parable of the onion ring

Wednesday February 16, it's blustery.  This morning I was sitting the dentist's chair watching clusters of clouds move past the mountains.  I have the most wonderful dentist...Dr. Smile.  If you want more information please ask me.  If I refer you I get a twenty dollar gift certificate to Costco.

  I was so dreading having these three cavities filled, the grinding, drilling, mouth contorting, blood rushing to my head for an hour, bad hair for the rest of the day.  Happily found out there were head phones and movies. Watched part of Indiana Jones.  That will be Ben's salvation when he goes for his fillings Tuesday.  And I watched part of some Mel Gibson movie I'd never heard of before, where he gets frozen in 1939 and wakes up in 1992. If you know the name let me know.  I'd like to see how it ends.

On the way home I went to Big Lots.  My first time in there.  I saw that they were having a pretty good sale on some electronics that I'm going to try to sell on e-bay.  I'm finding that the prices with the big name drop shippers are not much better than going to a pseudo-wholesale store. More on that another time.

It's funny how those wholesale places try to make you feel like you're getting a good deal by making the store feel really dingy and stinky and putting big ugly orange fluorescent price tags on things and making every thing an even number. You see a box of cookies for two dollars and you think it must be a great deal, but really it's 1.99 at Smith's.

It also helps that they're so often located in the wrong part of town. So I drove in to the parking lot, which was pretty empty, except for a kind of unsavory looking man and two women, blond with bad roots, having an altercation. I could hear them shouting, but couldn't make out what they were saying due to the wind.  Of course I was trying to, since I'm nosy. Wondering if it was safe to pass by, added the element of risk.   The seedy atmosphere legitimizes the wholesale experience.

So we'll see how the electronics sell.  If not, they're things that Sam and Ben would love as birthday gifts, and cheap anyway.  Got a good deal on potting soil.

Meanwhile my mouth is numb from the fillings. Feels like it is not connected to the rest of my body.  I still taste the terrible taste of dental work and I come up with the great idea to pull over to the Sonic, that shares the creepy all but forsaken parking lot with Big Lots. I am remembering the lovely onion rings that Sam and I enjoyed together the other day.  They are so large, and round with a so nicely textured crunch.

I think, surely I'll need just one bite for my mouth to have a re-awakening.  I took the hot bag from the girl behind the window and I could feel the crunch with my fingers and the oil seeping through two layers of paper. I couldn't wait to pull away from the line to try the first bite.

And so I didn't wait. I bit right in, and all I could taste was swollen gum.  So I tried some of the large Coke I got to go with it. Swollen gum.  And I tried again and again and could hardly find the place in my mouth where my top teeth meet the bottom row, but I was desperate to enjoy those onion rings.  After all, I'd spent four bucks on the whole deal and that was probably equal to my e-bay profit for the day...if I was lucky.

So driving home I determined that the dentist must have left something stuck to the top of my teeth.  I reached into the back of mouth to pull it off. Nothing but teeth, but my fingers were covered in blood.  And that's when I realized that I had been chewing on my own gums!  Now my mouth is so sore and bitten up that I don't have an appetite for anything.  Who would have thought that would be possible?

We learn from this. Don't buy hot delicious onion rings on the way home from having three cavities filled unless you plan to enjoy them pureed.  Don't expect something, just because it is delicious, to awaken you from a state of numbness.    Don't be so addicted to Cola products that you can't see that they might just be how you got all the cavities in the first place.  What else?  You think about it.