doped up at the dentist

I went to the dentist today, and asked for the happy gas. And yes, I was getting holes drilled in my head, and needles shoved into my gums, so I felt it was necessary to breathe deeply from a rubbery tube covering my nose. I need to be reminded to breathe out of my nose sometimes, even when there is drilling going on in the alternate air passage. Sometimes, my body is slow in responding to such things.

I like the nitrous because while my braincells dissolve into little pink bubbles of happiness, I can pretend that the sound of the drill is the sound of a radio inside my skull. You know, like the mom on Pete and Pete, how she had that metal plate in her head and could pick up radio waves. The drill begins to sound, with the help of oxygen deprivation, like someone tuning a radio, maybe trying to pick up a signal from outer space. I'm part of science while I stare at the probably asbestos ceiling. "La la la," I think. "Ha ha, I can only feel half my face! Ha ha!"

And Dr. Davey always tells stories; today was about how much worse the smog in LA used to be when he was a kid, and that there were no freeways until the '60s. He has a new assistant, who sounds Russian, and with all her knowledge of LA, I wondered if she wasn't somehow related to Galina. Because obviously all Russians south of Santa Barbara must somehow be related to Galina.

He talked about how he remembered swimming at his aunt's house in Los Angeles, somewhere, and that he came up from the water and didn't feel like he had come out of the water. The air was that bad. But really it just made me wonder what the fuck was wrong with his aunt's pool.

But then I just started listening to the radio in my head again.

And THEN he said that the gas was up too high, and that I wasn't enjoying any of his stories. And I think I laughed just slightly too heartily, and he turned the gas down. "Dammit," I thought. "He must have noticed how deeply I was breathing. Or that I was twitching just a little. Am I drooling?" I didn't trust the Russian to hold the straw properly. I didn't.

He went on to talk about the theory that freeways cause smog, but no! It's stop and go traffic that causes smog! "Yes, puhting on the brheaks," concurred the Russian. "Yeah, and when Jerry Brown was governor, he swore he wouldn't build another mile of freeway, and for eight years or something, there were no new freeways in California, and in that time, our population exploded! It was just ridiculous!" Dr. Davey talks like this a lot. Last time it was about how cheap it would be to live in Uruguay.

La la la.