Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Barbiturate Babykins, Narcotic Slut, Black Oil of Opiate





Woke up with that in my head. Hey! I'm having oral surgery tomorrow! I'm fifty-four years old, I'm getting a wisdom tooth yanked out. For fifty-three years I thought my wisdom teeth painlessly impacted and dormant, then my top-right wisdom tooth headed south suddenly, need to have it - and only it - extracted. I don't know if I'll have the opportunity for a dental selfie like the one that is this blog's header from 8:00 PM EST 12/11/13 until 8:00 AM EST 12/12/13 that I took last root canal earlier this year and if I do if I will.

My oral surgeon, who both looks and talks like Colonel Flagg in MASH (but is highly recommended, Washingtonian Magazine approved), tells me two shots of novacaine, five minutes, two stitches, two days of Aleve, shazam. Uh-huh. My regular dentist, who looks and talks and scrapes his face with his hands like Brian Keith in Family Affair (but is highly recommended, Washingtonian Magazine approved), tells me get the tooth out now or die a long and sinus-infection afflicted death. So.

Doctors and dentists tell me I have a remarkably high pain threshold, which is no comfort when things hurt, so I'm hoping to avoid opiates (decades ago I enjoyed my recreational experiments with opiates so much I was quickly scared into quitting) because as pain-killers the RX opiates make me throw-up.  As I said, I'm assured the surgery will be quick, relatively painless, with extremely low risk of complications, I can even eat and drink after midnight tonight as only a local will be used, but still, should something go horribly wrong, I will be wearing my emergency medical bracelet.






  • Which is to say, I may not feel like link-farming tonight, writing tomorrow morning, and link-farming tomorrow night. Maybe I will, maybe I won't, maybe I'll post, maybe I won't. Regarding link-farming, it's fucking December, people aren't posting more than they never post anyway. Blegsylvania: Deader Today than Yesterday, Not as Dead Yet as Tomorrow. 
  • As I've already written, call me when Pope Francis grants equal status to women and sells the Vatican's riches and donates all proceeds to the most impoverished before I think him anything but a Corporate barker, but it does make me smile that he makes right-wing assholes' heads explode.
  • Buy me dinner here + train to NYC & hotel room for Giftmas.
  • John Waters on Giftmas.
  • My soccer team sucks and is run by morons. If the over/under on games played by Arnaud next season is ten, I take the under.
  • Johnny Cash and Neko Case, with songs.
  • Peter Broderick.
  • Serendipitously, this amazing song's title (I heard the song first time yesterday while listening to Berger's show from last weekend) sounds like a pain-killer.
  • My apologies, editing this post reminds me to not assume my reflexive shortcuts are not necessarily your reflexive shortcuts.
  • And yes, when I hear the beginning of this next Fuck Buttons song the Kate Bush song below the poem starts playing in my head.







MEDS

Cynthia Huntington

1.
Living from pill to pill, from bed to couch,
what doesn’t kill me only makes me dizzy.
Pain dissolves like chalk in water,
grit on the bottom of the glass.
Waiting takes forever,
throbs to the soles of my feet, Bella noche . . .
Hives as large as mice hump up under my skin
(“no more barbiturates for you, Cynthia!”)
—itch, stretch, I don’t fit my flesh—
sting, tingle, prick, the sorcerer’s threat.
There’s a knife stabbed through my left eye.
My right foot is made of elephant hide
and weighs in at roughly one cartload of potatoes.
Oxygen twenty-four hours; I’m swelled with steroids,
prednisone buzz in the brain; a motel room
with sixteen foreign workers sleeping in shifts,
playing reggae at three a.m.
  
2.
Oh I love my white pill
that makes the black fist of pain unclench,
unspasming the nerves. I float,
released to darkness visible,
worlds dissolving.
And the yellow pill, bitter on my tongue,
that wakes me at 2 a.m.
writing out plans in Arabic
to organize an expedition to the Pole.
Drug of hubris searing my eyes,
my scrawl unreadable in daylight: foil my enemies.
Bitter taste of fugue,
my hand shakes: some foreign being in my brain giving orders.
You must You must You will.
Later, the pungent brown liquor
shoots the dark with threads of gold behind my eyes.
One flash as the mind goes out.
  
