After one insurance provider after another refused to cover it I finally got a dental plan that paid for a custom-fit mouth guard, for Bruxism. I’ve grinded since forever but it went into overdrive during Covid, eventually leading to two teeth being pulled because I grinded them so hard. I honestly believe it was the cheap store-bought mouth guards that either caused this to happen outright or else exacerbated the decay. Those things don’t fit right, because how could they? But I wore them anyway, feeling like I owed it to someone other than myself. Who that someone is? I don’t know.
But the real mouthguard, which was 3D-printed from arduously obtained imagery of my mouth, seems to fit perfectly. Unlike the cheap ones it does not fall out and end up somewhere on the other side of the room. It is a good fit, and I should be happy about that, but I suspect enough damage has been done already. This can only prevent more, it can obviously do nothing to reverse anything.
Puerto Rican Parade was Sunday. I did not attend but I got the experience of being on a very crowded subway platform stuffed with scantily clad teenage girls. It was, honestly, kinda icky. Easy for me to comment, I suppose, having never (quite) been a dad. But who lets their kids out wearing short-shorts that practically expose themselves and shirts that pretty much do the same? Answer is simple: Tons of parents. I thought it was icky. I mean, I could look at it as innocent, guileless fun. OK, I’ll do that.
I am wearing a shirt that might be 25 years old. I believe it to be a shirt I wore on the “Today” show all those years ago, although that might actually have been a blue version of this same style shirt. This one is kind of pale tan. It is big. It also comes from the corner of my closet through which I’ve barely rummaged in years. Yesterday I found a shirt that had almost certainly been placed by the ex-girlfriend who made a project of buying me designer shirts for $1 at the Salvation Army. She would button only the top button of a shirt when hanging it in the closet. I keep most of the shirts buttoned when I hang them on the hanger, and put the shirts on as if they are Ts and not Oxfords. I am such a fucking caveman.
I found naked pictures of another ex-girlfriend last night. Unlike other women I’ve known we made no promises or agreements to delete and shred all photographic and video evidence of our times together. She looked cute in the pictures. Drunk, obviously. Flopping around in the bed. I think we lasted about 6 months, and had sex like we were getting paid good money to do it. It was all we had, though we ended up going through the motions of looking like we were in a relationship. A long walk around Canal Street toward the Staten Island Ferry turned up a totally unexpected discovery of a pristine, full phone booth inside a hotel just off Canal Street. This was amazing for me but she seemed uninterested in payphones. Until, one day, in the closest thing to romance we ever got to, she made me walk with her into what seemed like a sketchy part of Gowanus. I didn’t understand why she was taking me there, and I started having thoughts of “I just boned this woman 4 times in 2 hours, and I do not even know who the hell she is or where she is taking me.” Just as those thoughts formed all concerns were vanquished. She had taken me to the site of an old, abandoned payphone that she remembered from when she spent more time in that neighborhood. She gave no clue that she knew or had any interest or even awareness of payphones, so that was quite a step outside of her regular character, or what I thought was her regular character. She became a mystery to me but it seems all women I’ve been with become mysteries to me when we part ways.
I should probably delete the pictures. She was troubled. I am troubled.
I think I will, after I don’t know how many years, cancel my New York Times digital subscription and access the Times for free through the Tor browser. I hesitated because I thought Tor was unable to access all functionality of the site, specifically comments and Javascript. But if you disable all those restriction Tor is basically just another web browser. As I don’t intend to use it for any dark web searches for hired assassins or CP I don’t need to worry about the malicious pests I might pick up from such sites that carry such content. What I will lose is access to the Times Machine, which had been useful to me when I thought I was writing a book about something. I also cannot comment on articles without an account, but I don’t care about that. I’m not sure what else I lose access to but I don’t care.
For some mysterious reason the article about me from 2004 does not appear in the New York Times site search engine. The earlier one, from 1990-something, does show up. The more recent one does as well, from May of last year. But not the A1 from 2004. The Times site search has always sucked, though, so I’m not entertaining conspiracy theories about this. The article remains on the site.
I desire to use the restroom facilities of this workplace. Thunder.
