On Monday a week ago I had a tooth pried from my skull under somewhat trying circumstances. Like one of those wild savanna rhinos that needs to be tranquilised before a veterinary appointment, it took a while for me to go down.
The dentist stuck me with four needles in the end, which had the effect of paralysing eyelids and nose but not the very middle of my hippocampus which I could feel wriggle like bumped pudding every time she tried to jimmy the tooth from my jaw.
Some of you may remember I had a wisdom tooth out in the chair almost exactly a year ago, having flown to Perth in the most severe pain of my life and overcome my debilitating fear to have a handsome dentist with an Irish lilt do unspeakable things to my mouth. That was a good tooth, the kind of tooth that leaves a party before the narcotics come out; academically gifted, mature judgment.
This tooth — Monday’s tooth — was a bad tooth. It had to be crab-walked out of there over almost an hour, like a double-door fridge being shuffled out of a third-floor walk-up apartment. As each wrench penetrated the very centre of my brain, I could feel individual memories evaporate. Yoink. There goes the family holiday in 1998; then the the time I interviewed Kermit and Miss Piggy in Los Angeles, assorted personal triumphs and what have you. And I began to panic. No, no, no, I thought, take the ones from the amygdala.
My dentist, a lovely woman who chose violence as a career, discovered the problem when she finally pulled the tooth from my face, which felt like going down a slippery slide but inside out so that the slippery slide was going down me, out of my very mind.
The tooth was a somewhat rare three-rooter, although the X-Ray had only picked up the two, one of which was hooked. The incidence of three-rooted molars in the modern world is as low as 3.5 per cent, but up to nearly one-third in parts of Asia, but historically speaking it seems to be far more common. When I ran into the dentist a week later in a local cafe she asked me how I was going and I said “I’ve been doing a lot of research about three-rooted wisdom teeth and there is some pretty poor scholarship linking it to interbreeding with the ancient human Denosivans!” And she said OK.
It speaks a lot to my brittle character that I felt a little bit special with my three-root tooth. I imagine it’s not dissimilar to being mauled by a mountain lion and thinking ‘he chose me’. And what’s to be proud of? The body-horror of extraction? Having a grippy tooth? If I was an actual Denosivan living some 160,000 years ago and one of these bad boys played up I would have put my head in a tiger.
My dentist was very nice, actually, and she said she didn’t even have wisdom teeth except for one which had to be taken out and I yelled out across the cafe: “Good!” I meant it. I was eating a scone with jam and cream and drinking a large flat white so I felt cornered and lashed out.
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You haven’t heard from me for a few weeks because, well, things have been happening. All at once, as they are wont to do. For a large part of March and April I didn’t actually know where I was. I’ve flown so much I’ve started to recognise the same baggage handlers at different airports from my plane window and find myself wondering what their lives are like when they’re not on the tarmac.
While I was sitting in the chair I asked my dentist if I could fly the following day when I was due to go to Melbourne and she said ‘it’s not a hard no’ which was not the answer I had expected or wanted. On the plane the following day my sinuses fizzed and popped in the most peculiar way. I think she shoved sherbet up there (the lolly, not the band) and it’s the most alive I’ve felt in months. It’s a low bar.
My entire face has been in a very specific kind of pain ever since. It hurts, and the lingering blunt force trauma has made it very hard to concentrate on anything at all. Unfortunately, I have had to concentrate on rather a lot.
But, it’s not all been fun and games! I have also had to finish writing the robodebt book which, only this Tuesday, I did. There are almost 143,000 words — about 53,000 more than requested by my publisher — and it’s not bad-bad but it’s quite genuinely not the book I had in my head when I said yes to doing it. They never are, of course. Whether you’re writing a diary entry or an email or an essay, the words never do as they are told. My imagination of what my writing could be is a better writer than my actual writing. And it won’t even teach a class.
Look, we all know a compliment-fish when we see one. I don’t want your bon mots. I’m just going to be earnest for half a second because my defences are down and also it was a public holiday on Thursday and I couldn’t get to a pharmacist within an hour of home that was actually open to refill my SSRIs because I am absolutely woeful at life admin at the best of times and it was deadline day for my work-work and I had to file 2400 words before lunch and I’ve spent almost a fortnight now being reminded in granular detail, and much more often than I would like, that my teeth exist.
