Category: medicine

I stabbed my face, and other fun things 

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Before I visit a country for the first time, I like to bathe in the local culture, mainly through books and movies. (I save the food part until I get there and do it right, with bite.) As mentioned in my last post, I head to Seoul, South Korea, in a few weeks, so I’ve been hungrily reading novels and watching films by Korean artists. Christ, they’re grim. How I love it.

Take “Memories of Murder,” by Bong Joon-ho, who made the stinging class-warfare satire and Oscar-winner “Parasite,” itself fairly bleak. This excellent serial-killer detective saga throbs with death and dark humor, winding down to a gut-punch ending that will leave your jaw somewhere around your big toes. Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” is another serial-killer drama, a fiendishly clever spin on the revenge thriller splattered with brutally sadistic punishments that I cannot speak of here, lest the authorities bust in.

Something lighter? Try the smash Netflix series “Squid Game,” in which financially strapped citizens try to win millions playing grueling games with the simple rule: you lose, you die. I haven’t seen so many blood geysers since “The Wild Bunch.”

Twisted, yes. But then you don’t know Park Chan-wook’s 2003 masterpiece “Oldboy.” Yet another revenge rampage, Park peppers his gorgeously gory film with creative curlicues not easily forgotten — like the antihero devouring a whole, live, squirming octopus in one take and, later, fending off dozens of assassins armed with only a hammer, a tour de force of cinematic choreography.

It’s not much sunnier on the book side. I just finished the slim novel about suicide “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” by Young-Ha Kim. It’s gloomy, but also not great. It’s infatuated with its own misery. 

More famous is “The Vegetarian” by Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang. The heroine of this celebrated novel renounces meat, triggering a plague of psychological and bodily repercussions. (Put. Down. The. Cheeseburger.) And I’ve just started “Lemon” by Kwon Yeo-sun, about the unsolved murder of a high school student. More death — party time!

Is Korea so cracked? Apparently I’ve tapped into a thick cultural vein of crime, vengeance, class disparity, the sordid and surreal, the darkly existential and the exceptionally, even giddily, violent. That vein is a bloody gusher.

Speaking of unchecked violence, the other day I bayonetted my cheek with a thumbtack. I was lancing a pimple, not too giant, but big enough to evoke the Elephant Man. A hard, stubborn whitehead that was impervious to onslaughts by furious fingernails. So I said F-it, I’m getting a tack and uprooting this beast. First, I sterilized the tack’s point in the dancing blaze of a Bic lighter. Then I rinsed it in hot water. Then I took the business end of said tack and dug out the pimple’s white core from my cheek. Blood happened, but I extracted the thing in 30 seconds flat. My threshold for pain and gore is impressively high. The tattered flesh around the deceased pimple healed in a few days. I am an absolute master. Dermatologists, take note. And fellow zitheads: Shelve the Stridex. You might find more relief at Staples than CVS.

Like its kaleidoscopic neighbor Japan, South Korea is a Day-Glo bouncy house of the whack, weird and wonderful. While there, I will have ample offbeat options: Should I visit the Toilet Park and Museum, aka Mr. Toilet House, a festival of fecality? Or the Penis Park and Museum, studded with upright totems of erotic arousal (stop it!)? Or the Meerkat Friends Cafe, where twelve meerkats — so smooshily cute, like living anime creatures — a random raccoon and a floofy white Arctic fox scamper and play with you as you sip, and conceivably spill, coffee? I’ll be at all of them, of course. Oh, I almost forgot the popular Poop Cafe, whose theme is all things playfully bowel-adjacent (think chocolate soft serve, etc.). Consider it checked.

Midsummer miscellany

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Four mini-blogs, bite-size essays, from eyewear to dog hair …

Shopping for new eye frames is about as thrilling as shopping for underwear — a little fun, but mostly a utilitarian ritual for a deadly pedestrian accessory. I got new frames this week to go with new prescription lenses, making me feel very old. I’ve had my current blue frames and lenses for two years and I felt like underwear shopping. Yesterday I took my new (burgundy) frames to the optician to get the fresh lenses. The whole deal cost an eye-singeing fortune — around $1,200 for frames, lenses and exam. The nice guy helping me said, “You don’t seem old enough for progressive lenses.” I sort of thanked him, then thought to myself, ha!

