A Luncheon Visit

My son in law, Seeth, took me out for lunch the other day.

Just the two of us. It was a guys out day, I guess. It was nice. I brought him to a restaurant called The Great Catch, a Bit of Boston, in Zephyrhills, the town next door to where I live in Wesley Chapel, which is themed like a seafood shack on Cape Cod. There are several restaurants down here with references to New England.

One was called Coney Island Hot Dogs, which sadly went out of business a while back. I liked it. I think it is a Mexican restaurant now.

Another is a breakfast place themed like New York City subways and trains. I love trains. Always have. Since I was a kid. I remember taking the metro from New Haven into Grand Central station in New York as a child. I saw the 1964 Worlds Fair that way. What a trip!

I assume a lot of northeasterners moved down here and felt nostalgic. I’m one of them.

It’s nice for an old nor’eastener like myself to see a brace of nostalgia from New England in my new home. Thanks, La Florida.

Seeth and I, along with talking about normal stuff, you know? The weather, how we are doing, what is new in our lives, our jobs, or in my case, what projects I’m doing currently in my workshop since I don’t, you know, actually have a job or anything, what’s going on in our communities, the weather, he brought up something metaphysical.

What we thought about the world in general. You know?

You know: Life. The universe. Everything.

I don’t know how it started. But we’ve had conversations like this before. Seeth can be very philosophical. So can I.

My views have been all over the metaphysical spectrum all my life going all the way back to grade school and catechism in catholic school in the good old, very old, catholic church days of my youth, and through puberty, and coming of age in high school, and having a girl friend, who I loved and lost and regret.

And knocking my head against adulthood, and college, and marriage, and parentage, and obligations I did not anticipate, and religion whether it mattered or not-really let’s now be serious, and working a real job, and kid raising, and divorcing, and rebuilding my life, and salvaging my daughter’s life, and at 70 years old today, I really don’t know what the fuck I believe in anymore.

I’m kind of agnostic now. I don’t know what I believe.

But Seeth’s words struck me. I follow YouTube channels of scientists and mathematicians who say the world is really stranger than we can imagine.

Like. Bizarrely. Strange.

Robert Heinlien is purported to have said, “Not only is the world queerer than we believe, it is queerer than we can believe.”

That’s not just a monstrosity. That’s a heresy.

A heresy of science.

The Scientific method, going as far back as Francis Bacon, says that science is based on three principals.

One: The world runs on rules.

Two: The human mind can understand these rules.

Three: The method of revealing these rules is the Scientific Method.

 

That’s it. That is the basis of all modern science and understanding. All industry, technology, and modernity. And all of everything. Believe it like a religion or die like a heathen.

What Heinlein said was a violation of this principle. He said that we can’t understand how the world works.

It makes no sense.

The world is just... fucked up. Totally. And there is no way any of us can ever understand it.

Period.

Science, from what I understand, seems to agree.

Richard Feynman said that his graduate students would often come to him and say, “Dr. Feynman. Quantum physics just makes no sense!” And he would say, “Just shut up and do the math. The math works.”

That’s it? Shut up and follow the protocol?

Math is the holy spirit of science.

It is ineffable.

Un-understandable.

Just plain fucked up.

Like in every other religion. But it works. Don’t question it. Just use it. Take it as given and shut the fuck up you little, acolyte, scientific heathens.

I heard recently that some quantum particles can go backwards and forwards in time. Simultaneously.

Evidence or interpretations or incarnations of stuff at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern say so. So it must be taken seriously. Scientifically. So. And I believe it. How can I do other?

Shit, yes. How fucked up is that? Put that in your differential equation and derive it.

Science doesn’t tell us what the world is. It tells us what it looks like. How we perceive it to be. It tells us how it appears. What it means to us. What it puts on our plates and offers us for dinner. Take it or leave it, as our mothers used to say. That is all.

Not what it is.

“I think that now I am mostly agnostic,” I replied to Seeth’s observations about the world earlier. “I just don’t know what is going on in this world and I probably never will. And you know what? I’m good with that.”

I guess I’ve reached a comforting conformity of non-committal commitment. Make with that what you will.

“Though I have gone through phases all my life of religious beliefs and atheism,” I continued, “which is a normal oscillation, I think. All things considered and all people included. We all change our minds now and then.

“Now I don’t know what to believe.

"Though if I was pressed for it today, if someone wanted a direct answer. If my feet were held to the fire. I would say that I am left of center in my beliefs; political, social, and spiritual. I am an old school liberal from the Baby Boomer era of the 1960’s and proud of it, but I am not someone whose beliefs lie at the extreme nut job end of each side of the spectrum. Either way. Right or left. I am sympathetic to my fellow man and woman.

“And above all else, I try to understand other people. I always have. And I love everybody. That includes you, by the way. My son and you, my reader of this essay.

“Spiritually, I believe there is something out there, something greater than us. A god/God if you will. And that It/He/She is controlling everything. But I don’t think any religion in the world has a real concrete idea of what that God is like. They are all right and they are all wrong, which makes no sense at all. But that is life. Ultimately senseless.