If you’re wondering where I have been, this [gestures at the above paragraph] is roughly where, but over a longer duration. I don’t think the book is good which is really just a me thing. It tells the robodebt story and that is its primary purpose, and I hope it gets read so even more people know what happened, but it is not good, I do not think. It is very hard to sit with something for this long and have it turn out not good. Now I know how all those sourdough people felt in 2020.
There is also the small fact of the subject matter. I’ve never been one for secondary observers complaining about how difficult it is being exposed to something. It’s real, don’t get me wrong, but it always strikes me as being a little gauche. Writers are not first responders. We make some choices. Sometimes the choices make us. There is always something between us and the thing, however, unless we have a personal stake in the specific harm. Is humanity a stake, I hear you ask, and I want to say absolutely but the whole point of writing and telling stories is to reveal how our shared humanity fractures into all these different experiences. You can’t just say oh yeah I can guess how that feels and call it a day. That’s the opposite of getting to know something. It’s cheating! Most of what we use to empathise with someone or some thing is by way of analogy. It’s useful but not precise, by its nature.
And so I am inclined to mock myself. Oh assembling words about how a government attacked its own citizens and ruined their lives was hard was it? Imagine actually being attacked! I resist it, but the truth of the matter is yes, it was hard. My constitution is not so complex, I’m afraid, as to separate myself easily from the subject. Writing this book has snuffed out a little bit of my spirit, perhaps, and I can’t work out whether that’s just the daily proximity to the denial of bureaucratic violence or the fact I wrote an average of 2000 words every day for six weeks straight without a single day off which hurt my brain far more than I could ever articulate. Then I had to go back to work so I could, you know, eat.
Delicate little petal, is me.
The last month has been so unduly complex I can’t even remember its exact form. It’s all just noise. I just checked my journal to see if I was forgetting anything important but it is just alternating days of “gotta finish robodebt book today” and “my fucking face hurts so much” so I think I’ve covered it.
I was talking to a friend about the writing book depression and he asked whether, now that I have handed it in, I can come up for air. And then I had to break the news to him about the post-book depression where you don’t have a project and wish to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And also you hate what you just handed over to the publisher. At this point I had to concede that there may not actually be any period in which I am not in depression so giving them seasons, so to speak, is unnecessarily Vivaldian.
All this is to say, were it not for the chance encounter of Pauline Cockerill’s The Teddy Bear Encyclopedia while writing at a cafe I think I would have had a complete nervous breakdown by now. This book has sustained me with a sort of hideous glee, largely because every single teddy bear produced within its pages is an individual challenge to God’s authority. Well, maybe not Columbia Teddy Bear Mfrs.
It’s not quite vintage doll levels of psychic horror but there is something about the historical teddy that invites an assessment of whether people in the 1800s and early 1900s actually liked children. To my eye, it’s the combination of questionable fabrication techniques with an overbearing Germanic fairy tale aesthetic that is truly haunting. Take Master Teddy for example:
Master Teddy looks like a rodent who has been struck on the head in a Wes Anderson adaptation of The Fantastic Mr Fox. He has a pathetic disposition and cannot even recite the zero times table.
Or perhaps party-hat teddy:
I am not viscerally offended by party-hat teddy, who invited friends from school to her party and had nobody show up, but she does make me unspeakably sad which is unforgivable. Party-hat teddy has the countenance of somebody who has been repeatedly promised that the world contains good things but who now understands, through the vicissitudes of life itself, that was a rhetorical flourish designed to hide the pain of existence.
Then there is one of the smallest teddy bears, a 10cm miniature who looks like a gummy bear dropped on the floor of a Himalayan cattery.
Miniature Bear has coal-black eyes and a permanent frown. Steiff bears were created by German woman Margarethe Steiff who was later joined by her nephew who, according to Wikipedia, “gave [the company] an enormous boost by creating stuffed animals from drawings made at the zoo.” To which I want to ask: what fucking zoo did he go to?
But enough about dropped gummy. You simply must meet Muzzle bear!
Muzzle Bear has invited you to a sex club and, although we are not here to kink-shame, it does look like he’s bought a nice bottle of Chianti for afterwards. I am afraid of Muzzle Bear.
Won’t somebody save us? Maybe you, Baby-Bär!