When it comes to a big juicy novel, I’m a restless reader. My standards are unreasonably high, and if a book hasn’t hooked me by page 70 or so, I close it and move on. I am not one of those chumps who strains to finish a book once they start it, no matter the quality. That’s obscene. I just closed Rebecca Makkai’s wildly praised novel “The Great Believers.” The Pulitzer finalist about a group of friends impacted by the AIDS crisis was worse than overly familiar and a mite trite, it was dull as dirt. So I started the also-acclaimed Adam Haslett novel “Imagine Me Gone,” a substantial (356 pages) story about a family of five facing mental and physical challenges that upend the unit and try the bonds of love. On page 89, I’m with it for now. But every so often it sags and I give it the stink-eye. Book, you are on perilous ground. Watch it.

Puffs and curlicues erupting over his face and body, the dog at last got a summer haircut. A professional groomer came to the house, bathed him in the sink, then took the razor to him good for more than an hour. Cubby now looks like a bewildered sea otter and it’s fabulous. Everything about him has shrunk — my, what tiny ears you have! — and it’s adorable. Thing is, now he’s licking his butthole and nether regions with frantic intensity, like he’s infested. It’s merely razor burn and getting used to the lack of locks, and if the past is any indication, he’ll stop licking presently. But it sort of drives everybody crazy, not least of all himself. Why are haircuts such trauma? Cubby and I both want to know.

My brother’s radar is exquisite. He knows my dubious tastes, my oddball obsessions, my disgusting fetishes. So it was Christmas in July when he recently gave me a gift of surpassing thrillingness: an immaculate wax double-wick candle of deformed conjoined twins skulls. Craig, my only sibling, said he got it for a Christmas present but couldn’t resist bestowing it now. He bought it at a local taxidermy/tattoo shop called Unlucky Rabbit that deals in deer heads to “Lesbians and Taco Trucks” bedroom candles. My kind of place. I’m a freak fanatic, sideshows, medical curiosities, monsters on down. For now, the Siamese twins skulls are on proud display, and I have no plans to torch them, they’re so gruesomely perfect. Still, lighting them and watching them melt into bone-colored goo would be its own grotesque beauty. Where’s the matches?

The terrible twos


Pill pals

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

I’m an anxious person, shaky and fretful, and when anxiety gets the best of me, I pop a pill. I hold out as long as I can before grabbing the amber prescription bottle, but when the physical jitters and mental goblins won’t blow off, then it’s time for Clonazepam. Swallow, wait, ahh.

Sort of. But the meds — those sedatives, so tiny and pink they’re almost cute — can blunt the edge, like sanding a jagged thumbnail on an emery board. Magic? Hardly. Mellow? Kinda. 

I’ve blabbed about this, my fun, adorable neuroses, on these pages before. But it’s been a long time and things evolve. 

No. No they do not. 

I’m exactly in the same place I was in 2020, or, for that matter, 2010. I remain a quaking Jell-O mold, gulping pharmaceuticals to stanch dramatized grief. Get a therapist! you scream. Exactly a dozen therapists later, starting at age 13, I’ve sworn off them. They’ve been as helpful as talking to my dear Aunt Gladys, who’s deaf in one ear and has narcolepsy.

Meditation has been my most recent move. Like many novices, my frantic, hamster-wheel mind — Did I pay that bill? Should I call her? Do I have a brain tumor? — has so far derailed any quality concentration, but I’m working on it. Anything to snuff my mind’s overactive orgy of tripe and trivia.

The tiniest shard of unresolved thought can keep me up all night. So angst often translates to sheet-tearing insomnia. I will toss, turn, cuss up a storm. I finally convinced my doctor to prescribe me Xanax expressly for insomnia, as it is worrisomely habit-forming. (A previous doctor scoffed, “That stuff is crack.”) 

My sleep success rate with Xanax so far is about seventy percent, which I consider worthy of confetti and party horns. Yet when it doesn’t work, look out. My pillow becomes a cloud of fluttering feathers. I chew it. 

I take other meds for mental “stability” (insert: laugh track), but the anxiety tabs yield the most direct effect. The other ones are like background Muzak, a calm, ubiquitous hum. In thirty minutes or less, my low-dosage Clonazepam is like a mental muffle, quieting the chaos. (I’ve also tried cannabis gummies, but they just make me woolly and irrationally hungry. A whole box of Kraft Mac & Cheese, at midnight — not a good look.)

As I travel a lot, I’m blessed my anxiety is rarely a stowaway; it was never issued a passport. I’m sure that’s because I’m relieved of quotidian complaints and overblown worries, transported to a scrubbed reality. I’ve written: “In my travels, my angst all but evaporates. I am unshackled, life’s daily detritus dispersed by an existential leaf blower.” 

