all of it...it just keeps...going

Time wears away, dulls memories, dulls experiences. Sometimes that's a blessing, sometimes that's a curse. I spent the first part of my grown-up life with these lyrics in my head:  

Some things...will never change 
They just stand there looking backwards 
Half unconscious from the pain

Thinking to myself, "This guy knows what it's like to be me, what I've had to survive, how I stand every day looking backward half-unconscious from the pain of my MEMORIES."

Fine, I was 19 and may have misheard the lyrics a bit. Of COURSE it's a song about heroin. They all are.

Anyway, right now it's a blessing to forget and let some things fade. I'm changing habits left and right, trying to shake myself out of this funk. I start with lists. Sometimes the lists get me through the next hour, but mostly they get me through the next few days. I pay the bills, I go to appointments, I cross items off my lists. I feel productive and useful.

 I get to work before sunrise and get out of class after dark. I'll miss the sun but my skin will be amazing. That must be the secret to my amazing skin: my late teens and 20s spent sleeping during the day and working all night may give me cancer someday, but my corpse will look a good ten years younger. So, I've got that going for me.

I went in yesterday for a pre-crown appointment, the logical end and culmination of Medicaid dental services from 1995. Just in time, too, as small pieces of the cheap filling started to crumble away last week. I had to go right back in this afternoon for a new temporary, as the first one didn't seal correctly. The pain was so bad that I cried in the dentist chair. I was so embarrassed. I didn't even cry from the twisting grinding pain of childbirth or the dull ache of bone break when my face got smashed, but there I sat, leaking tears like a kid. Toothache can bring down monarchies, I'm sure of it.