'Pip' and her helper was called 'Tenille' and the room they worked me over in had a picture window facing the balcony of the Town Hall where Abba and the Beatles formerly stood, just not at the same time. Pip admired my shoes (they are indeed admirable) and offered me a $300 filling that would last maybe three to five years or a $1200 filling that might last ten years. (I think numerals for single-word numbers, as opposed to spelling the words out, is a mark of illiteracy, by the way. It's good that nobody comments on my blog anymore or possibly even reads it as I do not feel I have enough time left on earth to be wasting seconds defending my views on this and many other questions, it's bad enough having to write them down in the first place. There is this cat here who makes me do it.) I opted for the relatively inexpensive yet still quite expensive filling and they got down to business giving me injections in the roof of my mouth, going up my nose with a rubber hose and jamming the cheap but filling filling stuff in. They put in more than they needed to though. Even though the interestingly etched glass wall panelling and well-maintained deco plaster friezes and beautiful receptionists and and iconic views created an aura of collectively knowing what's what when it comes to fixing fucked-up teeth, after about eleventy years of Pip grinding down the too-high surface of the newly installed filling, I began to wonder whether this aura had very much substance behind it after all. When she'd had enough of grinding and of telling me it was no wonder really because my whole mouth is basically hideously deformed, I was allowed to depart. Look the MU building is brilliant and I highly recommend going up in the lift for a wander about in its lovely corridors, but colour me mildly sceptical about expensive dentistry. Dr K. out in Preston also wreaked her fair share of mayhem and pain but it was nothing that a day or two binge-watching In The Thick of It did not put right. This most recent bout all went down a week ago and my mouth still hurts and feels weird. 
  • Leonard had a haircut - the first one since January - and he looks like a different person. Very much more vulnerable. I love him. He is the best thing in my life. Sometimes I feel afraid to think about how important he is to me. Not because of morbid fears that something might happen but because it is such a big thing for a child to carry, all that immense love.

3 comments:

Janet said...

I have been quoted an outrageous amount of money to have my teeth fixed enough to last another 10 years. I was in so much pain, I might have agreed. New dentist is lovely though and has a tv on the ceiling. I watch with captions and the dentist plays soothing from his spotify. It is a world away from the also lovely community dentist who has looked after me until now.

lucy tartan said...

Teeth are the absolute worst body parts.

elsewhere said...

I go to Smile Solutions. I don’t know why. I think my Health fund suggested it when I moved to Melbourne.