I don’t need the pills in, say, Paris, though I bring them along for backup in case life kicks in and I start pacing and perspiring through the hallowed halls of Musée d’Orsay. 

Who needs all this? It must stop. It’s not so easy, of course. I’m resigned to being wired this way, though nostrums like meditation and mindfulness and all that cognitive crap pave avenues of mild hope.

Meantime I have the sweet companionship of Clonazepam, itty pink pills that chirp, “It’s okay, pal. I’m here to soothe the dread and iron out life’s pesky wrinkles.”

I’ve heard it all before. Almost daily. I don’t believe a word of it.

What a prick

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

When the needle goes prick, lancing flesh and entering my vein, I reflexively turn away to avoid the carnage. I instead picture the syringe slurping up my blood into those glass vials containing the violent harvest, which I also won’t look at, lest I get lightheaded and require smelling salts to keep me from passing out. 

That’s what happened to me as a 12-year-old sick with mono. (The kissing disease. I rule.) I had to get regular bloodwork, but my body and mind weren’t having it. Even lying down so I wouldn’t topple over, I got woozy when the nurse drew blood. More than once she had to fetch smelling salts to prevent a fainting spell. It was a spectacle, drama, like a scene out of  “ER,” pediatric unit.

I’ve gotten much better about being pricked. Getting bloodwork, as I did yesterday, is child’s play of the more mature sort. Pivoting my head from the procedure is merely habit, and if I happen to catch a glance of the needle and the blood, I’m sturdy, acting my age. I even thank the blood-tapping technician when it’s over, like he’s some kind of hero.

I’m also rather effusive to those who jab my arm with flu and Covid vaccines. It’s a thankless job, poking the skin of a nervous needle-phobe who tries to crack jokes to lower the pressure. All business, they rarely laugh. I recently got both vaccinations and thanked them like a madman, even though my jokes tanked.

Incidentally, if you ever need smelling salts, they are amazing. Perk you right up, like a cartoon character.

She’s handling it slightly better than me.


A tossed salad of topics, memoirs to movies

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

In these mid-summer doldrums, a few rambling thoughts that amount to nothing in particular …

Best sentence all summer: “Her lipstick is a philosophically incomprehensible shade of chalky orange.” (From “Eve’s Hollywood” by Eve Babitz.)  

I have yet to read a memoir that didn’t bore me silly or raise an eyebrow or two. Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” is a possible exception, and “Eve’s Hollywood” definitely is. I’m skeptical of minutiae only the writer cares about, like how their father flew planes in World War II and their sister married an alcoholic son of a bitch. I can hardly believe a word of what the authors say, especially when they do things like insert direct quotes they muttered as toddlers, forty years after the fact. (See: Mary Karr’s aptly titled “The Liars’ Club.”) It’s all magnificent hooey.

I’m sleeping like crap. Nothing new, but I’m locked in a stretch of relentless insomnia. I called my doctor and he gave me a low dose of Lunesta. It’s done nothing, even when I take more than the prescribed amount (whoopsie). I pop Benadryl and a dorky over the counter sleep aid as well. I’m all drugged up and I still don’t nod off till 4 or 5 or 6. Then I sleep till 9 and awake vaguely refreshed with murder on the mind. I feel like a Stephen King character.

Kamala’s got me revved. For now. The initial blast of flowers and fireworks — her spontaneous honeymoon — is about over, and now she must face the music … er, the monster. Trump, a hopeless buffoon, bigot and playground bully, will meet his match in the debates. Kamala will be the buzzsaw that Trump’s ignorant, lying face encounters and it will be beautiful. That ear boo-boo Trump’s so proud of will be shown for the nothing it is, except symbolic and specious martyrdom. He keeps blathering about the American “bloodbath.” Yes, indeed.

