Pricks, Pricks, and Pricks

Swimming with the Sharks
I went strolling through the Yellow Pages recently, looking for an attorney. (Before my wife or coworkers start getting skittish, I have some questions on copyrights.) I must’ve gone through six or seven pages of ads for personal injury attorneys before I saw any listings for other legal services. Looking over those ads, with their promises of “Getting you the money you deserve!”, just made me tired. When did we become such whiners? How did we go from the Greatest Generation to the Paid Victimhood Generation? To hear the lawyers tell it, there are no accidents anymore, only malicious and gross negligence. Common sense has been drawn and quartered, and left hanging from the gibbet of instant gratification and no personal responsibility.

Life after the Knife
Yes, dear readers, your favorite feline had a quick surgery last Thursday. Not that kind. I had a small abdominal hernia that needed attention before it became a large abdominal hernia. Things got off to a somewhat shaky start when the anesthesiologist came in to go over the procedure. “Mr. Cat? How are you this morning? So…you’re here to get your gall bladder out?”

“Hope not.”

Once we got all that worked out, it was pretty straightforward stuff. I remember the cold heat of the anesthesia crawling up my arm, then I was back in the recovery room. The doc sent me home with a scrip for Percoset…and that’s where it gets interesting.

Now, this being my first surgery, I’ve never had occasion to take the really good narcotics before. I’ve had morphine once, and I took an occasional Flexeril for migraines back in the day, but this is the first time I’ve had a regular regimen of painkillers. It’s an interesting effect: the world gets wrapped in cotton batting, and all your reactions are dampened. You can still function, but you don’t really care. It really hits me when I’m drifting off to sleep. See, I’ve always been a particularly vivid dreamer. Always in color. Always in stereo. Sometimes with credits. I’ve even got about a half-dozen recurring dreams that have developed over the years that I instantly recognize as dreams when I’m in them. Now, those that know me know that I am fascinated with the macabre, so they won’t be surprised at all to learn that these Percoset-fueled phantasms display a bit of the grotesquerie. I once had a friend try and convince me to drop acid. Her main selling point was that it took what was in your head, and made it real. I reminded her of the stuff that was in my head, and she agreed that I should keep away from the LSD. I mean, when you’re standing in a crowded country dining parlor, and there’s a large Venus flytrap in the corner that keeps opening to reveal a creature about the size of a four-year-old, with an alligator head and skin made out of a night sky, and at a nearby table there’s a little girl wearing a floral print dress and two long braids, who would be cute if her teeth weren’t miniature skyscrapers, and the crowd around the fireplace nervously watches the cast iron pot hanging there, because every so often it rattles just slightly, well…you want that to be just a dream.

The corporate veil. And piercings.
I understand that some companies, particularly those in the Service sector, don’t want their employees wearing their various piercings when dealing with the customers, but sometimes it would actually be preferable. At least, it would for those of us with overactive imaginations. We went out to a restaurant recently, and the waitress that served us had a bright blue band-aid on the side of her nose. I would rather have seen a little diamond stud there than to wonder if she actually had some suppurating hole on the side of her skull where she was balancing our food tray. I once worked with a guy that has so many piercings, he would be pulled apart in an MRI. Once he took them out, you couldn’t even tell – except for the slight whistling sound when he moved fast. If management had demanded that he cover all the perforations, he’d’ve looked like the Mummy, which would have been just as distracting and off-putting. Setting a presentation standard is all well and good, but requiring some sort of obvious cover over an almost unnoticeable puncture is going a bit too far.