[sic]

The proof of my idiocy wound, 24 hours later (don’t click it if your squeamish at seeing it this size):

As I told Susan the night of the injury: if I can’t operate a simple pocket knife safely how can I ever be trusted around a blender. Or a baseball bat. Sigh.

The kind comment of the LA Fire Department’s Brian Humphrey calling me courageous in response to yesterday’s post about the last few months of my job search is greatly appreciated, but it takes a different kind of bravery to post a photo of me I found this morning while looking for my map of Death Valley. You’ll have to check it out after the jump because I’m too chicken to put it up ffront here, but first some background info to help soften the ridiculousness of the shot.

It was taken 17 years ago in September of 1990 in what I would hyperbolize as the prime of my resurrected life. I was about eight months separated from my first wife (and my then less-than-one-year-old daughter Katie). I had an apartment in the south of Glendale and a good enough job with Sparkletts with a route that included parts of Eagle Rock, Glassell Park, Atwater Village and Glendale. In addition the physical rigors of the job had helped me to drop about 40 pounds, aided by the fact that the bulk of my diet no longer consisted of delivery pizza and bags of Reese’s peanut butter cups. As a bonus I enjoyed an increased social life. In short it was a time for me to feel my oats.

Having said all that, hindsight is not kindsight… especially when it comes to the fashions of the past, which ryhmes with aghast which is how I feel seeing the then-me now. So without further delay hence, let the pointing and laughing commence:

(more…)

Let’s just put it this way: I’ll be going to the store for some tomato juice later. That’s right, Susan and I got ambushed by a skunk this morning with me getting the worst of the juicing. We were nailed barely a quarter mile into our second consecutive four-mile morning walk. Trust me on this it could’ve been a lot worse, which I’ll explain below.

Here’s how it went down. Susan and I hit the streets around 5:20 a.m. this morning. We headed north to Sunset then over to Parkman then down to Silver Lake Boulevard. Walking up the west side of the street with Susan to my right we past several properties until to my left was a short retaining wall, atop which were crudely installed some plywood boarding to keep the property’s sloping hillside from migrating.

At about the midway point across the front of that lot from out of nowhere all of a sudden a surprising spritz of something swept over my face from the left side. It hit my cheek, my nose, went in my eyes and on my lips. The succession of my rapidfire thoughts that followed were “I don’t hear any sprinklers” followed by “that’s not a sprinkler that’s rain” followed by “rain doesn’t feel oily like that!” followed by “rain doesn’t burn like that!!” followed by “rain doesn’t smell like that either!!!”

Right about that last thought was when I heard something scrambling across the dirt and weeds about arm’s length from me and at elbow height and so it was at this point that I decided it was high time to alert Susan — who was still assessing the spray that got past me and struck her — to the situation. I believe I said “Skunk! Holy shit!! We’ve been skunked!” And I said it loudly. Then I ran into the street totally like a girly man. Like a shameless stinky gesticulating little girly man.

A few seconds later I managed to regain most of my composure and return to Susan’s side where I pointed out to her our rapidly retreating black-and-white attacker with tail up but only at half-staff heading south away from us. This was followed by a few moments of Susan and I wiping and smelling ourselves to determine the extent of the damage.

Potential denial-phase aside, there just wasn’t all that much in the way of stank. Definitely present was that familiar bouquet of burned rubber with notes of rancid onions, but it was surprisingly subdued. And while never actually having come into direct contact with the projectile anal secretions of a skunk before, I do remember when our dog Shadow did back many years ago. She got hit badly and despite countless baths I swear I could smell remnants on her even after a year later. Plus I’ve certainly had to endure the noxious clouds let loosed on many an occasion by the nocturnal emissions of the skunks around our house… sometimes it’s bad enough to wake us up.

Thus is why I say it could’ve been a helluva lot worse. Given the skunk’s three-foot distance and strategic high-ground position, if Pepe (or Penelope) Le Pew had wanted to unload upon us it most certainly could have brought the rain, baby.

At best we suffered an abbreviated warning stream shot across the bow. Or maybe that’s giving the skunk too much credit and it wasn’t a warning at all. Maybe we just benefited from encountering a skunk that had sprayed recently and hadn’t yet had a chance to replinish its depleted supply of stank. Perhaps we surprised it out of its sleep and it decided to go to guns right away. Whatever the reasons and background all I know is that I’m having a much easier time dealing with the smell than I am with the fact that I had skunk ass juice in my eyes and on my lips.