As always, I’ve been watching lots of classic movies from early and midcentury Hollywood — the Golden Age of pictures when men were either gruff or suave (and glistening with pomade) and women were silky and soft-focus, radiating unreachable glamor. Black and white was king and the best pics were positively charged with swoony cinematography and dazzling chiaroscuro. Those were the days. (And I’m someone who name-checks “Alien” and “Jaws” among his favorite films, alongside “All About Eve” and “The Big Sleep.”) Recent viewings: “The Big Heat,” a crackerjack 1953 crime thriller by Fritz Lang, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, who gets a pot of scalding coffee tossed in her face by Lee Marvin and has to wear a giant bandage for half the movie; the unbearably charming Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in the 1937 screwball marriage/divorce romp “The Awful Truth,” which features the brilliant dog Skippy, who also plays Asta in the great “Thin Man” films; and 1955’s “The Big Knife,” where a fist-tight Jack Palance is a movie star sucked into the manipulative corruptions of fame. A rabid Rod Steiger noshes the scenery like it’s beef jerky. And that’s just three oldies I’ve recently watched (I’ve seen them all before). They beat the living crud out of big, dopey summer blockbusters any day.

I bought a hair dryer. I swear to god. It cost $15. It screams like Janis Joplin.

 

Sole asylum

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So we’re wandering through the smashing Henry Taylor exhibit at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan and, like that, flash-bam, my right foot spontaneously combusts. It burns and sizzles. I seize up and sit down like a premature geriatric. Wincing happens. Cursing occurs. And yet nothing diminishes the pleasures of the show one bit. The art is exquisite — raw, funny, moving. I’m between awe and ow.

The foot becomes an issue. The pain, the throb, the burn. And we still have miles to trek through the unforgiving corridors of the city. The day is young, and it is often excruciating.

A day later, I call the podiatrist. An X-ray of my right foot is taken. I wait in the doctor’s minute room, slouching on the elevated exam bench, whose thin tissue covering crunches at the tiniest move, like aluminum foil, or tracing paper.

The doctor at last enters, assistant in tow, and she asks me to denude the offending foot. As I peel off my sock, I intone dramatically, “Behold the monstrosity.”

She laughs. I was expecting a scream. My foot is an objectively ghoulish sight. 

Pro that she is, the doc instantly unriddles what’s before us, which is, in all its homeliness, sort of poignant. It’s something Cubist, maybe Surrealist. Perhaps a strain of elephantiasis.

What’s really happening is a honking medley of maladies: a bunion, a hammertoe and a flat foot. Hearing this, blinking dumbly, I inquire about a wholesale foot replacement, say, a grocery cart wheel, or a deer hoof.

Ignoring me, she administers a very gnarly cortisone shot into my toe while her assistant sprays a freezing liquid on the entry area so I don’t shriek like Axl Rose. The needle goes in deep. And deeper. I swear I hear the crunch of bone. A choir of angels sings.

Amazingly, my foot feels instantly better. The burn is extinguished. The doctor cautions that the cortisone could last a week, two months, forever, we don’t know. I’ll take any of those. She has me order an $11 toe splint from Amazon and suggests I buy fancy insoles. She checks to see if my insurance will cover the insoles she can provide, at $450, but, no, of course not. They will not foot the bill.

I sort of hobble out of the podiatrist’s office. My foot feels so much better. I’m walking on air. I’m about to do a little jig, until, out in the sunshine, I realize what a heel I’d be. One step at a time. One step at a time.

Eerie and incandescent, my X-rayed foot, a web of symptoms.

To CVS, and into the void

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

So today I went to the nearby CVS to get my annual flu shot and my sixth Covid vaccine since the great outbreak of 2020. I try to avoid this CVS and its florescent scuzziness if I can, but this errand had to be done sooner or later, and this store is the most convenient option.  

Like most chain drug stores, CVS dizzies with its heaving array of stuff. I waded through a chaos of clamoring consumerism, everything jostling everything else: sacks of Halloween candy, weepy Hallmark cards, laxatives, reading glasses, and, perplexingly, a tall inspirational/Christian book rack abutting, with nary a blasphemous blush, the celebrity-exploitation magazines, those tawdry journals blaring rehab stints, venomous divorces and flashing the spray-tan décolletages of washed-up starlets. The men in these screeching glossies, lizardy leches all, fare no better.

Cutting through the garish gauntlet toward the pharmacy, I notice that the store is in critical need of fresh carpet — its ratty blue pelt looks like it belongs in a beer-soaked basement with a cracked pool table and a Doritos-dusted Xbox — and that most of the products on sale plunk me into a sad funk. (50% off gargantuan bags of Funyuns? Pass the strychnine.)

Why, I wonder, does everything in this store look worn and near its expiration date? Shelves gape with spaces where products are long sold out. And much of the inventory appears coated in dust and/or placed in the wrong department. (Flintstones vitamins next to the Trojans? Huh-hum.)

