• Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern."

 ~

I went to the dentist today with a ridiculously oversized upper denture. It was needful of tightening.

I had already been to the oral surgeon, who said , "those holes in yer gums that we made, they can be fixed with surgery. Except you gotta quit smoking.."

I said, "not a chance".

He said, after halfhearted efforts to scare the shit out of me, talking infections and respiratory distress, that , "yeah well ok. I'll write you a note. They gotta give you a tightening...."

Turns out, not really.

They are gonna give me the tightening but i gotta pay full price for it. Two hundred 30 bucks. I showed off a bit to the nice Oriental dentist, a guy with no sense of humor at all, and said, "Do ya need a down payment? I'll pay full price! I got it!"

He consulted someone older i guess.

Said, "Nossir, you are eligible for a sliding scale.."

"When? Today? Do i gotta see the guy today?"

"Nossir. next vistit. Now let us make a cast of your mouth."
 
6 or 7 minutes of goo in my mouth, reading Whitehead. I sat reading incomprehensible philosophy in the chair trying to concentrate. I actually understood some of it.

"Ok, open your mouth"

~

Guy took my upper palate. For, like 10 days. So what.

I still got my lower teeth.

I cannot use them to eat. I gotta take em out, but the dentist said that is to be expected because of the nature of lower dentures.

"Yeah yeah. It is a 'quality of life issue ' for me. Get me?"

He did. Kid was young enough to be my son.

~

I miss my old dentist, the lovely Dr. Khan, an exotic beauty whom i may or may not have given up smoking for, if she asked nice enough. I could make her giggle...

Oh but she is gone..

"Wahhh hpnn to Dr. Kann?"

"She found another position"

uh huh.

~

Thank God in heaven i brought whitehead with me, is all i can say.

Really.

That is all i can say.

I was treated like someone who cannot understand philsophy, dammit!

Ha. Little did they know i was reading this:

"In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life?
 And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim
with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty. "

or shit like

"In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate
 which is actual in virtue of its accidents.

It is only then capable of characterization
 through its accidental embodiments,

and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality.

 In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity;
 and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident. "

Haw. "God is an accident, whoops"

~

an again:

"In monistic philosophies,  this ultimate is God, who
 is also equivalently termed The Absolute.
In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final,
eminent reality,
beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents.

I approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate."

Neither, dammit.

~

process says i gotta be upper toothless for two weeks. Reality says, ha,  there are hard and set rules for the teeth.

My teeth are my teeth though.

~

• Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.