“Basically, I have no fucking clue, I guess.”

Seeth said that he is fond of the Zen religious beliefs, which I readily agreed with.

“Buddhism,” I advanced, “preaches that everything is God,” I said, finding myself glad of some common ground with my friend/son in law.

“I feel that might be true. You are God, I am God, those trees, grass, and houses are God. As well as that toxic waste site at the edge of our town is God.

God is the totality of living and life. The earth, the planets, the galaxies. God is reality. God is existence. God is good. Great, even. God is evil. Horrific, even. God is right. God is wrong. God is everything,”

God is a horror. And an honor.

That’s funny. And frightening. Terrifying, actually.

God is a joke.

Horrifyingly so.

But a joke on whom?

The most horrifying thing I have ever heard in my life is that we are actually eternal. We live forever.

We just keep coming back. Over and over again.

New universe. New planet. New life. New history. New everything. New nothing. And nothing ever changes even though everything is new. And different. But the same.

If that is truly true then, we will just go on living.

Life.

One day after another.

One life after another. Eternally.

Doing good things. Doing bad things.

Making civilizations and building dungeons.

Fighting wars and constructing cities.

Writing plays and epic poetry.

Doing great deeds. And dread ones.

Loving and hating each other.

And dying at the end.

And being reborn.

Somewhere else.

When we die in this life, we will be reborn in another somewhere else as someone else, man or woman, sinner or saint, great person or grisly one, and keep on living in another universe. On another planet. In a distant world. Much the same as this one. Like we have done eternally before. And will do eternally into the future. Just like the slice of God that we are. That you are. That we all are.

You are eternal.

Forever.

I reminded Seeth of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Reality Bomb, the explosive device that was so powerful it could destroy everything, past, present, and future. Time and space. Matter and energy. Now and eternity. All dimensions. All universes. Everything. Everywhere. All at once. Now and forever. Gone. And how horrible it was.

“Why didn’t they use it?” asked Arthur Dent, the protagonist of the story.

Good question.

“I believe we just have to make the best of the time we have,” said Seeth as I drove into the driveway of my house in Wesley Chapel, Florida.

The American southeast. Just above Tampa, Florida. With its New England themed restaurants. In the United States. In a universe that exists. For now. For a little while. And then is gone. And replaced by another. Happier or sadder. Or just, different. New. Or the same. In the end. Or the beginning. Universe. Full of us. Doing it all again.

May we have a world supporting essence. A reason to be.

Wise words from my son in law.

I must consider them.

A Toothy Grin

I never thought I would ever say the following words:

“I would rather have the root canal, please…”

Six months earlier…

My teeth have always been strong, though I used to get a lot of cavities when I was a child. Even with the massive doses of fluoride they used to swab on our teeth and shirt fronts in grammar school in the sixties, along with our vaccines, including the needle pricks on our left forearms one and the sugar cube one. That set us up for the latter part of the sixties where needle pricks and sugar cubes would take on a whoooole-neeeew-context. But that’s another essay.

Moving along.

Nobody knew what dental floss was and we only dragged the toothbrush back and forth across the fronts of our molars and front teeth, like they showed on the toothpaste commercials in Ozzy and Harriet breaks on our black and white Magnavox TV sets. Still, I could count on several fillings at each six-month visit. Four was not unusual.

Our dentist used drills that were powered by belts and pullies on a contraption that looked like a hideous mechanical insect from the industrial planet Giedi Prime in Dune. And he didn’t use Novocain for something as trivial as a cavity. That was just unthinkable. I remember the first time I did have a cavity as an adult, which was decades later, and they automatically injected me with Novocain. 

I thought, “Huh? What?” and “Why?”

Who, when, and where were covered, though.

By the time I was a teenager I stopped getting as many cavities, and except for having my wisdom teeth pulled before going to college, with Novocain this time, I was mostly dentist-free. My face was so numb that lit cigarettes kept dropping in my lap as I drove home. I pretty much didn’t have any more dental issues after that for decades. Or cigarettes cascading into my lap.

Well, time and tide pull all teeth, as they say.

One peculiarity with my jaw is that I am missing my canines-they never came in. This limited my prospects as a vampire and made my appearance a little strange. The rest of my teeth spread out to take up the extra space like passengers on a subway trying to eke out the most personal territory on the A-train as they could, as one would do.

This had the effect that whenever I smiled my mouth looked like Stonehenge. Well, it was my upper teeth that were missing, so I looked like Stonehenge hanging upside down. Droop-henge? Tooth-henge? Either way it was hilarious. For those around me, that is.

My teeth were straight and healthy in other ways, and my mother asked the orthodontist if I needed braces when the time for such things came. Though she did it in a 1950’s Mom manner.

“If he doesn’t get braces will he lose his teeth by the time he’s forty years old?” she asked the doctor.

Moms back then had an obsession with their children turning forty and what perils that might entail for some reason.