But anyway, given that after the conclusion of a preliminary olfactory investigation we weren’t terrifically odious Susan and I opted to continue the march, paying particularly close attention to dog walkers and joggers who’d pass us and enter our wakes to see if they’d let out a deep sniff and a “phew!” None did. At least none that we could audibly discern.

Upon arriving home, whoo boy did the dogs take immediate note of the additional aroma and all the compromised clothing promptly went into the washing machine for the first of repeated cycles in they hope they can be salvaged. I’ve washed my face several times, too. With hydrogen peroxide. Like Lady Macbeth trying to get the blood off her hands, baby.

I did it again. I got my hopes up high and huge that I would be The Perfect Choice for a gig in Hollywood I went after. Felt even moreso after I got to the second interview with the new marketing director.

But that second dance was in the middle of December. And a “Happy New Year” follow-up email sent the week after Christmas went unanswered. Seeing the writing on the wall I sent another one to the firm’s HR director about a week ago telling her I was indeed still available and very much interested. That one drew a response but it told me more than I needed to know:

Thanks for the follow up. We have narrowed in on [a] specific candidate though we’re still in the negotiation phase so the decision is not yet final. I will keep you posted.

Awwwww, come on! Didja have to go there with the “yeah we left you behind but we might come back and throw the bone in your general direction if our first and oh-so-infinitely more appealing and probably better qualified not to mention spiffier dresser with flawless skin and perfect teeth and higher IQ and more experience and more pleasing personality and wicked sense of humor along with a better cell phone who’s fluent in five languages turns us down.”

Really, now. A simple blanket blow-off of “We’re still in the process of finalizing our choice” would’ve been fine. Would’ve been better. Because to be frank this entire job searching thing is one big egosuck — especially when you have to hunker down and suffer through repeated rejections no matter how good you think you are. No matter what benefit you might think you’ll be.

So in the days that have passed since being told I was second best (or perhaps third or fourth) I’ve been recovering from the blow. And by recovering I mean trying to dig deep and steel my resolve to stand up and smile and dance with whoever next comes down the CareerBuilder/Monster/JournalismJobs/DotCom pipe.

I do my best to keep the outlook positive. I do my best to know that this isn’t forever and that there is some company out there that will slap me on the back and welcome me inside.

But it gets dreary. It gets mean. It gets scary. I find myself in the car on the way to the store, or walking the dog, or taking a picture or doing something in the backyard, or reading, or sleeping, and suddenly there’s a physical pain I experience as the voice inside my head tells me I don’t have what it takes. That I’m not tough enough or employable enough so why not just give up and become a cabbie or a clerk at Radio Shack. Do something punk, the voice tells me. Anything!

Ahhh, but I can’t do that. I won’t do that. And I’m still telling that voice no. And I’m still telling that voice that as difficult as it is it could be a helluva lot worse and lonelier if I didn’t have the love of my life standing with me. And I’m still telling that voice it is just a matter of time. And as such I pick myself up and go through the motions all over again, albeit a little more wary. A little less enthusiastic.

I applied to two jobs this morning. Two jobs I could and would kick ass at. Let’s see what happens.

I wasn’t invited to this meme party but I saw Cybele was and so was Sean too so without explanation or my usually extrapolation I’m chronologically crashing this “Five Things You (Probably) Don’t Know About Me” thing:

1) My nickname as a baby pretty much up until I hit double digits was “twig.”

2) Dad? At 5 years old I thought I was related to famed L.A. Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax because we were both left-handed.

3) Weapon of mass distraction. At 7 years old I peed on someone in self defense.

4) Not worthy! The scariest thing I’ve ever done was when I was 24 and mounted the gentleman caller scene from Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” on three-days rehearsal with the wonderful actress Beverly Leech for Stella Adler in one of her legendary master classes.

5) Permission to come aboard! I joined the United States Navy. Twice, at age 18 and again at 28. Passed the physical, took the oath and everything. Never served. Discharged both times. Loooooooong stories.

Bonus) Cross my heart and hope to die. At 30 I had a needle stuck in my eye. While wide awake. No anesthetic Had to watch it and everything.

I may be putting too much stock in how proudly and positively I deal with the stresses and disses and setbacks that afflict me. I’m not an alcoholic. I’m not an abuser or a destructor. Sure there’s some self-pity I wade through but I recognize it and strive to keep the levels down and I’m always on the lookout for the good in the world even if it’s hard to find.

But yeah… that job I wrote about wanting so bad a couple weeks ago? The one I thought I was perfect for and to which i could bring all my enthusiasm and talents to bear?

