Back on Friday, I ate something very, very hot. It was actually one of those little pizza roll things, so the inside was full of extremely hot tomato sauce and melted cheese. When I bit into it, this boiling mixture squirted out and instantly flash fried the inside of my mouth (at which point the cheese solidified and adhered to the burning flesh). Ouch. Then it turned into a big ass blister, which then popped (mostly because I squeezed it ’til it popped). It has hurt like a son-of-a-bitch since. On Sunday, as I prepared to go get my weekly groceries and gasoline at the shopping “club,” I went to their website to see if they sold OraJel (or something like it) there. No hits on “OraJel,” so then I searched for “benzocaine.” That returned one result – Vagisil. Apparently that’s go benzocaine in it. I don’t know what else is in it, so I wasn’t sure if it was something safe to use in your mouth, so I did a Google search for “Vagisil oral.”

In retrospect, I probably should have anticipated the results returned but, illuminating as they were, they weren’t really the kind of information I was looking for. After verifying that they indeed did not sell any OraJel-type products, my only real alternative for pharmaceutical-related stuff without driving all over hell was to go across the street to the Wal-Mart Supercenter. Not my favorite place to go, but this burn is right inside the corner of my mouth, and it hurts like hell to try and peel my lip back just to floss my teeth. Trying to drink coffee is a rather painful exercise as well. So, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it was off to Wal-Mart I did go.

So I got myself some generic benzocaine-type crap and while I was there I got a really cheap (yet relatively expensive) “rustic” wall clock to put over the teevee in my office so I can more easily see how much time I’m wasting. And the benzocaine sorta works, but you can’t really deliver a precision application with it, so you wind up numbing your tongue and lip and the back of your throat, and it doesn’t really last all that long anyway. Beer works better, but I only had four beers in the fridge last night, so that didn’t last long and I had to go to bed early (which is actually probably a good thing, but then there’s the damn foot thing to keep me awake so that’s not so great either).

The foot thing is a real pain in the ass (counter-intuitive as that may be), and when you add a sore mouth and no beer, well, life just seems to be pointless. Especially with having to go to work again today (for a full week for the first time in a while – this is gonna suck). Of course, there seems to be a lot of jab hatred going on around here lately. At least, I think that’s what it’s about. There are times when I just have to wonder what the point is – but I’m too damn stubborn to just cash in my chips (not until I max out my credit cards and use up all my sick and vacation time, anyway).

And of course I have to see how the rest of hoops season goes. So I guess I better get ready work work. Bleh.