time travel

content warning: dental pain, dental yuck, suicide actually also, sorry about that

A secret of mine is--I love time travel.  I figure we are all time travelers, usually only in one direction.

But there's where our minds go.  Anxiety, fantasizing, prognostication.  Or remembering stuff.  Our minds zoom around from past to future to present, all around.

I did some ecstatic dance recently, and it put me in a weird state.  Toward the end, I was sitting down near the corner of the room, drinking water, and I got a thought that was bizarre.  I realized, wow, I was not my usual self.

My thought was about suicide, that a really difficult way to kill yourself would be to go back in time and cause your parents to break up.  I went so far as to imagine physically attacking my own dad to make him unable to reproduce with my mom.

Right afterward, I was like, where in the world did that thought come from.  Maybe I danced it loose.  It was lodged somewhere weird and fell out, free and strange.

I had some other thing to say about time travel.  Maybe about my time traveling dreams, or something about sci-fi as considered less-than, as fiction.  Genre fiction.  But then sometimes sci-fi is marketed as regular fiction, and we're supposed to pretend it's regular fiction.

I think sci-fi hate is an anti-geek thing.  No fair!  But we can call it speculative fiction and be cooler.  Speculative fiction is sci-fi wearing black sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, and holding a guitar.

At the dentist yesterday, the most painful thing was probably pretending the pain wasn't happening.  He glued my crown back in, and then he had to floss around it to make sure floss would go past the extra glue.

And it was very painful, with force, the floss cutting into my gums, coming up bright red, and we were all supposed to pretend that was ok.

Usually I cry, small tears escaping my eyes, as I grip the arm rests and tell myself to stop gripping the arm rests, but this time, I just had trouble breathing.  I would realize I wasn't breathing, force myself to breathe.  Try to breathe through my nose.  Doing the special dental self-talk in my head.  You're ok.  You're almost done.  These people are good.  These people are trying to help you.

So I don't get up and run away.  Stay in the chair, Laura-Marie.  You can do it.  You're ok.  You're totally almost done now.

I bookmarked this article about dental work being super difficult for people who had certain trauma, but the domain is available.  I guess it's gone.

Apropos to nothing, this song is comforting me tonight.  We're friends with these people.  They like my zines.  I want to be dancing with them in New Mexico by a pretty mural.