COOL SHIT 9-30-10

Jesus. Another crap week here at Cool Shit. Once again, there is only one book who made the cut, and sad to say, it was just barely. Maybe I’m depressed with the news that DC might be shutting down Vertigo by December. I don’t know. But, here we go with the one good book of the week:



CROSSED: FAMILY VALUES #4: Yeah, I miss Garth Ennis on this series. The new writer, David Lapham, is really good with most things (crime, obviously), but pseudo-zombie apocalypses? Not so much. Ennis can take humanity and make it real, but Lapham sometimes makes it sound too hokey. Still, they share the ability to be extreme. As per usual, the kinda-sorta zombies are ultra-violent, and their words are really ugly, but Lapham falls into the trap so many writers these days are familiar with: the real monsters of this book are the people. Yes, the villains here are ordinary people with guns who want to steal horses from our heroes. Things get nasty, and the main bad guy (a fella’ who looks a bit too much like Alan Moore) sounds exactly like one of the Crossed, especially when he says things like, “I’ll fuck that little girl’s brains through her teeth while the rest of ‘em [pregnant women] bleed out!” It’s a good read (not great), and the art, while sometimes silly, is good enough (I miss Jacen Burrows, too), but ultimately worth the price of admission.

SHIT ON TV by Dr. Jonah Chaos

Recently, the FCC reduced the Seven Words You Can't Say on Television to six.  You can now say "shit" on TV, and CHICAGO HOPE took advantage of this.

In Elmhurst, citizens are up in arms about this, going so far as to picket City Hall.  Mayor T--- M------- said at a press conference that he is indeed pissed off at the FCC, especially if it will win him votes in the upcoming election.  "What if children hear it on TV?" M-------- said.  "Fuck the FCC!  FCC stands for Fuckin' Cocks and Cunts!"

In fact, many children who overheard M--------'s speech have adopted his cry of, "Fuck the Fuckin' Cocks and Cunts!"  They shout it gleefully in the streets.

"Fuck those bastards!" said Thomas Finn, 8.  "How dare those cocksuckers expose us to the s-word!"

My question is, what's the problem?  There should be nation-wide celebrations.  One down, six to go.  As much as I despise the poison semen of Satan's crusty, wart-spotted, AIDS-infected cock (the mayor), I have no choice but to agree with him.  Fuck the FCC!  Not because they let "shit" slip by, but because they put so many regulations on TV in the first place.

Words are words.  Some may be powerful, some insulting, but is it wrong to say certain things just because they imply something dirty?  "Shit" describes something emitted from every human being.  It's perfectly normal to excrete a hunk of brown, stinking matter.  In fact, your bodies rely on the act of shitting.  Why, then, is the word "shit" considered immoral?

To "fuck" is for one being, be it male or female with a strap-on, to insert a cock-like object, be it dick or dildo, into the hole of another human being, male or female, cunt or asshole.  This act is also perfectly natural and quite pleasurable to boot.  In other words, not only do people do it, but people do it a lot.  Not only should it be allowed to say "fuck" on TV, it should also be allowed to fuck on TV, or at least have some sex scenes that show nudity besides some guy's wrinkled ass.

These are only two examples.  There are many more.  The question remains, then, why allow the existence of the FCC?  The argument that certain words are dirty does not hold.

The only possible answer is to lie to children, to maybe deter them from fucking by keeping them stupid.  Why keep them from fucking?  Teenage pregnancy, so-called decency, sexually transmitted diseases, and most importantly, fear.  God help them if these kids ever experience pleasure!

I implore you to stop lying to our future.  While you're at it, how about giving them some freedom, too?  Take age requirements off tobacco and alcohol.  It means nothing anyway, except to earn the city money when kids get fined for under-aged smoking or drinking.  To restrict something is to restrict thinking.  To restrict thinking is to restrict evolution.  To restrict evolution is to restrict intellectual growth.  Thus, to restrict kids from having a choice about anything is to reduce them to the level of morons.  Maybe if you start treating kids like intelligent human beings, with dignity, they might surprise you.

