Everybody's Talking, or, My Trip to the Dentist

Dear Readers,

Right now I'm staying up too late and listening to the Meat Puppets on my iPod. It's funny, but I'm listening to the song, "Meat Puppets" on the album, "Meat Puppets" by the band "Meat Puppets."

I highly recommend "Meat Puppets," the debut Meat Puppets album. Be warned: Meat Puppets music is an acquired taste. It's very strange. A lot of people don't like it.

And now the song is "Everybody's Talking" and it speaks to me in a really cool way. I like it very much. It's one of the things that I know I like in a very powerful way.

The first time I remember listening to "Everybody's Talking" was a few weeks ago when I was getting some cavities filled at the dentist.

I felt tired and crazy that day. It was cold and I had ridden my bicycle over there. I was full of juice and electricity. The best way I know how to describe it is like this: that morning I wanted to paint something - hieroglyphics, maybe - with my fingers in a violent way, or I wanted to howl, or throw pinecones at cars that I saw driving by that morning. I wanted to slay Goliath- to sling a rock into the forehead of the Philistine Champion. And then I wanted to cut off his head. I wanted to hack at his neck with a sword. I wanted to parade the bloody head around the countryside and the cities and all the kingdoms of men, holding the giant's head in my fist by its hair.

I couldn't do any of that stuff - paint violently, throw pinecones, slay Goliath, though, in good company, but at the moment, the moment I'm now relating, (and of course you'll have no idea what it was to be inside my body at the time) but at the time shortly before my dentist appointment I found everything around me very funny and alive. It's as if gigantic things were going on all around me and underneath the surfaces of the things I saw with my natural eyes.

People were looking at me, too, and talking. I felt like people were looking at me and thinking I was Pestilence, one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. And I thought all those people I saw on my bike ride and all those people I saw in the dentist office were smiling at me, but really they were thinking that I was a destroying angel who had come to lay waste to their village.

That morning, the morning of my dentist appointment, I thought I wasn’t really a man who went to the office and filled out paperwork, a man who wore slippers around the house and followed the stock market- nor was I really myself.

I was a real-life mythological beast. I was a beast with horns and with flames coming out of my horns. The flames weren’t coming out like the fireworks on the Fourth-of-July, but like the fire that will come when Doomsday comes. A way you feel in your mind and in your groin.

In another moment that morning, in the dentist office, when I was flipping through an issue of Parenting magazine, or maybe when I was signing my name at the check-in desk, I felt like I had an armful of plump grapefruit and I was headed for the county fair at dusk. I was walking all the way there, making holes in the ground where I stepped with my boots. I was headed for the Zipper or the Graviton or I was just going to go there to spit sunflower seeds shells and pet goats.

I was going to cut in line, too. I was going to shove my way through the crowd, I was going to have a look of doom on my face, and I was going to get challenged to a knife fight. Certainly somebody was going to challenge me to a knife fight. And when that happened, when some kid took out a knife and stuck it into my stomach, making blood come out, I was going to expand- expand first like a peacock, and then like a lion killing another lion, like a giant squid squeezing a ship- I was going to expand and swallow the kid with the knife.

Yeah, that's the way I felt that morning, and I was there in the dentist chair wearing a paper bib and they were drilling and squirting stuff into my mouth and stuffing cotton into it and my spit was flying all over the place and the dentist's assistant would sometimes tell me to close my mouth and let the sucker thing suck the superfluous saliva out of my mouth. I had the iPod ear buds in my ears and I was listening to "Everybody's Talking" by the Meat Puppets. I could faintly hear the dentist and the assistant chat about the movies that were playing in the theatre- which movies they had seen lately, which movies they wanted to see. Their conversation was very casual. (I heard enough of their talk to call it casual, and when my eyes were open I deciphered their body language- the way the dentist and the assistant were moving gave them away- they were very civilized and attractive.) But the way my senses were heightened (or maybe I should say altered) that morning while I was in the dentist chair made me think that the whole situation was bigger and more important and more terrifying and more telling of the true nature of the universe than maybe it really was.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa