I went to the dentist today (=yesterday) for my first cleaning in too many years.  It was John’s dentist Dr. Guenther, the same guy who fixed my filling a month or two ago.  I got good news and bad news… the good news is, my teeth are so sparkly and lovely now!!  That stain on my front tooth I’ve been complaining about?  It is GONE.  Gone!!!  He cleaned off that frickin’ thing, gave it a little extra polish afterward and now it’s just like it used to be before that disgusting spot appeared. So my biggest cosmetic complaint is now dealt with.  I’m still stuck with those genetically yellow teeth, but I’m used to that, and can deal with that later, whereas the stain was really embarrassing and grody-looking.  I thought it would look that way forever, I’m just amazed!


The bad news is, I’m paying the price for not having gotten my teeth cleaned in so long.  Duh… apparently even if you brush your teeth all the time, you still need to go to the dentist for cleaning, because of your gums.  I have very angry gums!  He was about as gentle as he could be but it was a fucking bloodbath anyway.  And as a result I now have three more appointments.  The first is to touch up another couple of old fillings — I gotta real museum of antiquities in there — and the 2nd and 3rd are for more thorough cleanings. He just couldn’t do the kind of roto-rootering he needed to today, there was so much bleeding and so much junk in there.  I was being very brave and noncholant about it but my eyes didn’t agree with that plan, they kept tearing up automatically!  I kept dismissing it but it must have freaked him out a little and kept him from digging around any deeper.  (Man, wouldn’t it suck to be a dentist??)

The idea is, I got a good cleaning today, which should please my gums very much.  We’ll give them a month to heal, and then I go back and he cleans again, using Novocaine so he can really get in there and dig out the crud that’s been irritating them.  I go back a month or two later for another regular cleaning, without the Novocaine.  And so on… I keep going back every couple of months, keep that shit clean as a whistle until I have Happy Gums again and I can go back for a cleaning every six-months-to-a-year, like normal people do.

In non-tooth-related news, John and I were supposed to go see Ali Roberts play tonight (=last night) at Schuba’s.  John had stayed up too late last night and my mouth was throbbing so neither of us were really feeling up to a late night out.  So we decided to go to his instore at Reckless instead of going to the actual show.  I took the bus down and met John after work.  It was great, Ali played solo, about 4 or 5 long traditional songs, a few using a keyboard and a few playing guitar.  A couple of his bandmates joined him to sing on one song, that was lovely.  I spoke to him for a little bit afterwards, it was great to see him again.  I still feel guilty for missing his real show though.

Rian was there… I told him about about the 3 new songs and he seemed pleased.  (That 12-song goal of mine was just to hopefully motivate me to write 3 or 4 songs, okay?) I didn’t have a CD for him, but I have MP3s he can grab as soon as he gets online.  I really hope he likes them… my home demos always sound so weird, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The songs are fine, and the recording’s not horrible, but it’s just guitar and vocals.  It’s missing instruments and the songs usually go way too slow tempo-wise.  Some of them come out better than others but usually the demo is a bit of a detriment to the presentation of the song itself.  Which is why I don’t release albums that I’ve recorded at home!  I do so much better with a good band, in a good studio with an engineer who’s not me, etc.  I might play the song more or less the same way as I did on the original demo, but the performance will be a lot better, and it’ll have all the instrumentation it deserves.

Anyway… I’m getting very impatient for my new guitar to arrive.  It’s been a couple of weeks hasn’t it?  Maybe it’ll come today or tomorrow and I can play with it over the weekend.  :-)