I remember both my older brothers having braces for as much as five years, after which they looked pretty much as they had before getting them, and they made no attempt to hide the agony of them from me in every way possible. Brothers are like that.

To this day I believe the orthodontist tightened their braces each month with a torque wrench. So when the doctor said “No,” to my mother’s blunt question, I was relieved.

But I always hated the gaps in between my teeth. I’d hate biting into an apple and there would be furrows carved in the channel where I bit into it. I’d hate getting popcorn kernels embedded in my gums around my teeth. It seemed unnatural. Though I still get popcorn kernels stuck in between my teeth today. I guess that’s an everybody problem. Everybody who eats popcorn, that is.

So I got braces when I was 45 years old, Mom knew what she was talking about. The orthodontist pulled together my front teeth, trying to keep them as symmetrical as possible. Then when they were all shuffled together, I had one Sarsen stone sized gap on the left side of my mouth instead of several smaller gaps scattered amongst the Bluestones.

This I addressed by getting a titanium post dug into my jaw and a false tooth attached to it. I called it my alien implant, and I’ll put in a good word for you with the spacemen on the mother ship if you like.

Part of the reason for this much orthodontal-agony was vanity, of course. But I was also volunteering at a community theater, and I thought it might improve my stage presence. I doubt anybody noticed, but I felt better about myself, sporadically. Though when I see pictures of myself from that time today I can't help but think they could have played my face like a xylophone.

As I aged so did my teeth and jaws. Gums receded, nerves grew more sensitive, porcelain discolored and decayed, and calculus grew. I never could get calculus in college, but I got it in my mouth just great.

It started to hurt when I flossed. I started having pet toothaches that I could always count on like a loyal puppy. Places that hurt when I drank something hot or cold.

I had my first root canal about fifteen years or so ago. The tooth in question was dead, the nerves were at least, so it didn’t hurt very much. The shots of Novocain pinched but the drilling didn’t phase me at all.

I had always thought that root canals were very painful. This one took a while and was uncomfortable, but not that bad otherwise and I thought, “Hey, this ain’t so bad!” 

My second root canal cured me of that misconception. This was an upper front tooth, and its nerve was alive and kicking, um… nerving. The nerve of it!

It gave me a run for my dental bill.

And now back to where I started. Six months ago…

My right lower jaw had been aching. It was more than uncomfortable. It was a pain too painful because it was pretty much in my whole jaw from the empty spot where a wisdom tooth had once lived to my front teeth. On the left side was one tooth that had a grudge against over and under temperatured liquids so now it was hard to negotiate my sustenance on either side of my mouth. Since absorbing nutrients directly into my skin like a jungle orchid was out of the question I had to find another option.

I mentioned it to my hygienist and my dentist. She took some X-rays and poked around, but not much more. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” they said. “Let us know if it gets any worse.”

I thought I had just let them know! But what do I know?

I started wearing a mouth guard on my teeth and gradually the whole jaw settled down and got only merely uncomfortable, but not really painful.

So I was surprised when my hygienist brought up that I had an abscess on my gum at the back of them. I think she called it an abscess, it looked like a mouth sore but it didn’t hurt.

She took some X-rays and the dentist came in and went over them with me. He pointed out faint lines on the X-ray. I looked. “Ah-huh,” I said faux comprehendingly.

“You might have some cracks along the root. We can’t really tell. I want to refer you to an orthodontist,” he said. “We might have to remove the tooth.”

“Oh,” I exclaimed. “An extraction?”

“Yes. And then you would get an implant.”

“Ye!” I exploded. “I got one of those here,” pointing to an upper tooth where the Sarsen sized hole had been and a false tooth on an alien implant now is. The thought of getting another one was not pleasant. Having that hole filled with a false tooth had taken at least two years and was not at all fun.  It had been part of my whole mouth beautification process when I decided to get braces and reign in my wandering teeth, also not a pleasant experience. “We might be able to do a root canal on it.”

“Oh?” that sounded better.

“The orthodontist you’ll be consulting will tell us.”

And with that they gave me a name and address and instructed me to get an appointment for a consultation. “If she can do the root canal she’ll do it right then,” he said. 

That was encouraging.

So I went home and called. They gave me an appointment for the next week. After the examination with Ashley, the hygienist, and some X-rays, etc., Dr. Medina came in to speak with me and explain the X-rays.

“You have an infection in your jaw,” she said.

“Oh,” more exclaiming. I was saying a lot of “Oh’s” lately. “Will I need an antibiotic?”

“Yes, I will prescribe one for you before you leave.”

“What do you recommend for the tooth?”

“We could do a root canal or extract it and put in an implant,” Pretty much what Dr. Patel, my dentist, had said to me already.

“Which do you recommend?”

“Well, it’s really up to you,”

“I have an implant already,” I said with some distaste. “And I’d rather not do that to another tooth.

“I would prefer the root canal, please.”

And there it was. Me requesting an orthodontist to drill out one of my teeth and fill it with mouth cement.

Well, what do you know?