Think about it, if you're capable.

THE ELMHURST PUBLIC HOUSE: DAYS GONE PAST

The Elmhurst Public House used to be a lot more fun. Not to say that one can’t have a good time there now, but their drink specials just aren’t what they used to be. In the golden era of drinking at the Public House, every Tuesday and Thursday were $1 personal pitcher days. Domestic only, of course, but still, it was the main attraction to the place back then.



The only drawback was that the personal pitcher was almost impossible to pour from. It was a guarantee that anyone attempting to do so would lose at least a mouthful of beer to the table top; the liquid would just slop down the entire body of the pitcher instead of going into the desired cup. A friend advised that you should just drink from the pitcher itself, at the otherwise inefficient spout, and this seemed to remedy the situation.


Not that it matters. This drink special is gone, and there really isn’t much else to say about the place because of it.


During the day, it serves as a decent restaurant with good mozzarella sticks, but you don’t want to hear about that. No, you’re looking for a good time, in which case you want to show up at night. Don’t go too late, or you’ll never find a place to sit. It’s mostly a college crowd in there, and they love to flood the place. Anytime after nine o’clock, and you’ll be standing, and even that is doubtful.

Even if you do find a seat, you won’t want to get up to go to the bathroom because someone else will take your chair the moment you’re out of sight. The customers here know no mercy, and they don’t honor anyone's space. Yes, your fellow patrons are not your friends (unless you’re accompanied by actual friends, and they will have to struggle to save your seat), and barroom etiquette is rarely observed here.


But the waitresses and bartenders are very good. If you ask for a whiskey on the rocks, easy on the rocks, they will take you at your word. They will not water your drinks down, and the service is fairly prompt if all you want is a drink. (If you want food, it’ll take a bit longer than most would prefer, since there are so many goddam people in there, and they all want food. And don’t order the steak. They overcook their meat. Steak shouldn’t crunch in your mouth.)


There are decent drink specials (not as good as the $1 personal pitchers, but still not bad), and every once in a while they have a live band. The place is not, however, built for live bands, so you might want to avoid the crowd for those evenings.


The Public House is very accommodating when it comes to reserving tables. In fact, they’ll give you an entire room for your event, where you won’t have to deal with the other asshole customers.


In short, the music is good, the service is good, there is plenty to look at, but beware of your fellow drinkers. They are beasts, and they don’t have a sense of good manners. But forgive them; they’re in college, they know not what they do.



