NEVER WORK WITH CHILDREN OR ANIMALS

Have spent the week in dark gigs on account of half my face turning blue. I take it this is some sort of after-effect of wisdom teeth removal, but at my post-op appointment on Thursday the surgeon was convinced that it was way too late for bruises to start appearing so it must be something to do with the TH. I could have dined out on that one quite a bit this week, if I were able to dine yet, that is.
The medical profession will say anything here to avoid being sued, although I guess I could have sued him for libel.

So last night en-route to another gig, the TH and I stumbled into one of those peculiarly New York cab experiences.
Granted it was a people carrier, but it's not often you get into a taxi and immediately realise that you're sharing it with quite a few others. For starters there was a large cat draped across the top of the dashboard. And a young child in the front passenger seat. I say 'in' but she had no seatbelt on and a very bad case of ADD, so was more or less everywhere in the car except in the front passenger seat. She spent most of the journey on or around the steering wheel, occasionally crawling down to experiment with the pedals. The driver, who was straight out of The Sopranos, seemed totally oblivious to this and was on his cellphone ordering takeout pizza whilst simultaneously running a heartfelt momologue to nobody in particular about how cellphones cause brain tumours and in 34 years exactly, all the cellphone companies would have to compensate everyone and hence provide him with a pension. In his free hand he was brandishing a bottle of chocolate milk at just about every other driver on the road.
At one point the cat stretched and yawned, completely obscuring the windscreen, the chocolate milk went flying and were it not for the child landing on the brake pedal, last night's gig would have had two less patrons. It was during the emergency stop, as we lurched backwards that we noticed the jagged metal rods protruding between our seats and turned round to find the entire contents of somebody's house in the back. Completely obscuring the rear window. Maths has never been my strong point so I genuinely lost count of the number of violations we were dealing with here, but that was probably just as well, seeing as we were stuck in a confined space with a couple of troubled Sopranos. And I'm not talking about their vocal range.

I do love the Eggplants, but I've never felt quite so happy to arrive at one of their gigs. We handed over a ten dollar bill for the 7 dollar fare. The child (who can't have been older than 6) grabbed the money and asked us threateningly if we wanted change. Of course we didn't.....

SLEEPY HEAD

So these are the lengths I'll go to lately in order to score a couple of hours of sleep. This morning I had my first ever general anaesthetic.

I was actually having my wisdom teeth removed at the time, but I don't think anyone would have got me to the surgeon in the first place for this particularly jaunty little Thursday outing unless there was at least the promise of a good nap attached.

General anaesthetics are a pretty weird sort of sleep it turned out -
I didn't dream and I had no concept whatsoever of the passage of time, so I did feel a bit cheated out of knowing that I'd slept. After the fact like.... But the words small, mercy, thankful, one should be, come to mind, because I can also now strike off my very extensive list of pointless (though imaginative) worries, (which are part of my insomnia problem in the first place), the one where I might be one of those people who doesn't respond to general anaesthetics and is therefore aware during operations without being able to communicate it - euggggh. I don't need to worry about that anymore because I was definitely unconscious. I know this because in the interim I'd managed to gain several holes in my mouth (although weirdly some where there weren't even teeth ...), which are now stuffed with gauze, a bunch of random stitches, and a really fashionable, if scary, chipmunk-gets-botox-and-collagen-lips kind of look (which, sadly, might help in job interviews) - all without having a clue as to how. Mind you I've had real sleeps when I've woken up in that state too, but not, I think, since I stopped partaking in the 'Westgate Run' in Wakefield, circa 1983.

So now the pain is kicking in and despite being very hungry, I can't face the thought of the inevitable battle that would ensue between my mouth and anything I might try to put in it at the moment. So instead I am off to experiment with the sleep inducing properties of vicodin....be afraid.