Friday July 4th, 2008 - Lake Villa, IL

OWWWEEE. I woke up with an excruciating pain in my mouth this morning and it’s a flashback to the dental hell I went through last year around this time. I don’t know what it is but it REALLY hurts and I can barely get out of bed. I was invited to several barbecues today but I turned them all down. I haven’t had pain like this in a while and it‘s intense.

Of course Mr. Lucky’s luck would have all this happen on a three day holiday weekend. I have no idea who to call but I am going to have to find someone ASAP. This is a pain of Marathon Man proportions and I don’t know what to do to make it stop. I didn’t leave the house all day but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still torture. This is exactly what I dreaded.

Money is really tight right now and of course I have no insurance. With all the trouble I am having with my cars and the sports cards I bought and the people who owe me money I am tapped out at the moment. The last thing I need to be popping for is a root canal. It’s killing me though and I’ll have to do something about it or I’ll go totally crazy. I’m stuck.

I took some aspirin but that barely made a dent in my wall of pain. I tried to watch some TV to take my mind off of it and happened to come across the Maury Povich show. If that evil bastard isn’t rotting in hell someday with my father there is NO justice in this world.

I’m not usually a watcher of that stuff because it totally makes me puke. I do a major bit about these mopes in my act and that’s enough. I guess people like to feel better by seeing others doing worse than they are but this particular show held my interest so I watched it.

The guest was a 22 year old southern kid with a mullet and tattoos who had never had a chance to meet his father. He was crying on the set and they had someone backstage that kind of looked like the kid and had known his mother at just about the correct time so the chance was there that he was the kid’s real father. I could totally relate so I waited to see.

They didn’t tell the kid or the possible father what the test results were and tortured that poor sap and made him find out on live television. It turned out the older guy was not his father and the kid collapsed in agony. I felt like driving to wherever Maury tapes the show and grabbing him by his pencil neck until his bug eyes get even buggier. What an ass bag.

It’s very easy to sit and watch someone agonize when he or she hasn’t experienced a bit of the pain that kid was going through. I could see it in his face and when he described his childhood of what it was like to have no father of any kind I related on a level thankfully most people can’t. I felt the same way about my mother and still do. It still hurts me now.

The kid was weeping bitterly and they just rolled credits and went to a commercial. His feelings were just tossed aside and I bet he didn’t even get paid for it. After I saw that it’s a tossup which pain was worse - my tooth or watching that kid get his emotions crushed. I totally hope Maury Lowvich has to feel that kind of pain in his life and if he did he’d stop exploiting desperate people. I’m still steamed about the show and my tooth still hurts too.