I think after this afternoon, I’ve officially been kicked out of the Crest Kid’s club. I mean, with the horror story report the dentist gave me this afternoon — my first visit to a dentist in about 6 years — I find it hard to believe they won’t come and pull my membership card.

The gory details? At least 6 cavities, a couple of root canals (with a porcelain crown on one for good measure), two previous fillings that will have to be redone because the jackass who did them made them too large, and a pair of impacted wisdom teeth as the crown jewel in the menagerie of dental delights. I’m getting a bit faint just thinking about it all.

At least I don’t have to worry about all the work bankrupting me, thanks to the wonders of dental insurance. That way, I can put all my energy into freaking out over the impending drill and cut sessions — currently slated to start on Sept. 12. Here’s hoping they can knock my ass out for most of the big jobs.

Gray and rainy skies and damn if I’m not loving it. With a mindset like that, I think I could do well in the Pacific northwest. But here at my desk, I’m more worried about hypothermia than moisture.

With the A/C cranking, it’s like a meat freezer in here. I’ve actually taken to bringing a sweatshirt with me to the office every day, and every hour or so I’m in the bathroom defrosting my fingers under a running stream of boiling water. Of course, this will all change in a few months when thoughts of keeping cool are replaced by thoughts of keeping warm, at which point I’ll find something new to bitch about.

At home, my desktop system has once again forgotten how to boot into OS X. It’s done this before, and I know how to fix it. Of course, the fix means spending an evening reinstalling the operating system and weeks tweaking things until they’re just right again.

With it being a franken-puter spliced together with a host of after-market parts, I can’t say I’m surprised when it decides to do something flakey. My kingdom for the cash (or at least a decent line of credit) to get myself one of those lovely new Mac Pro‘s.

Tic-tac. Two in a row.

Another month underground in the sunshine, and I’ve popped my head into the gray and blue of the world outside to see if I still have a web site. Somehow my stats say I still have people who visit every now and again. Imagine that.

While most of the month has gone by well, there have been a few occasions where I’ve given and received grief that could have been avoided with just a couple of well timed communications. And then there were times when just keeping my big yap shut and my big ears open would have done wonders. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out when to do which, and other times it’s just hard to do — period.

Okay, what other vague and foggy bits of wisdom can I impart here? Fire is hot and ice is cold. Brakes are for stopping, unless you’ve gone far too long without replacing them, in which case brakes are for chewing apart your drums and rotors and increasing your auto repair bills exponentially. Cleaning lung out of your pots is easier than cleaning pot out of your lungs (or so I would imagine). That, and babies decide when they are born, and you can toss any preconceived notion of a schedule out the window.

Oh, and if anyone reading this thinks it’s about them, they’re probably wrong. If anyone reading this thinks it isn’t about them, then it probably is. Wrong is right and right is the opposite of left.

You still reading this crap? Go outside and play in the river or something!

So I find myself awoken at the godless hour of 4:30 am this morning, having been forcefully roused from my slumber by one of those particularly loud Matthew Lesko commercials running on the television. Usually when this happens, the tube gets turned off and I fall back to sleep the next moment, yet here I am writing instead of sleeping. If I plan to make it through the day as planned, it looks like coffee is going to be part of the equation.

This was all after a rather unforgettable Friday; some of it public record and some not. I mean, it’s not everyday I find myself sitting at an outdoor cafe in Little Italy, sipping a beer and smoking a cigar — this after walking around said ethincly-name neighborhood in search of a shop to buy said cigar from. Nor is it every day I go out to have celebratory birthday drinks with friends and a fancy pizza dinner at Lombardi’s.

The rest of the weekend looks to involve Coney Island, coffee shop sketching, working on blog layouts and other such unrelated things. I look forward to writing about them soon.