3.
I must elude pain
                                                            float past clarity
pain in the brain
                                                            slammed down like a housefly.
It’s a big dodge.
Fly on a stovetop
                                                            sizzle and ash pop.
This is illusion,
                                                                        mental confusion
                                                            born in the synapse.
What can be undone
                                                            down to the last gasp.
It’s a hodgepodge.
If you kill pain
                                                you will become pain;
pain does not feel pain,
                                                            no nerves in the brain.
It’s a mind-fuck.
It’s just your bad luck.
                                                            A torpor sealed my brain
                                                            I felt no humans near
                                                            it seemed to me I could not feel
                                                            or touch or see or hear.
I don’t know who I am
                                                            without my medicine.
My skin will crawl with bugs
                                                            if I don’t get my drugs.
My brain’s a maelstrom,
                                                            singing a sad song.
Reality is so cruel.
Prednisone oh prednisone
so fast my mind racing, never tasting
rest.
Razzle-dazzle razz
Fist bitch piss stitch witch . . .
                                                            (only wait, the fit will pass.)
fast, gash, lash, splash—QUIT!
(I saw a werewolf in a white suit, walking
past the tables at the Full Moon Café.
Floppy bow tie, big furry hands.)
Percodan, Percocet, let you go, let you rest.
When the grip lets you go and you float like a note
on the flow, there’s your life, there’s no worry—
(yeah, it’s funky how the night moves.)
Barbiturate babykins, narcotic slut,
black oil of opiate. Chatty Cathy, dirty brat,
bed-wetter, nasty pants.
Painkiller, painkiller, I have a new friend,
better than my old friend,
plugging holes in the brain:
Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Cocaine!
I want a soft landing; let me float.
Once the seizure lifted me and threw me down.
I did not like it. I did not like lying there
on the floor looking up
through air like green water.
  
4.
And there is one so dark, a ghost,
it passes through the mesh of thought
without tearing a strand, whispering
destinies perceived true, pronouncing
sentences of death.
  
5.
A cloud, the absence of a noun, no name,
roaring far away in the summer
dark like a train, or a giant fan, or a highway that never stops.
The mind explodes in the dark of space,
unnursed by atmospheres,
as air raid sirens scream for blood
and I am only nerves, strung on constellations,
meridians and vectors quivering. A red and yellow
capsule invades the chemistry of thought; cathode rays blast
from the television screen and signals pass deep into space
until the stars are singing “Rosalita.” You
will not remember this night.



4 comments:

  1. One word, Dude: nitrous oxide! Well, two.

    Any oral surgeon worth his/her salt offers it for free. It provides a dissociative effect as powerful as LSD. I shit you not. And the good thing about it: it is only active when you are actually breathing it in. Once you stop breathing it (i.e., take the nose piece off), it clears out of your system. No after-effects. Period.

    My dentist is generous with it. Gives me noise-cancelling headphones and lets me plug in my iPod/iPhone with its preset playlist. Often, something psychedelic. No kidding, it's the best high you will ever have. And the safest. Wisdoc says so. Dentists have long been on the forefront of painkillers.

    My dentist likes to regale me with tales of dentists who have after-hours parties with their staff where they take turns using the Nitrous. Occasionally, he says, you read about one who tried it alone or fiddled with the mixture percentages and dies alone in his own chair. Seriously, I can think of a lot worse ways to go.

    Best wishes. But seriously: demand Nitrous! You'll totally thank me. If for nothing else, the buzz. You'll think you are back in HS or college, but in a safe, controlled environment.

    ReplyDelete
  2. i wish you a comfortable, easy, ok oral surgery adventure

    my most recent use of professionally-prescribed opiates, here in the 21st century, was in the context of a cholecystectomy - but before that, long ago, in the third quarter of the twentieth century, i experienced the codeine-induced peace that passeth understanding in the aftermath of having all four wisdom teeth removed at once, under general anesthesia - i went in the night before the operation - in retrospect, i'm not sure i needed such expensive care, but i had health insurance that paid for it so it seemed like a good idea at the time

    later i had root canal work - twice on the same tooth (!) - the first guy had just had a new baby, and i believe his sleep deprivation affected his job performance - after i got through the second round, a year or two later, i wrote the following -

    Oral Analogies

    Some love affairs are like root canal work -
    a dull ache with
    moments of intense agony
    going back to be hurt time after time
    until only a dead husk remains

    But what about the encounter that's like
    having your teeth cleaned?
    brief
    relatively painless
    and it leaves you with a brighter smile

    Then there's the story of the absent-minded dentist
    who filled the wrong cavity




    ReplyDelete
  3. Nitrous oxide? Two words two of you will get: Brent Bates. Oh, I know of nitrous oxide, never used it for medicinal purposes though.

    I'm strangely unworried. I hadn't been to a dentist for years until the last year because of a butcher dentist that scared the fuck out of me, he inflicted such pain, but my experience over the last year getting shit fixed has been completely pain-free, root canal included, that I'm not freaking out over this. Irony being, Brian Keith rubbed his face and said he thinks getting my teeth fixed created the space for the one wisdom tooth to start emerging.

    Thanks the both of your for good wishes.

    ReplyDelete