Monday, April 26, 2004 :::
My Eatin’ Teeth: The State of Senior Dental Care In America
The other day I was enjoying some lunch at my favorite Whataburger. I was studying for a test about the variability of exchange rates between foreign currencies as they relate to the relative annual changes in the consumer price indices of the respective countries. So, as you could imagine, my mind began wandering and I looked out the window at the world passing me by, car by car, burger by burger.
Not long after my wandering attention starting searching for topics more entertaining than Purchasing Power Parity I saw a woman approaching the door. She was a tall glass of Texas WT, White Trash that is, Hillbilly. She was High Mileage, a few hundred odometer flips past her warranty date. Her shabby clothes were a mix of different trends gone by, a collage of roughly pasted Cosmo pages wrapped around a frame built for Whataburger consumption. She made for interesting people watching so I studied her as she approached the door.
Just as she was about to enter I saw her REMOVE HER TEETH. With a quick flip of the wrist she was all gums as she pulled back the door and entered. She stopped at the first table and set down her purse. From the purse she withdrew a plastic case that looked similar to the thing people use to store their retainers or other dental appliances. I assumed she was going to put her teeth away in anticipation of denture unfriendly menu items, such as a thick shake. To my surprise, instead of opening an empty case to store her teeth for safe-keeping she actually pulled out a second pair of teeth. She swapped the ones from the case with the ones that had been in her mouth just moments ago.
By now she knew I had focused my attention on her and her late-afternoon tooth rotation. Once the new teeth were in she smiled at me showing off the new set. They seemed more savage, with sharper canines, beastly and vampiric. If she were a wild animal it would be like some sort of transformation had taken place as she readied herself for the anticipated kill.
Just before she turned to head to the counter to place her order her smile became even wider and she winked at me. With an unabashed enthusiasm she made a clicking sound with her mouth that was timed in unison with her winks. Then she said, “Got my eatin’ teeth in now!” and headed for the counter.
Aside from its gruesome nature, the display made me proud. You see pictures all the time of the elderly in foreign countries all trying to eat corn and stale bread with a single rotten tooth protruding from their blue-black gums. Say what you want about our health care system for the elderly in this country, but we have the whole teeth thing figured out. Sure we have millions of citizens probably suffering because they cannot get the prescriptions filled through Medicare because the profit-gouging pharmaceutical companies need to make 1000% profit per pill. And I am sure there are home-stricken folks who cannot afford rovers or motorized wheelchairs. But, providing you don’t need government subsidized medication or mobility enhancement, then there is some fine vittles down at the WB and all you need is a few bucks and your eatin’ teeth.
::: posted by Mike at 1:43 PM
Wednesday, April 21, 2004 :::
Heroes or Victims? I can never tell anymore.
Last night in Illinois a tornado killed 4 people.
In the photo you can see all the signs of crisis. You got firefighters, emergency workers, rubble: all the major ingredients of the shit hitting the proverbial fan.
So I wonder this: An unpredictable and subsequently fatal event was visited upon innocent folks who did not wake up that morning and tell themselves in the mirror that it was a good day to die. That is sort of the victim package. You get dead without warning and your relatives get a call. So by modern standards and measures are these people not Heroes? Sure they didn’t do anything heroic, but either did the people who went to work at the Pentagon one day in mid September a few years ago. Both got killed and both situations were (regardless of what a government commission might intimate) unpredictable. It confuses me because there doesn’t seem to be any standard when the label of “hero” is placed on a corpse. Does there have to be a certain number of casualties? Does the needle of patriotic fervor need to be buried in the red-white-&-blue zone before the unwitting dead get elevated to honored martyrs?
I hope when I die I can just be dead and not be hassled with prosaic titles that look good in the headlines. But then again I guess that will depend on the location and circumstances of my death, now won’t it?
::: posted by Mike at 10:40 AM