The Elmhurst Public House

683 W. St. Charles Rd.
Elmhurst, IL 60126

TALES OF DENTISTRY CHAPTER TWO

What is a crown lengthening procedure? It’s simple, really. It’s when they remove a swath of gums from under one of your teeth, thereby making the crown look bigger. This is what Dentist Two had in mind for me. The idea was to have the procedure done so Dentist One could see under the gums to see how far down the decay went. He would then make a decision about what we need to do with my bad tooth at that point.
Dentist Two was a chipper woman, whose abundance of energy somehow put me at ease. Not enough at ease that my blood pressure wasn’t rocketing, of course, but still, I was more relaxed than I expected to be.
About the high blood pressure: Dentist Two doesn’t do anything to you if your blood pressure is beyond a certain point. I was right there on the cusp. She kept testing me until I was relaxed to the point where she felt it was safe to give me Novocain.
There was really only one problem with the procedure: when they do this, they only numb your gums. You can still feel your teeth, and the bad one was pretty tender at this point. Every time she brushed up against it, I felt a jolt of pain. Now, speaking as one who had been through an immense amount of pain recently, I was able to take most of it, but there was one point when she actually tapped the tooth with a metal tool, and I jumped up hard enough to almost fall off the chair.
The procedure itself was pretty quick, though, which was merciful. It didn’t even seem all that scary. The worst part was watching her closing me up. The idea of stitches in my mouth absolutely terrified me. I didn’t even need to see the result to be frightened by it. Just seeing her pull the thread back was enough to gross me out.
When she finished, she handed me a mirror, and I saw that my tooth did, indeed, look bigger. There were two black blots in there, which I took to be the stitches. All in all, it didn’t look too bad. I showed it to some friends later, and they were shocked by it. In fact, they were kind of surprised that I could be up and about, knowing that there were stitches in my gums.
She gave me post-op instructions (including do not sip through a straw or spit for a day, and rinse my mouth out with saltwater a few times) and told me to come back in a week to have the stitches out. After that, I can go back to Dentist One for an examination. And if I experienced any pain, I should take a couple of Advil. Well, that sounded kind of small for oral pain, but as it turned out, it wasn’t so bad. I hardly felt a thing. Every once in a while, while eating, I felt something tug at the stitches, and that wasn’t comfortable. But that was the worst of it. Oh yeah, and I couldn’t eat anything sharp, like potato chips. That was actually the worst part, as I’m a huge fan of chips.
Anyway, I followed instructions, and when I got the stitches snipped and pulled out, Dentist Two said everything was looking very good. Cool.
I went back to Dentist One, and after poking around a bit, he said that he thought he could clear this up with a root canal. This wasn’t a promise. He said that things could still fall apart, but he thought it was worth a shot, that a root canal could possibly fix this.
Root canals are done in two parts. The first is to cut the top off your tooth and then to go in and file all the decay out, all the way down to the roots of your teeth. The second part is to close everything up with a crown after a few finishing touches. The tooth would then be a dead tooth, but it would still be in your mouth, right?
Okay, so I went in for part one, after having heard horror stories all my life about root canals. In actuality, it’s not all that bad. There is ZERO pain when they’re doing it. There is some discomfort because you have to keep your mouth open for a long time, but that’s the worst of it. The dentist then puts a bunch of files that look like needles into your tooth. It looks scary, I’ll tell you that, but again, there is ZERO pain. I was so loaded up on Novocain, you probably could have hit me in the mouth with a hammer, and I wouldn’t have felt it.
Then, there is the filler. If you hollow out your roots, you need something to fill the spot, right? He stuffed four rods into the tooth, which he then had to seal by setting them on fire. The assistant produced a lighter, which the dentist used to heat up a metal tool. As soon as it was hot enough, he pressed it into each root. The sizzle and the smell of burning tooth was kind of off-putting, but again, there is ZERO pain.
He then cooked up a temporary crown, which he glued in place. He told me to come back next week, and we’d finish up. He said everything looked very good, that he thought this was really going to work.
I went on my way. He told me if there was any pain, I should take a couple of Advil. This time, though, I did feel pain afterwards. Actually, a lot of it. That’s when it all catches up to you, after the procedure is done, not during. I got a jumbo bottle of Advil and slogged through the week.
There was one problem: half of my tongue remained numb when the rest of that side of my mouth came back to me. I couldn’t taste anything on that side for that entire week. Why? I’ll explain in a moment.
I went back, expecting everything to go smoothly. In fact, Dentist One said that since it was now a dead tooth, I wouldn’t need Novocain. But I was paranoid, so I asked him to shoot me up, anyway, which he gladly did.
At this point, I mentioned my half-numb tongue, and he said that it’s actually a common thing. When injecting Novocain, you’re supposed to just touch the nerve with the needle, but occasionally, the drug gets INTO the nerve. When this happens, numbness can continue indefinitely. Now THAT is scary. I asked how long this would last, and he said sometimes it takes a few weeks, sometimes a few months. There are some cases in which the tongue remains numb forever.
I tried to keep that out of my mind as he started poking around in my mouth. He took the temporary crown off and probed into the tooth. As he was doing this, he cursed.
“What’s up?” I asked, or at least, I tried to ask. My mouth was open too wide at this point.
“It might be too late to save the tooth,” he said. “I need an x-ray to make sure, but just sit tight for a moment.”
They took an x-ray, and when Dentist One returned, he pointed out the trouble area. “The tooth’s got to go. This is why.” He pointed out a crack in the root of the tooth, right there by the jaw. Apparently, the bottom of the tooth was in two pieces, and nothing can fix that. “The decay just went too deep.”
As he put the temporary crown back in, he told me my options. There were three. First, I could get an implant. It would take a lot of time, almost a year, and a lot of money, thousands of dollars. But it was the best option. Secondly, I could get a bridge. This involved sanding down the teeth on either side of the gap and affixing a piece over the space, using the filed down teeth as anchors. This was the most popular solution, but it tended to wear down the bone in the jaw in the blank spot, and it put undue stress on the anchor teeth. Lastly, I could just let it go. Just deal with the empty space.
The last one wasn’t an option for me. At the time, I was 31 years old. Too young for missing teeth. If I was in my sixties, I would have just dealt with it. I didn’t know about the other two, though. I spoke with my friend, Jason, about it. He lost one of his upper front teeth, and he wound up getting a bridge to fix it. He never had any complaints about it, but in the end, I chose to get an implant. It sounded sturdier and healthier from what the dentist told me.
Dentist One then said for me to go back to Dentist Two. She specializes in implants, and she knew how to prepare for it when pulling the tooth. (I was also told about same-day implants, but those are actually not very sturdy at all. They’re actually kind of a scam.)
So, I made an appointment with Dentist Two to have the tooth pulled and the preparations for an implant to begin. Tune in next time for that account, and to find out how a THIRD dentist got involved . . . .

