Memento mori.

I've always had bad teeth. I had juvenile periodontitis growing up, and as an adult my teeth have become so sensitive to cold and sweets that I simply can't have ice cream, fudge, or chocolate; I prefer to drink soda beverages and water at room temperature, because otherwise it hurts like the second coming of bejesus. For better or worse, I'm used to my mouth being in some kind of pain or discomfort, and I've changed my lifestyle to minimize that pain as much as possible.

That's why I didn't think much of the occasional pain in my right wisdom tooth. Most of it had rotted away a year or two ago. I was careful not to use it when masticating, and I grinned and bared through whatever pain it gave me.

In May of this year, it started acting up more than usual-- a constant pain that inflamed the gums surrounding it. At the same time, I developed a mind-splitting ear ache. It turned out that the two things weren't unrelated; the abscess in the tooth had become infected, and it had spread to my ear. The next day, it spread to my entire lower jaw. I was quickly put on medication, which quelled the pain and eliminated the infection.

The days that followed were pretty agonizing. The physical pain was immense, and I can neither adequately describe it nor overemphasize this point: it was the most pain I've ever been in in my life, and I never want to feel that kind of pain again, ever. Beyond that, however, the infection robbed me of "me".

I'm a talker, but it hurt too much to open my mouth to talk. I love to eat-- possibly the sense I derive the most pleasure from is taste-- but I couldn't do more than slurp apple sauce. And even that hurt so much and tasted so terrible-- the infection not only preventing me from chewing, but from tasting food properly-- that I couldn't stomach more than a few bites. Which meant that I went several days with hardly any food. I was weak and exhausted, unable to stand on my own. I just spent all that time lying on the couch in my pajamas, and while I'm not the most physically active sort, the lack of mobility really ground me down. The pain was so distracting that I couldn't read any books, watch any movies, or play any video games.

And all this made me rather cranky, ill-tempered, and difficult to deal with. So, like I said: it robbed me of my "me"-ness, prevented me from adhering to the behaviours, pleasures, and attitudes that collectively spell out "Tom". Pain, as one of the Mantle brothers so memorably put it, causes character distortion, and I was glad when I came out the other side of it. According to my dentist and my GP, if I had waited a few more days before seeing the doctor-- not that I'd have been able to handle the pain for that long, so that's a big "if"-- it would have spread to my heart. It would have killed me.

Which is a sobering thought. I've always been intensely, perhaps morbidly, definitely neurotically, concerned with the decay of my own flesh and my impending demise. It's something I contemplate daily, much to my Mary's chagrin. My father died at the age of thirty-eight, and somehow that's been built up in my brain as a number of Significance-- ingrained somehow is the feeling that I won't live to be older than thirty-eight. A big part of the reason why I'm so prolifically creative-- making movies with Mary, designing video and board games by myself, writing novels and stories, composing music, even running for political office in a weird way-- is because I frantically wanted to make what time I feel I have left count. It's not quite the same as wanting to become immortal through art; it's more that I want to do as much as I can and leave something behind. And since it's unlikely that we'll ever have children, art is about the only thing I have left to leave.

But now that I've actually been close to death-- not at its door, sure, but closer than I've ever been-- strangely, I don't feel that same fire under my ass to "make my time count". And that thirty-eight year deadline-- which I've always known, intellectually, to be silly, even as it held sway over me superstitiously-- doesn't seem to loom quite so large. I'm less concerned with leaving something behind, and more concerned with just plain enjoying myself; less concerned with making use of the time, and more concerned with using the time.

That's not to say I'm going to stop creating-- creating is one of those ways that I just plain enjoy myself-- or that I'm less prone to mood swings, suicidal depression, self-loathing, and moments of sudden unexplainable terror (yep, all that fun stuff is still present and accounted for). I'm still very much Tom, for better or worse, but my slight brush with death makes me want to be a happier Tom than I've been in the past. And I think I am, if only a little bit.

Why and How I Saw Pearl Harbor

It was recently revealed on Twitter, to my everlasting shame, that I paid full price to see Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. Let me explain. First off, gym teachers are to blame.

As the Woodman once said in his infinite wisdom, those who can't teach, teach gym. Often held in ridicule by both the studentry and faculty, the gym teacher was given, at least in my school system, a special power to compensate for the complete lack of respect afforded to him or her: "the zero for the day". Often given as punishment for forgetting one's sweatpants, the Zero for the Day adds an empty grade each time it is given.