After my journey down miles of aisles, I make it to the vaccination check-in counter and the store’s overall complexion magically changes. At first it’s a little hectic and scarily unprofessional. The guy assigned to administer the vaccines looks about 19, and he’s distracted and aflutter. 

“Ah, let me sneeze,” he says, turning his head. I allow him to sneeze. He sneezes. 

But when it comes down to business — i.e., when he walks me over to the vaccine area and jabs both arms with needles I’d rather not be jabbed with — he proves a steady-handed pro. And affable, to boot. 

Somehow it comes up that he is from Syria, and I tell him I’ve been there briefly (though he’s from Damascus and I went to Aleppo). We share a chuckle at the expense of the mountains of Halloween candy spilling onto the floor — so soon, more than a month away! You buy some of that, no way it’s going to last! If the kids don’t eat it, you will! Ha! I realize this is third-rate banter. 

Anyway, things go as good if not better than they could, even in this semi-wretched drug store, where I bet their discount passport photos are disastrous, unusable. My guy is swift and smooth and painless with the syringes, and he neatly bandages up the holes. I thank him, he thanks me. 

And, after a few mandated minutes sitting down post-shots, I’m back in the Aisles of Death. It’s not that bad, of course. I notice that, hey, some of these prices actually are good deals. CVS stands for Consumer Value Stores (for real), and as far as what I came there for — which wasn’t for the greasy carpet or the dirty Advil boxes — this consumer got his value.

CVS? Totally. 

Flicks and the physician

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Small talk with your various professionals, be it a masseuse or barista, is standard social glue. I gab with my barber extensively about world travel, for instance, swapping tales of our latest journeys to pass the otherwise awkward time. It’s chop and chat. (Most guys at the barbershop jaw about sports. Tedium crystallized.)

Things are different with your doctor, unless it’s with your therapist, where talk isn’t cheap but it is profuse. With medical doctors small talk is spotty, because the climate is so clenched, so clinical. For one, they always seem to be in a tizzy, a nerve-wracking rush. Two, it’s hard to shoot the breeze when they’re asking you to turn your head and cough. 

I had the biannual appointment with my primary care physician the other day, and I came away thinking how cool he is. After prattle about my prostate, gab about my gall bladder, and talk of a tetanus booster, he eyed my t-shirt and said, “That’s a great studio.” I had to look down to remember I was wearing my A24 shirt that looks like this:

A24, if you’re wondering, is the hot indie film distributor right now. The boutique shop — which (shockingly) scored a Best Picture Oscar this year with “Everything Everywhere All At Once” — is a mighty machine, celebrating 11 years in the biz with brazen and peculiar taste. Ambitiously art-oriented, A24 pushes cult films that garner lavish critical kudos and discerning viewing audiences. 

Movies like: “Ex Machina,” “Midsommar,” “Hereditary,” “Uncut Gems,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” “Aftersun,” “The Florida Project,” “Talk to Me” and more. 

And TV shows like: “Euphoria,” “Beef,” “The Idol,” “Ramy,” “Irma Vep,” “Ziwe” and more.

The good doc and I fell into a spontaneous groove, both of us animated by the splendor that is A24. We agreed that the ending of “The Witch” was spectacular and the ending of “Midsommar” sputtered. 

His favorite A24 movie is “The Lighthouse,” with Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, and he loves “The Whale,” which snagged Brendan Fraser a Best Actor Oscar. I told him I like “The Witch” more than the mind-boink of “The Lighthouse,” both films directed by visionary wunderkind Robert Eggers. He was okay with that. He just nodded, knowingly.

So, yeah, A24 is badass. Dr. So and So digs it. I dig it. But I guess the point is me and my professional — a guy who actually used a stethoscope on me — forged a small connection. Everyone likes movies, and most everyone can chat them up. This, however, was specific, downright micro. It was like talking about a tiny kebab kiosk in the slimmest side streets of Istanbul that only the savviest tourist would know about. 

And then reality barged in. Suddenly, the nurse entered and jabbed me with a tetanus shot, and my fellow A24 fan was gone, vanished in the weird smelling ether of the doctor’s office.

Fade to black. Roll credits. We’ll always have “The Witch.”

Dodged a bullet — for now

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Health scares have a sly way of wrecking your day, your week, even your month. 

Say you’re awaiting test results, as I was this past week. Each day you wait to hear from the doctor is a kind of water torture, drip drip drip, as you check your phone and email every hour, every minute, to see what the verdict is: Am I sick, or in the clear? It’s aggravating. It’s terrifying.