[WHAT FOLLOWS IS A PICTURE OF THE TEMPORARY CROWN, EVEN THOUGH IT'S NOT VERY CLEAR.]

COOL SHIT 9-23-10

Sorry, but only one good book came out this week. There were a couple of notables (like Brian Keene’s THE LAST ZOMBIE #2 and the new issue of THE DARK TOWER), but they just barely fell short of the Cool Shit mark. I think it’s no surprise, though, that the one good book is . . .

THE WALKING DEAD #77: Protagonist Rick Grimes has come a long way since we met him in issue one. I remember even considering him a hero back then. Tragedy and hard decisions have turned him into a much darker force over the course of nearly 80 issues. Once again, we find him doing something very questionable in order to protect his friends. This is the first time he has committed such an act in a cold, soulless way. Even though he still does these things through love, he might have finally crossed the line into villainous territory. Even when he hanged the murderer in the prison storyline, he did so with rage burning in his eyes. Bad deeds have become such a commonplace occurrence for him that he doesn’t even feel it anymore.

And that’s what makes him such a fascinating protagonist. This guy, he’s just like us. He’s not Bruce Wayne avenging the deaths of his parents. He’s not Spawn, seeking justice against the forces of Hell. He was just some guy, and then the zombie apocalypse came along. Would we be so different from him in his shoes? Would we have made different choices?

Without society, the center doesn’t hold. Darwinism does, though. Only the savage can survive. As Hunter S. Thompson used to say, “It’s time to get familiar with cannibalism.”

FUCKED!, an opinions column by Dr. Jonah Chaos

[NOTE: IN MY YOUNGER YEARS (IN THE LATE 'NINETIES), ONE OF MY FRIENDS AT THE LIBRARY STARTED UP A WEBSITE DEDICATED TO MAKING FUN OF MY HOMETOWN, ELMHURST. HE KNEW I WAS A WRITER, SO HE ASKED IF I'D BE INTERESTED IN JOINING THE STAFF. OF COURSE I WAS, AND I WAS GIVEN WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A REGULAR OPINIONS COLUMN, WHICH I WOULD WRITE UNDER THE PEN NAME, DR. JONAH CHAOS. (I HAD OTHER PEN NAMES AND DUTIES, BUT NONE WERE AS FUN AS CHAOS.) NEEDLESS TO SAY, NONE OF THE WORK I DID FOR THE WEBSITE WAS POSTED. I THINK IT WAS A BIT TOO MUCH FOR THEIR AUDIENCE. I ALSO WROTE AN INTERVIEW WITH THE MAYOR, WHICH IS REFERRED TO IN THIS STORY. I MADE ALL SORTS OF RIDICULOUS CLAIMS, LIKE THE REASON ELMHURST IS SO WHITE IS BECAUSE THE MAYOR HAS ANYONE IN TOWN WITH SKIN DARKER THAN AN ITALIAN'S MURDERED AND BURIED BENEATH CITY HALL. I ALSO CLAIMED HE WAS A PEDOPHILE, THAT HE KEPT A CATAMITE ON HAND AT ALL TIMES. NO WONDER THIS SHIT NEVER SAW THE LIGHT OF DAY . . . .]