Say, for example, that the gym teacher gives twelve grades through-out the semester, each one worth ten points. Your final grade for said semester is arrived at by dividing your total-- let's say you're some sort of athlete and you got all 120 points-- to reach your percentage. 120 divided by 120 is 1 or 100%, an A+.

But let's say you forgot your sweatpants or swim trunks or what-not: you've got two zeroes for the day. So your 120 points is divided not by 120 but by 140 (ten for each empty grade) and your final grade is 85%-- a B.

But at some point in the history of this twisted saga, the other teachers got jealous of this sexy status symbol and soon they, too, were given the power to award empty grades, thus regulating gym teachers back to their sad existences of disrespect and alcoholism. These academic empty grades (as opposed to their athletic counterparts) are up to a teacher's discretion, and can be awarded for any number of reasons-- tardiness, smarting off, et cetera.

And in my final year of high school, my history teacher had this astonishing power at her disposal. My history teacher also had a pretty lousy grasp of history, often saying things that, well, weren't true. And when I corrected her on areas that were up for debate, she gave me a zero for the day. When I corrected her on areas of fact, she gave me a zero for a day. When I brought in evidence to support my assertions, well, you can see where this story is going.

I think I accumulated something like 160 empty grades, which basically ensured failure no matter how highly I scored on anything. There is a lesson to be learned here about the value of keeping one's tongue, et cetera et cetera, and the necessity of compromise to get along with others, et cetera et cetera, but I was eighteen or nineteen years old and was renting a room in Detroit instead of living at home and thought I was smarter than everyone, et cetera et cetera. While I still get furious when I think of history teachers disseminating lies as facts, I also think I made some very bad decisions. Probably 160 of them.

Since I did want to graduate from High School, I asked my teacher if, in all honesty, there was anything I could do to salvage my grade. Some kind of extra credit that could somehow bump me up from an E to a barely-passing D-. And there was. Since I liked pointing out factual errors so much, she suggested I see both Tora! Tora! Tora! and the newly-released Pearl Harbor and do a compare-contrast.

And that's why I went to see Pearl Harbor. But that's not why I'm telling you this story. I'm only telling you this story so I can share this one with you.

So, I go to see Pearl Harbor. And there's this guy in the theater, a veteran of World War II. Old dude, wearing the little pointy hat and uniform, with a walker. And for whatever reason he decides to sit in the top row; it's one of those big slanted theaters. And during the big bombing of Pearl Harbor sequence, this little old dude says at the top of his voice, so everybody can hear: "This is bullshit."

Then he slowly, arduously walks down the aisle and makes his exit. I did the same, bullshitted my way through my compare-contrast, and ended up with a D-.

She Moved The Pillow: A Tale of Tom & Mary.

Tom had known Mary for a couple of years-- not well, but casually, and well enough to have a little crush-- when he invited her to tag along on one of the shoots for his new film. The film itself isn't all that important: it was, in the end, a manifestly terrible piece of work, a cynical and completely misanthropic film that had nothing but contempt for its characters. The person who made that film scarcely resembles the person writing these words today. And yet, somehow, miraculously, Mary saw the latter in the former and fell in love with him. And I'm so very glad that she did.

And while I think our love was built slowly, bit-by-bit over the years, evolving into a fast friendship and then, wonderfully, something more, I can pin-point the very moment that my infatuation, my attraction, my crush on her exploded madly with passion and desire.

It was on that shoot. I had set up my actors on a couch-- in those days, all my scenes took place on couches, so much so that the joke going around the set was that next time, the couch would move-- and my camera was at one end on the couch, glaring at them in profile. Or, at least, it was supposed to; situated at each end there sat a pillow. Not a big pillow, just the sort of ordinary square pillow that adorns any couch worth its cushions. But it was big enough to obscure my camera's view of the actors as I tried to frame my close-up.

And so, I started cranking up my tripod-- an old photographers tripod, really intended for sitting photographs, another reason for my commitment at the time to cinema du sofa-- to try and peer over the pillow. When that seemed to not be working, I tried tilting the camera upwards. No dice. I adjusted the tripod again. I got my dolly-- by which I mean, of course, a block of wood with some casters on the bottom-- and placed the tripod on it to gain some extra height. Still wasn't quite what I wanted.

This went on for a few minutes, constantly making adjustments, continually getting frustrated. And then, Mary got up off her chair, walked to the couch, grabbed the pillow, and, without saying a word, sat back down with the pillow on her lap. The shot was very quickly framed and, as they say, in the can.

Mary moved the pillow, and my heart skipped the beat.