2005-01-21 - 5:56 p.m.
I'm just rambling now, but I thought I would write something seeing as I haven't written anything in a while.
There are a ton of family stories [that is, stories about my fucked up family] that I need to write about.
Joey Ravioli tells me that I need to clean my rooms at my father's house, so I started doing that. Paid my sister to shred papers.
Still jobless and thus insuranceless. Could've gone on something called COBRA, which is supposed to ameliorate the pain of insurance costs. It would've costed, like, $400 a month to go on that. Fuck that!
Had a tooth emergency. Had a cyst and an infection under a wisdom tooth. Went to my dentist who referred me to another specialist. The good part is that my regular dentist is gonna bill me. The bad part is that the specialist doesn't have a payement plan and "payment is due upon delivery of services." The consultation was $160. The extraction was $355. The pain of having to part with that much money was more excrutiating than the pain of the infection and the surgery. Credit card hell, here I come.
A couple of days ago, the tooth pain started to intensify. Yesterday, I went back to the dentist. He was really cool about it, didn't ask for any money, and let me leave through the back door.
On the way back to my friend Mike's place, a homeless guy selling Streetwise asked me for a dollar. When I told him I didn't have one, and didn't know if I even had money to catch a bus, he said, "How much money do you need?"
"No," I said, shaking my head in disbelief. "I can't take your money."
"No," he said, "How much do you need?"
"A dollar."
"You need a dollar? Here my brother," he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a dollar.
"No. No, man. I can't take your money."
"Here take it. The good lord blessed me, so now I'm helping you."
"No. No, man."
He took my hand and folded the dollar into it.
That lifted my spirits, renewed my faith in humanity, and restored my humility...for a while anyway.
