Fangs A Lot

I'm not saying it's a really big deal. People go through a lot worse; it's just off-putting. I lost a little bit of a tooth the other day. You can't tell from the front. It just got thinner from the inside, where a shard calved off. It's just another example of the fact that you can't really count on anything. I remember when this particular tooth was brand new. It had little ridges on the top. My teeth have never been prize material: they're stained, small, and crooked, but by gum, as it were, they have always done the job. They've diced up truly heroic amounts of food over the years and sent it straight down the hatch, no problem. But now, apparently, they can just snap off on a soft chicken-andouille sausage. What's next? If I slug down a kiwi smoothie with the seeds still in it, can I expect to see kidney shrapnel in my urine stream?

As soon as my tooth sheared off, my tongue mounted an exploratory expedition. A new entry point was discovered right away, and various new ravines and shafts were mapped. Continued effort revealed the possible presence of artifacts thought to date from the ancient Bicuspid civilization, and investigation is continuing on a nearly 24-hour basis even without funding. It's not sustainable.

The thing is, a girl gets used to her own body, and comes to depend on various components of it, and then they let you down. It's bad enough to watch your own skin puddle up at the elbows or your boobs get so far away that you can't get the middle part of your trifocals on them. At least with all that, everything's still in the vicinity. But now things are just snapping off? How is that fair? And it's only likely to get worse. I've heard of women dropping their uteruses. I'd always put it down to inattention, but it's not like I'm getting any sharper, myself.

This inexorable decay can wear on a person. I remember old man Moore down the street when I was little. He'd get to hacking and you could hear the lung nuggets rattling away like a string of tin cans in his throat. Every time he's start up, I'd think: he's on the way out. It scared me down to my spongy new marrow. And that's when it hit me: if you can't prevent deterioration, re-cast it as a new power. We have the power to provoke existential dread in the young. And we should use that power.

You know how certain animals--butterflies, newts--are brightly colored as a warning to potential predators that they are dangerous? Maybe that's what old-lady breath is for. It's a warning to others not to get too close. Stand back! We're disintegrating faster than you can duck. Things could fly off of us at any time. You could get impaled on a suddenly sproinging chin hair. Teeth could detonate. We're one missed curb away from spraying hipbone fragments at you. We can take out a toddler with one swing of the bingo-wings. We may be on the way out, Junior, but we can take you with us, and don't think we won't.

Beating The Spread

Dave bought peanut butter last March and has been complaining about it ever since. It was a Costco purchase, though, so at least we had a whole lot of it. He soldiered through it, sandwich after sandwich, griping all the while. Presumably we could have thrown it out or given it away or made bird food out of it but none of that occurred to us, because we both have Acquired Great Depression Syndrome. It's different from our parents' original GDS. For instance, I have no problem squandering a hundred bucks on a dinner, but I'll unfold dried used Kleenex and use it again. There was probably a generation brought up in the '80s that tosses stuff away willy-nilly, but now we have a whole new generation that is frugal out of necessity, many members of which economize on laundering.

Anyway, Dave finally got through the peanut butter sometime in September and no sooner was the jar rinsed and in the recycling bin than we got a little postcard in the mail. It was a recall notice for peanut butter purchased in March. Because of salmonella. "I knew I had a touch of being violently ill for the last six months," Dave said. Everything makes sense in retrospect, which is where most of us live.

It is an interesting thing about human beings that we grow up accumulating quirks and addictions and coping mechanisms, and then we spend much of the rest of our lives trying to solve ourselves. Maybe we're not nuts; maybe we just got into some bad peanut butter. Our storyline changes throughout the years depending on prevailing villains, of which there is a constant supply. That's it, we say. That's why I'm this way. It's because of my mother. Or wheat. Even if we can't fix anything, it feels better to have constructed a rationale. And it's easier to come up with reasons for being an asshole, say, than to just quit being an asshole.