Well I didn’t even make the first cut. Didn’t even score an initial interview. Found out last night just before bed via a polite “you’re not it” in my email inbox. Had to take a Sleep-Ez to silence the flock of whygulls flying around my head so I could get some shuteye. It worked, but I woke up with them clucking and squawking in full feathered formation this morning.

So I’m getting the hell away from the computer right now and out of the house right now and taking the birds with me onto my bike for a long ride right now because I’m finding even the littlest most meaningless of things are setting me off: The repair man next door who doesn’t know how to speak below a minor roar. The woman in the newish 4-Runner digging with her two kids through the recycle bin waiting on the street to be emptied. The disbelief expressed via a Blogging.la commenter that I didn’t ask a specific question to someone I interviewed yesterday.

These are trivial matters but my amplifier is set to 11 and I’ve got to escape the distortion. This is the way out.

Let me make one thing clear. I would rather do almost anything than go to the dentist. Not necessarily because I’m phobic to the pain they give or the instruments of torture they use, but because since the repairs I had to endure after my motorcycle accident coming up on 12 years ago my chompers have been one accident waiting to happen after another. With my teeth’s bonds and veneers and crowns and bridges and other hardware, it’s always just a matter of time until something fails, architecturally, structurally, philosophically, whatever. And that means mo’ money to the tooth doc. Lots mo’ money.

The last failure was November 2004. As a guest of the Nature Conservancy, I was on the Channel Island of Santa Cruz for a couple days volunteering to help build breeding pens for the critically endangered island fox population there. We hadn’t arrived at the beautiful historic off-limits-to-the-public ranch in the magnificent and pristine interior of the island more than an hour earlier when I opted to snack on some pretty tough jerky and off came a crown. To make matters worse I didn’t know it had disengaged and I went and swallowed the thing. Now I’m not some weeny tot. There are people I know who would’ve demanded passage back to civilization right there and then, but I’m not one of them Instead, I just played it cool and did my job and my best to chew on and talk out of the side of my mouth opposite to the now gaping chasm that existed on the other. That, and I took a lot of ibuprofen because it hurt. But it’s more than the physical pain. Each incident is just another reminder that I’m a cut-rate humpty dumpty, put back together not with all the king’s resources, but with the wheatpaste and chicken wire the insurance companies would cover. Hey, I’m not knocking the end result — it could be a loooooot worse. But the when-not-if guaranteed obsolescence factor is a tad frustrating.

Anyway, when I got back from the island I made an appointment with my dentist who I’ve been going to since 2000 and a few hundred dollars later I was all patched up and wondering how long it would be until the next visit. Well that was today, to replace a fallen bonding.

This bond was special. We go waaaaay back, it and me. There’s older infrastructure in my mouth, but no one gave this a chance to live so long. I was at work when the previous one came off in 2003. April. I had tickets to the Dodgers that evening and I had a date with an ebullient and adorable and righteously religious young lady who had no romantic interest in me whatsoever. I knew this, I just liked hanging out with her and she me. But I certainly didn’t want to hang out with her wearing a real-life version of Billy-Bob teeth so I called my regular dentist who was out of town. I begged for a referral, which I called and that dentist couldn’t fit me in either. I begged another referral from that dentist’s receptionist and the third time was the charm; I was able to get some chair time. Once there after having to wait and wait and wait I told him the situation and asked if he could just slap something — anything! — on the broken tooth to make it look a bit less hideous in time for the game. He did as I asked but after he finished he said I’d be lucky if that quicky job would stay on a week.

It lasted more than three years until it finally gave up last Thursday night while I was using the waterpik. Fortunately I didn’t swallow this one, and even more fortunately it was pretty much intact and I had a package of over-the-counter dental adhesive just for such a situation. Too bad the stuff works better in theory than in practice. The bonding came off again Friday night during the Ride-Arc bike ride when we stopped for grub at a taco truck. I pocketed it, finished my tacos and finished the ride well after midnight. On the way home I visited the Sav-On on Beaudy and Sunset (closed) the Walgreens in Echo Park (closed) and even the Vons south of Los Feliz Village (open!) in search of another package of dental glue. Vons didn’t have it. Saturday afternoon Susan and I stopped at Walgreen’s again and they had one remaining package (at least I’m not alone!) of a different version of the stuff. That crap worked even worse than the first. It would hold the tooth on for varying amounts of time, from a few minutes to a few hours, but ultimately I’d feel that telltale slip.