For six days I’ve been lightheaded, my heart’s been racing, my stomach’s a mess, and I’ve been socked with depression and free-floating angst. I’ve been great fun to be around. Even the dog’s avoiding me.

Last Wednesday, I underwent a pretty invasive procedure to test for a pretty pernicious malady, and it took the doctor till today, Tuesday, to get back to me with results. I’ve been walking around like an anxiety-racked zombie for almost a week. 

At 1 p.m. local time, the goddam doctor called with the report: “Good news,” he said, in a semi-chipper tone. Let’s just keep an eye on it for now, he went on, come to my office for a quick chat, then go ahead with your May trip to Scotland. (Actually, he has no idea about Scotland. I just added that for cheery effect.)

Jesus Christ. I exhaled the breath I’d been holding for 144 hours and made him repeat the words “good news.” I see him Thursday. I may hug him, or bring him an ice cream cone.

The body bites. Its chances of betraying you — indeed, attacking you — are about 98.9 percent. We’re not all doomed, unless you consider dying doomed. But not all of us will be struck with dementia, MS, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s, you name it. Some will croak in their sleep; some will get smooshed by a speeding autopilot Tesla. 

We live on borrowed time, and I apologize for the gloom (and the cliché). For now, though, it’s good, or at least steady, news for many of us. Rejoice. I am — well, as best as this born pessimist can. I get encouraging news, cheer, then fall back into the abyss of: What does it all mean?

Enough. Bullet dodged. For now. Let’s party. 

Taffy, teeth, terror

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

I’m guessing that many of you aren’t familiar with Abba-Zaba. It’s an aggressively old-school candy, invented in 1922 and enjoying its height of popularity in the 1970s. It’s still around, available largely at specialty and retro candy shops. It’s a bar of white taffy filled with peanut butter. It’s delicious. It’s gooey. It’s lethal.

I loved them as a kid, when my mouth wasn’t a constellation of expensive dental work. And I got one in my Christmas stocking recently, either as a joyous surprise or a malicious joke. Either way, I was giddy. 

Still, considering the crowns in my mouth, I knew I was holding TNT. And yet, flinging caution to the wind, I unsheathed the sweet alchemy that is an Abba-Zaba, stripped it of its iconic checkered wrapper. I even paused to puzzle over the candy’s nonsense name: Abba-Zaba. Something about A to Z? Whatever. I took a bite.

I knew what I was doing. Or so I thought. I tried my best to keep the taffy away from my three crowns, sucking it and chewing mostly with my front teeth, almost rat-like. Peanut butter oozed and the sumptuous confection was kept under control, if you will. 

Evidently sustaining that exercise is next to impossible, because, pop, out went my rear right crown. I have to wonder what kind of glue they use on crowns — Elmer’s? 

I’m a numbskull. This is the second time a chewy candy has suctioned out a crown. Once a pink Starburst dislodged a crown with a swiftness that almost seemed spiteful. What just happened? I thought and then pulled out a gold beauty attached to a pink beast.

This time there it was, a silver crown, shiny, perplexed and despondent, all by its lonesome. It floated around my mouth before my tongue could catch it, frog-like. I cursed the Abba-Zaba, threw away the rest of it with a gulp of rue, a flash of ire, and sealed the crown in a plastic bag to bring to the inevitable dentist appointment. 

My dentist wasn’t familiar with Abba-Zaba until I educated her about its ravishing (ravaging?) delights. She confessed a mean proclivity for peanut butter. (Taffy, I presume, is anathema to dentists.) We both agreed I was a fool. Me to her: “I made the genius move of eating taffy.”

The good doctor, whose bedside manner is made of sprites and unicorns, glued it right back with a seamless dexterity that would make an orthodontist cry. (I almost cried, especially when I got the bill.) Pleased to report that weeks later my old crown is holding strong with the new adhesive, which I’ve been assured is not Elmer’s, rubber cement or school paste.

But my adventures at the dentist did not end there. Three weeks later — today — I had my biannual cleaning/check-up, something akin to a periodic colonoscopy, but, you know, about a thousand times better. The dentist mentioned to the hygienist that I had a crown reattached recently, but she mistakenly said it came out naturally.

And then, boom: “No, wait! He was eating taffy!” She chortled. And there I was, on my back, feet elevated part-way in the air, a paper baby-blue bib around my neck, smiling wanly and murmuring, “Yeah. It was an Abba-Zaba.”

It just dawned on me that the hygienist probably has no idea what in the world that is.