On top of this flu (which I really can’t recommend to anybody, unless you’re among the 2% who get hallucinations from Tamiflu), I had a dentist appointment yesterday at 8am.
Turns out, getting your teeth scraped at 8am while your head is full of diseased mucous sounds a lot like a giant playing street hockey with a manhole cover. So by the time the dental technician had gotten rid of the tartar (unpleasant) and polished the teeth (unpleasant, but minty), I was in no mood for the lady with the probe (don’t get the wrong idea: she’s my dentist) to come in with her version of Strike Talk.
“I think it’s going to be over next week,” she started. “Tom Cruise and the Weinstein Brothers are going to end this thing. Six months from now they’re going to be the only ones with movies!”
My head swam. The room was spinning. I guess Strike Nausea is an opportunistic disease.
“So what do you think?”
“I wish it was NBC. Then I would have a job. I guess, without a job, I’ll have extra time to see the four movies that UA and the Weinstein Company will have out this year.”
She gave me a look I recognized from when I was on the wrong end of the toothpick/floss/flossing sword debate. Eyebrows down, corner of the mouth up, slow micro-headshake. “The big companies HAVE to go back. They can’t afford this strike much longer. You’re just being pessimistic.”
Am I? Seems like all General Electric has to do is sell a couple of cruise missle engines and they could hold out for another couple of hundred years. If only we were at war. I started to formulate a premise for a discussion on pessimism vs. realism, when she hooked a spit sucker over my jaw.
It sucked the fight out of me, too. Whatever fight there was. In the blue sky outside I could see little flu thingies dancing in my eye gelatin. I was bathed in the unnatural calm of a drowning victim, when the spit ran out and the sucker made a sound in my head like I was flying a 747 with the windows rolled down. I looked back at my dentist, who was now counting off the measurements of my gum depths: numbers I couldn’t hear that were meaningless to me. Felt oddly familiar.
Then it hit me. It wasn’t the flu, or the scraping, or even what she had to say. It was the fact that she brought it up. Because, at this point in the strike, I go to the dentist to get away.
