Holly Northrop Blog

Overheard on the train into Manhattan:

"Look, there is the Empire State Building!" small blonde pre-teen child screaming wildly while pointing out the window.
"Can we go to the top?" the child's older blonder sister asked the parents.
"Yes, we will go to the top." The father answered.
"Can we go stand outside?" both children ask in unison.
"Yes, we can walk around on a platform." The father answered, already sounding exhausted.
After a few minutes of quiet the small pre-teen child asked her father, "Do you think they will bomb us today, daddy?"
"No honey, not today." The father smiled.

The Other White Metal
I had a filling fall out of my mouth earlier in the week and now, twenty-two hundred dollars later I have a nice, off-white temporary crown in its place. In two weeks, I will get the new color-matched crown. Seems that when things fall out that's bad, which is true for so much more then just fillings.

If I had known that I was going to need a porcelain-fused-to-metal crown instead of a simple filling, I would have self-medicated better. Especially seeing how I have a major gag reflex, (that's right not just in life but also for real) and the more uptight I am the more difficult it is to make a molding of my mouth. So without going into to much detail, let me just say that now, two more people on the planet consider me to be a nutty mess after having to spend two hours knee-deep in my mouth.

I couldn't see my regular, "Out of Network" dentist because he was booked solid until late September so I had to see his "Out of Network" protégé. Too bad there wasn't a price break on his latest charge.

Looking at the hole in my mouth with his little mirror, Dr. Protégé said, "You might need more then just a simple filling. You might need an Inlay."
"What the hell is that?" I asked, while straining to look down the hall for my usual dentist.
"An Inlay is where the surface of the tooth is still your tooth but the inside would be filled with gold."
"Gold, right, and how much does that cost? - ish" I sighed.
"Sixteen hundred dollars - ish." he replied.
"Fa-uck. Oh, I'm sorry." I said apologizing for dropping an F-Bomb so early in our relationship.
"I've heard worse," he whispered.

As Dr. Protégé began tilting my chair back, my back started having spasms. I quickly turned my TENS unit up. Thank god I already had it on. I wasn't even going to bring it let alone wear it. That is like the only thing I had any foresight on.

"What ever happened to gas? They used to give gas for everything. I remember getting gas for a cleaning." I started in with the nervous chatter that overwhelms me in stressful situations.
"We still have it but we only use it for patients that need to take the edge off."

Clearly, he was not seeing me for what I was.

"Hello? Right here." I said while raising my hand.
"Well, let's get in there and see what we have. Gas doesn't really do anything but get you high."
I just sighed and opened my mouth.

After what seemed like an eternity of suction, drilling, two additional shots of Novocain, enough water to drown me and wads of cotton rods, the assistant sat me up so I could rinse out all the old residue from the failed filling. As I was spitting out mouthfuls of silver chunks Dr. Protégé began speaking to my back, "Well, I have good news and I have bad news. Which do you prefer first?"

I roll my eyes at the wall, spit out another mouthful of dark grey water and said, "How about you don't fuck with me and just tell me."
"She's so funny." his assistant chimes in.
"Okay," clearing his throat, "…um well you don't need a root canal, but you do need a crown. There was a great deal of decay under the…"
"How much does that cost?" I interrupted.
"Eighteen hundred dollars - ish." I could tell he was trying to smile under his white mask.
"Of course it does." I laughed.

I considered calling Martha from the dentist to let her know just what the hell was happening but I knew that I was already on the edge of loosing it. So I thought I'd save that for outside, on the street amongst my fellow New Yorkers, where with a splitting headache I could stand over by Tony Rosenthal's bronze piece "Rondo" and watch my own distorted reflection crying into a cell phone.

All this comes on the tail of spending two hundred dollars for my "Out of Network" back doctor the day before, (which now pales in comparison), but I did manage to stave off the eight hundred dollar neck injections for now. Fuck it just chew more pain pills and shut up.

Money, money and money. It freaks me out when I know that I personally have spent over three grand in one week. That can't possibly be okay.

The timing on this is lousy. But then again, spending that kind of money is never, ever going to be light and causal. But see Martha and I just last week finally decided to deal with getting my ring resized. Martha bought me a beautiful diamond ring six years ago and I've hardly ever worn it. First it was because I was doing a lot more street photography and didn't want to walk around the Bowery with a rock on my finger. Then it I lost a shitload of weight and it didn't even fit on my thumb. But now seemed like a good time to take the ring to a jeweler. (Well, not now but a week ago.) We picked out a nice setting, something that was kind of ugly and looks more like a ring that I would have inherited, if I actually would have inherited anything. The ring is beautiful and I love it. It has two sapphires on either side of the diamond. We are celebrating sixteen years together next month and it just felt right to finally deal with the ring. But I know that if we would have had any idea that my mouth (of all things) was going to cost over twice as much as a new ring setting, well we wouldn't have done it and my diamond would still be sitting in a jewelry box, or used as filling in my mouth.