Jesus Christ. Baby-Bär has Sharon Strzelecki pash rash and a “felt tongue”. I bet it was. Windswept and startled, it is possible baby bear was doing all of this in a hedge immediately before being caught. Grows up to become Muzzle Bear.
We need another option. And nothing sounds more comforting than Hot-water bottle bear, the teddy of inviting warmth and… ah fuck.
Hot-Water Bottle Bear will devour your dreams. Your hopes are a digestif. Fell under a lawnmower and was put back together by Yorgos Lanthimo. Its ruthless pursuit of your sanity is powered by vengeance.
We need a champion in our corner. None are forthcoming.
But there is Miniature Atomizer Bear, who looks cheerful and bright despite being stuffed with a perfume bottle. He might seem imbued, however faintly, with the optimism of youth but it is a brittle thing and the veneer of it masks a reservoir of pain. Being an atomizer bear, this liquid hurt can be spritzed quite efficiently and in this fashion he assures his alienation from other bears.
These are the things I thought about as I read the bear encyclopedia when I should have been writing the book I hate.
Observations
At night, in lieu of knitting or reflecting on decisions I’ve made, I make a series of cargo deliveries across a post-apocalyptic America invaded by the very spectre of death with a baby in an artificial womb strapped to my chest. It’s far more relaxing than it sounds. The baby senses death but also we have a bond. It’s nice. He coos and gurgles and all the rest, and I must keep him happy by not falling over. In my experience kids love that! Whatever.
Mostly, though, all I do is pick up machine parts or oil or water and medicine, tools, old books — so many different things! — and cart it across this broken landscape to people who need it, thus reconnecting a divided country and earning points for my efforts. At the start it’s all on foot, and then you get access to a reverse-trike and, most recently, the lovely folk at a distribution centre gave me the plans for an upgrade and now I have a cool little wagon that attaches to the bike and I can carry, like, way more stuff. You should see me, just tootin’ around the countryside with my boxes. That’s the dream right there. Making my little deliveries, occasionally fighting the spectral essence of death and making sure the packages don’t get wet. Anyway, the other day I heard Mum trundling around outside and realised she was in Garden Mode and I knew what that meant so I raced out to take a photo and then show her these two images side by side, one of me playing my game and the other of her:
And I said “oh my God we are exactly the same!” And she said, without missing a single beat: “I actually pull my wagon though.”
While we’re on the subject of Mum’s brilliant one-liners I was going through some books that I had been sent over the past couple of years and figuring out which ones to donate and which ones to keep. I came across a biography of Harold Holt and handed it to Mum half in jest and said ‘there you go, see if you can find out where he went’. Now, Mum has an above average knowledge of politicians, their wives and and their basic biographies. Harold Holt is no mystery to her. Which makes it all the funnier when I returned half an hour later to find her finishing a page, closing the book solemnly and declaring with matter-of-fact sobriety to herself: “Hmmm, went for a swim and didn’t come home. Well there you go.”
All Mum this week. Greatest hits. I was in the office (craft room) writing dutifully the other day when I heard Mum outside through the open window admonishing the chickens. “Shadow when are you gonna start laying me eggs? Hey? You on havin’ a holiday, hey? I don’t like that. I want more eggs.”
And, finally, we got off a video call with grandbubby and nephew Hugh the other day and when I retreated to the kitchen to make a coffee I heard Mum say to herself (she speaks to herself quite a lot, you may have noticed): “God I love that kid. I don’t even know him and I love him.”
I know this piece is about a lot more, but for what it’s worth, this is my takeaway.
‘I think she shoved sherbet up there (the lolly, not the band) and it’s the most alive I’ve felt in months.’
This alone will bring me back for your next offering.
To me, Rick, your writing helped me know about our 'beaurcratic violence'. I'm so utterly sad and angry that it ever happened. I could read snips about it, while I got on with my work and privileged life. Ashamed to admit that sometimes I had to wince and look away. Your attention and immersion to robodebt helped me know more and be aware. I'm so grateful to you and your work. I read now your spirit was been a little bit snuffed out. I understand. How could it not? Advice you didn't ask for: Visit the midget dog and your little nephew, take Deb on a road trip. My god, I love reading about Deb! I hope you tell her. No matter what your write about, I'll be gratefully reading.