The earliest the dentist could see me was Wednesday, meaning I had five days of glue-and-slip, glue-and-slip. But I was cool. I wasn’t slated to give any speeches or make any new acquaintances or see any old ones… at least not until Tuesday night with my friend Cybele at the Golden Gopher Bar downtown for a blogger ge-together. So I bided my time until Tuesday and right before Cybele picked me up last night I dutifully glued the bond back on, said a little prayer that it would hold and off we went.

It slipped loose not even a mile away from the house. Dammit! But again, instead of being some wuss and asking Cybele to turn around and drop me back at the ranch, I just apologized to her for all the fingers I was sticking in my mouth, told her why and on we went. Midway through the evening I was having a chat with Jay from Blogging.la when the little bond finally had enough. This time in mid-sentence it didn’t just slip, instead it timed its exit perfectly and shot out of my mouth into the dark void of the Gopher’s floor. Jay was either very polite or perhaps didn’t see the tiny white projectile fly from my face and you know what? I barely broke stride in what I was telling him. And when I was finished I didn’t even bother looking for it. Fuck it. Instead I just talked to the other bloggers the rest of the time we were there, Billy-Bob tooth and all.

Besides my dentist appointment to have the damage repaired was only a few hours away the next day.

When I arrived to his Encino office this morning I was met by a new and overly-friendly office manager. Make no mistake, office managers for dental firms are hardcore, by-or-die salespeople. If this office was Glengarry Glen Ross then this office manager would be the friggin’ Alec Baldwin “second prize is a set of steak knives” character. She starts off all gushy and sympatico and then hits me with how I haven’t been in for a cleaning in two years and why don’t we go ahead and set up an appointment with the hygienest before you see the doctor.

I pass on that offer.

After I’m strapped into the chair the dentist comes in and of course orders an X-ray. Low and behold he shows me a dark gray area at the base of a tooth a couple away from the broken one. “Looks like an abcess,” he says. I remind him it’s the same abcess he points out to me every single time I come in and that I’m not here to deal with the abcess I’m here to deal with getting a new bond which an X-ray wasn’t needed for.

So he “tssks” and he “hmmms” and he sighs and says “oh boy” as in “oh boy does your mouth ever suck” and I just want to scream and tell him to fixie my owwie as cheaply as possible. But instead I keep a lid on it, and he says…

“We should talk about implants.”

“I like my breasts the way they are, doc. So does my wife.”

He laughs at this. But he’s serious referring to the canyon where the two lower molars I’ve been missing for eight and three years respectively used to be. Both were damaged by the crash and never repaired after the insurance ran out. Eventually they became too far gone and the first one I had yanked in 1998. The second one in 2003. Good times.

In the years since I’ve left the void a void because implants run a serious eight grand. I have neither the motivation or that amount of money to change that course, but I figure what the hell and ask if there’s any option that could fill it that would be cheaper and allow me to laugh out loud without throwing a covering hand up over my piehole for the first time since last century. The fact is, I’m not sure how good I’ve been at hiding my shortage of teeth to the world. I’d like to think either I have been successful or I’m just around people who are awesome polite or don’t give a shit if I’m a couple tusks short of a full load. Either way it’s a win-win, but still I wouldn’t mind shoring things up, even if it’s only a band-aid solution.

The dentist pooh-poohs it for being just that: a temporary fix , but I remind him that where my pearly off-whites are concerned temporary fixes are a semi-permanent course of action and I press him. He gives in and reluctantly lays out the details. I say I might be interested if it doesn’t cost too much. Then he calls the office manager in and asks her to work up an estimate for the work to my front tooth and the denture. A few minutes later she comes in and tells me $1,500. $850 for the bonding and $650 for the partial.

The latter doesn’t surprise me, but the bonding seems way high. The crown I had replaced back in 2004 barely cost half that!

She adjourns for a confab with the boss and a few minutes later comes in and says if I agree to both procedures he’ll knock off two-hundies as a courtesy. But if I just do the bond, that stays at $850.

Bitches.

Second prize is a set of steak knives.

Still I had to admire what a closer this gal is! So I “tsk” and I “hmmm” and I say “oh boy” as in “oh boy, you’re running some kinda racquet here ain’tcha?” and she just sits there holding out a pen and the estimate for me to sign probably wondering if she remembered to reschedule her manicure appointment until I finally and defeatedly say “fine” and sign.

An hour later my front tooth is all rebonded and the impressions have been made for my falsies, which I’ll come back a week from now to have installled and the office manager will hit me hard again with how important it is for me to schedule a cleaning with the hygienist and the denist will have yet another look at my X-rays on the computer and “tssk” and “hmm” and “oh boy.”

And then we’ll do it all again when the next time comes. And there will be a next time.