By the time we're fully grown adults, we have assembled a whole instruction kit to go with ourselves, and we socialize by reciting it to each other. We read each other our own captions. "Middle child and a vitamin D deficiency," we'll say, shaking hands, and our friend will reply "dude! Undiagnosed Lyme Disease and attachment anxiety. Beer?" and the party is on. No matter how bad things are, we always feel better with a good explanation. It will evolve over time, as new discoveries present themselves and make the rounds in the talk shows and the internet. Chronic fatigue gives way to fibromyalgia, which gets pushed aside by food allergies. By age forty, most of us have a serviceable working narrative. We've pinpointed our positions on the autism spectrum and have located dietary culprits and genetic predispositions, and any unsettled foibles can be addressed at our next doctor's visit, because we've jotted down a number of pharmaceutical wonders that just might be right for us.

It makes sense to try to puzzle out the things that trouble us, especially if it leads to a plan to fix things. Every now and then we even achieve a breakthrough. But sometimes our habit of introspection does us in. We reanimate our own anxiety until it's permanently coiled up and ready to strike. It spins and it spins. A person can have all kinds of good reasons to be fearful but the fear itself rarely helps anything. We might as well let it go if we can, because it all spins out of the same place, and there's no fixing it. Sometimes things run smooth and sometimes crunchy, but we've all got only so much peanut butter, and then we're going in the recycling bin.

Late-Breaking Mews

I may be the slowest scooper on the parade route, but I would really like to think that if there was a strange cat holed up inside my sofa, I'd be able to figure it out. I'd like to think that if my sofa were mewing, and if I had just purchased the sofa used, and if the mewing began on the day I brought the sofa home, I'd be able to connect some dots. If I were not able to put it all together, I doubt that my first reaction, upon sitting down on the sofa and feeling something move beneath me, would be to pick up the sofa and look. Not unless I could do it from up on the ceiling fan.

A Miss Vickie Mendenhall, of Spokane, however, had lived with a yowling davenport for quite a few days before her boyfriend discovered the cat by sitting on it. Perhaps they were distracted. Perhaps the TV was too loud. "It sounds like there's a zebra in the garage," Miss Mendenhall might say. "That Simon Cowell is a tool," the boyfriend would respond, and that would be all there was to that, until someone had to back out the Cherokee.

In reality, though, I might not have been any quicker on the uptake. A lot of times when I hear something, it's just safer all around to assume that no one else can hear it. Recently I began to notice that there was a mild little eep! sound every so often when I was sitting at the computer. Dave heard it too, although even we don't consider that a lock on reality. It seemed quite random and was so quiet, like a distant mouse at a surprise party, that we were never able to triangulate it. Out of nowhere would come another eep! and we'd both point to each other, unable to agree on a source. I eventually discovered that it came hourly, at nineteen minutes after. Then I heard it while I was in a whole other room. I suspected my watch itself, and quarantined it upstairs, to no avail. Eep! No matter where we were, at nineteen after the hour we heard a little eep! coming from somewhere nearby.

When it eeped shortly before people were coming for dinner, I got the brilliant idea of setting an alarm for 59 minutes and enlisting the whole crew to listen up. I forgot to tell them about it, though, and when the buzzer sounded, I suddenly jumped up and screamed at everybody. "Mikey! Stand by the basement door! Susan! Over here by the oven! Andrea! Next to the computer! Go, go, go! Be very quiet and listen!" They all ran to their places, one wondering if he should pick up a weapon, one wondering if she should summon a medical professional. And we found it. Everyone was pointing in the same direction, like it was the grassy knoll. The oven was eeping. We have no idea why.

It's just another little reminder of the passage of time, and puts me in mind a bit of those moments of existential dread you sometimes get in the middle of the night. Those were a lot scarier when I was younger; it would feel like a pellet of ice hitting my heart, when suddenly, out of nowhere, I would recognize my own death as an actual event in my own actual future. It was terrifying. Those moments have come up periodically throughout my life (eep!) but over the years I've paid less attention to them. Oh crap, I'm going to die, alert the press; boo hoo; now, don't forget to throw some compost on the strawberry patch. I'm not liable to do anything about the oven, either.