Ah, hope never dies. On my table lies a manila envelope containing the required four copies of my short story entry to the Piccolo Fiction Open 2006. I did resist the temptation to title it "By Jason Zwiker" in an attempt to fool the judges in to not bothering to read it before tossing it in the winner's pile.

Then after a painful morning of printing and reading: read it backward (to catch typo's), read it forward slowly (to catch typo's), read it aloud to the cats (for rhythm and flow) I got to go the dentist.

They don't merely clean your teeth. A few weeks ago, I had a "gross cleaning". Which involved spraying a lot of pressurized ice water on my teeth. Today I got to get the "fine cleaning". Which involved a lot of scrape..scrape..scrape.. with that little hook thing. Then a lot of ice water sprayed on my teeth.

And I told the dentist about how bad that tooth next to the crown has been hurting. Woke me up out of a dead sleep the other night, throbbing all the way up in to my sinus. I'm eating so much ibuprophen I'm probably going to need a liver transplant soon. He looked at it and said the gum was "a little" inflammed. He swore that an inflammed gum certainly could hurt that bad. Then they "fixed" it by spraying a high pressure stream of ice water flavored with some nasty-ASS tasting chloro-hexy-antimicrobial shit.

Yes, sure, of course, yes, that feels much better now. I swear, really it does!

Next time I'm asking for morphine.