Ah yes, but all this is just the ramp up to that wacky month, September. And soon that special thirty day festival will be upon us. In an effort to narrow the odds a tad, I have taken the month off. The price for this vacation will be high but Martha and I knew that going in, and damn if it didn't work like a charm. If I've learned nothing else, I've at least learned this; evil is so predictable and things fall out when the soul has rotted away.

I have to get an MRI Monday morning and I'm a little freaked out about it. So freaked out in fact that while Martha was at yoga, I laid under the coffee table for about ten minutes just to see what would happen. We have a rather oversized coffee table that was perfect for a visual test of something big hovering over my upper torso. I wanted to see exactly what the fucking problem was with my brain and small spaces. This whole claustrophobia thing is new; it only started when they kept scanning me for my adrenal tumor. I realized while I was under there that it isn't so much the machine but the whole thing, the noise, the lights the medical nature of it all, and well not being in control. I was in control under the coffee table. I could touch it and laugh at the silliness of it all and after a few minutes, I even had a cat join me, wondering just what the hell I was doing.

I have six blue, doctor-prescribed Xanax, a sleep mask to block out the light and Martha to help me through it all. Martha is taking the day off work just so she can sit in the room with me for my forty-minute test. Forty minutes is an awfully long time to have me shoved under a big metal pancake thing and expect me to keep it together. On the upside of it all, once I'm away from the MRI place and have calmed down, I should have a pretty great buzz on. Needless to say I will be working from home after a small nap.

Fantastic news from CCCA, (Columbia County Council on the Arts - these people seriously need a better website), they have chosen four of my photos to hang in the 13th Annual ArtsWalk. The super cool thing is that they are photos that I shot with my Brownie camera. That weird little blue camera shoots some strange stuff every now and then. Again, they didn't pick my favorite but what the hell. Even better news is that they also chose two pieces of Martha's to show. This is going to be fun. We get to go to the Meet the Artists' Reception where all of our social demons, (alcohol, food and mindless conversation) will taunt both Martha and me. Maybe I'll save a blue Xanax for that seeing how even on a good day I am still a total loon in public.

So the wasp guy came last week and I think we are now finally on the same page with the intensity of the problem. I know he thought I was crazy, as most folks think when they first meet me, but now, well, let's just say, he had an epiphany.

I was outside with him when his illuminating discovery had just begun. As he was placing the latter against the sunporch roof, it slipped out of his hands and tapped the gutter. That's when a small army of about a hundred brown wasps flew out in formation to see what was up. As I ran into the house, I looked back over my shoulder to see him jumping off the latter and stepping way, way back trying to get a better look at the whole house. I watched from inside the sunporch as he went back to the truck and brought out the big guns, (literally he had a big spray thing that looked like a gun) a big can of professional wasp spray and a fogger. As he started spraying, I went inside.

At one point, I looked out the upstairs bathroom window and there must have been a thousand wasps flying off the house. It was like the apocalypse out there.

After about an hour he came in the house and we chatted about the severity of the problem in which he actually apologized to me for not understanding just how many there were. It seems as though we are wasp central for Hudson. Well, at least for our little part of Union Street. Every five feet or so, and all along the sunporch was a nest. There are so many of them that he is going to have to come back and keep spraying and spraying. They have found a perfect place under the gutter traps and they don't want to give it up. Considering that they will probably be dead in six weeks I could live with it if they weren't over the main door into the house. Every time we open the windows, they get in and whenever I go outside to water or feed the cats, they are all around me. It's like we live inside their hive and it's rather spooky.

But again, outside of all that nonsense, we have officially lived in upstate New York for one whole year. That's right folks, Martha and I have been driving up and down the New York State Thruway for a solid year and both of our backs are showing the wear and tear. Woo hoo! We should get a sticker. We've had the Prius for just about a month and we already have over 5,000 miles on it. I do love living up here and I think I might have found a way for Martha to let me redo the bathrooms. We went to Home Depot to get a bug bomb for the garage, (spiders) and I had her looking in the bathtub isle at Whirlpool Tubs and talking about how fucking great it would be to have a soaking tub in the bathroom. It's the we could have "this" if you let me do "that" game.