The President of the United States visited your parents' home and fucked your mother. Now what do you think of the sex scandals surrounding Bill Clinton? Apathetic now, are you? Just the Prez doing a little fucking, huh? He just wants to lay some pipe. Yeah, well, he's laying some pipe in your mother.

I know what you're thinking: there goes Dr. Chaos again, spouting crazy shit. But you don't understand. I'm not lying. Clinton visited Elmhurst yesterday, and he went from household to household, fucking all the women in town, including your mother. What's that? Your mother is dead? He dug her up and violated her corpse. I saw him, and so did the rest of this shit-crusted city.

FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!

What am I doing? I apologize. I'm new to this publication, and this is my first opinions column? Sorry, I've been having trouble with the fucking mayor, and I haven't the time to come up with a proper column. I promise the following pieces will be better, but with the booze and my drug-addled brain, I can't take the mayor interview and this thing on top of it.

Don't get me wrong, though; Bill Clinton would fuck your mother . . . if he got the chance.

THE SPRING INN: A HOLE-IN-THE-WALL OASIS

There isn’t a lot of fanfare to the Spring Inn on the outside, and that’s how it should be. Neighborhood bars should never advertise themselves too loudly, because they don’t need to. They have a specialized clientele, and these people all know where to find the Inn. In the summer, there are usually a few smokers out front, and chances are, you know them. But in the winter, there is usually no one there; the smokers are out back where there is a tent for them.

Once inside the Inn, you know you’re in the right place. The lights are dim, but not so dim that you can’t make your way through the crowd. Even though smoking has been banned in bars for quite some time, you can still smell the smoke in the nicotine-stained walls. You can hear darts thunking into a digital board near the back, but only if no one has plugged money into the ‘Eighties rock jukebox.

The bar itself is made of thick wood, and all of it is scarred. Generations of people in this neighborhood have leaned against this bar. It is practically a tradition. The face above the hands wiping at a pint glass is familiar. You always know the bartender in this place. Hell, he probably even knows your drink of choice. You probably don’t need to say a word to him about your preference.

Take a look around. Most of the customers here are middle-aged. They used to come here when they were young, and they’ve never decided to break themselves of the habit. There are a few twenty-somethings here, ready to perpetuate the tradition of their parents. There is even some eye candy here.

But this is not a place to go in order to get laid. It happens, but it’s a rarity. No, this is a place where you go to unwind, have a few drinks, shoot the shit with your friends, and maybe even play a game of darts. If you want to get laid, go down the street to Doc’s. There’s a college crowd down there, and your chances are better.

Ah, you have your drink. If you’re alone, or are with maybe two or three friends, hang out around the bar. Your glass will always be full. Or if you’re with a bigger crowd, push a couple of tables together. If it’s a weekday, no one will bother you. If it’s Friday or Saturday, you might have a bit of trouble, as those tend to be the busy nights. They don’t serve food at night, but sometimes, the bartender will send out for pizza and leave it out for anyone who wants a slice.

The bell over the bar clangs, and the lights suddenly become brighter. The bartender is calling out that it’s closing time. Go up to the bar for one last drink, but the bartender is flexible. If you want another last second shot, he won’t object.

It’s time to go. You head out into the streets, and even if it’s winter, there is a warm feeling in your belly. There are very few places like the Spring Inn in the suburbs, and you will be eager to visit again and again in the future.

Spring Inn
552 Spring Rd.
Elmhurst, IL 60126