She asked “Are you afraid of the dentist?” I replied “Isn’t everybody?” She laughed, then said I must have had some horrible experience with a dentist somewhere in my life. She kept saying to relax but I don’t think I ever quite did. She said my teeth are fine, as they always have been, but that if I wanted to get them whitened or polished that was an option. I said no, I don’t really care, just wanted to be sure that the front teeth are not coming out. That has been a vague fear of mine since the last dentist said that grinding one’s teeth can ultimately lead to cavities on the front of the two front teeth. That was news to me.
If I was a little testy or anxious today it was partly on account of being made to wait well over an hour for the appointment to commence. She said something about the x-ray machine being “tweaky” but did not suggest why no one either thought to inform me of this or else reschedule. She took what seemed like excessive numbers of x-rays, some of them seemingly repetitive, but it’s fine. Where do I ever have to be, anyway?
I sleep too long in these days when it would seem it is in my least possible interest to do so. But the sleep feels good. I wake up feeling well but it does not last. Melancholy, a tightness in the pectoral area, and other subtleties conspire to sabotage my feelings of significance. The early onset of darkness now is no help, nor is the gloomy overcast or the heavy air.
…
I noticed a minivan parked at 35th Avenue and 30th Street. It has an orange pylon on the roof and the 4 or 5 parking spaces in front of it have orange tape and pylons on them, indicating no one should park there. There is always someone sitting in the car, it seems, though I have had no occasion to pass by very late. There is what I believe to be a Muslim household right there but if it is any kind of spying operation they could not be making themselves more obvious. Another oddity is that the minivan has Texas license plates.
I am reminded of my passing fascination with the street between here and Rainey Park, I think it’s 13th, where abandoned cars go to roast eternally. It’s a street where no side of street parking rules exist and it seems the word is out that you can park there as long as your car will survive. But the real long-term parkers are the folks who ransack cars for everything they can and just leave them there. I don’t go over that way so much these days. That little street is not really on my to anything since I ended membership at the nearby Costco.
