The All-Too Familiar Click

The other day I bought these bagel roll dealies, essentially bagel sticks filled with cream cheese. I’m not sure we’ve yet reached the limits of bagel science. Bagelology may well still achieve new heights, and clearly these things weren’t the pinnacle of what can be achieved with bagels anyway, but I thought I’d try them out.
They were okay – I mean, they were essentially bagels and cream cheese in a slightly different form factor, so no surprises there – but in and of themselves they weren’t really noteworthy.
The reason I mention them is that I was eating one this morning when I heard and felt that all-too familiar click that meant that some component of what remains of my teeth had come loose.
A quick tongue probe confirmed that one of my teeth was no thinner and more concave than it had previously been and that I’d lost some of the filling.
So I guess I’ll be calling the dentist tomorrow, given that it’s one of the teeth that my bottom plate – I didn’t have my partials in at the time – is anchored on. My dentist has talked about eventually getting a crown put in place there, so I’m assuming this count as “eventually.”
*Sigh*
I’ll most likely end up using what’s left of my Flex account money to pay for it. At least, I hope I’ll be doing so. At AOL, the Flex administration company extended the time limit for using Flex money from January to March of the next year, so I hope it’s the same where I work now. If not, I have this year’s Flex money that I can use, but not being able to use last year’s would mean that I’ve lost over a thousand dollars, as it’s a “use it or lose it” system.
I’d kind of forgotten that the end of the year was approaching – with regard to the context of my Flex account, at any rate – so I hadn’t really given any thought to what I was going to do with the remaining money.
The other day it occurred to me that I should go to my Chiropractor and pre-pay for a bunch of visits, as my neck, shoulder, wrist, and various other parts have been giving me trouble for a while.
So I drove over to the building where his office was located the and realized that I didn’t remember what floor he was on. Checking the directory, I discovered that he’s no longer located there.
D’oh.
I meant to track him down when I got home, but then I got distracted and forgot about it.
Ah well.
Apart from breaking my tooth I didn’t do too much today.
I talked to my mother, then headed out to gas up my car and to pick up a few more groceries.
After I got home I sat down and watched some true crime show on TLC for a while. The particular episode – they were running a marathon – that caught my attention involved a guy who was accused of abusing his daughter as part of a nasty custody battle. Most accounts indicate that the accusations were false, but they were enough to keep him from getting custody and to ruin his life in general. Then, related to the custody battle, someone shot him. After he survived that, the person who shot him attempted to hire someone else to finish the job. Fortunately the assassin for hire was an undercover cop.
The courts, in the meantime, had ruled that neither parent was fit to have custody, and the daughter was put into foster care.
Eventually the daughter admitted that her mother had talked her into accusing her father of abuse – she was very young at the time and began to believe that her father had abused her simply because her mother kept telling her that he had – and a review of the case led to him gaining full custody.
So things were looking up for the poor sap, though he was, quite justifiably, somewhat paranoid. Still, he was reunited with his daughter, who described her father as her “best friend.” Overall, not too shabby of an outcome, all things considered, and definitely an improvement over the way things had been. Until one day when he just mysteriously dropped dead.
The official cause of death was listed as a heart attack, but, naturally, no one believed that.
The focus of the show was on the efforts of a medical examiner to take a second look at the case. The body was exhumed, and while there was no evidence of poisoning, which was the suspected cause, they did find that at the time he died he had three freshly-fractured ribs, most likely the result of some sort of deliberate blunt force trauma, and this was probably what actually killed him.
Still, there was no conclusive evidence of foul play, and the case was officially closed.
What I found fascinating about it all was just the fact that the guy just couldn’t catch a break.
I suppose that if there’s a lesson in any of that it’s that there are much worse things in life than a lost filling, or even a lost thousand dollars.
Which isn’t to say that I’m not going to complain about those things – even if they are my own damned fault – because, really, if I didn’t complain about stuff this blog would have even less of a purpose or point than it does now.
I thought about drawing something today, but as I looked through reference images and unfinished pictures in search of one to work on I felt an overwhelming case of not feeling like it.
In any case, tomorrow will find me back in the grind. Sometime this week – Friday, I think - will mark my one-year anniversary at the new job. Will I do something to mark the occasion? Sure; at some point I’ll stop and think, “So it’s been a year. Huh.” And then I’ll get back to business as usual.