My wife had her wisdom teeth pulled today.

You say “i do” after the “sickness and in health” part, but it never really dawns on you what you’re agreeing to until you have a doped-up, half-crazed girl with gaping gumholes moaning at you to bring her applesauce.

i waited all through her extraction, and was called into the recovery room. My often sweet, frequently cuddly girl rolled over on the bed looking like a pale, chubby vampire waking up from a nap. The corners of her mouth were parched and cracked from where the dentist hinged her mouth open. At first, i thought it was blood - she looked like she had just finished feasting on a tasty zebra. After a protracted wake-up period, i escorted her down the elevator and into a cab, where the disappointed driver took my five dollars for taking us two blocks down to our place.

i don’t do well with sickness. Despite being chubby and arrogant and uncoordinated, i have some killer immune system that finds me sick once a year, tops. But when that rare day arrives, i milk it for all it’s worth. Ever 80’s sitcom i can remember did an episode where a character was sick and kept ringing a little bell to be waited on hand and foot. i am that 80’s sitcom character.

But when it comes to other people getting sick, and i’m the one who has to do the running around, i’m a horrible person. i can’t handle it. i can’t handle being near sick people- partly because they’re contagious, but mostly because they’re ugly. It’s this awful vanity that finds me repulsed by my loved ones, and it’s all i can do to keep myself bolting out the front door and tearing off my itchy, infected clothing. i am awful. i am an awful person and i know it.

What’s a guy to do? i’m slowly getting over it … i’m helping my wife get past the pain, helping her eat Jell-O … i even picked up a slimy, bloody piece of gauze with my bare hands and threw it in the garbage (moments after realizing that even she handles that stuff with a protective paper towel). It’s a start, but i just don’t know what i’d do if she needed a catheter, or if she were to firehose the bedroom wall with spew. i don’t change the kitty litter in our home, and i’m slowly, mentally preparing myself for the inevitability of changing dirty diapers. She says that pregnant ladies aren’t allowed to change kitty litter, because it contains a harmful ingredient (i’m guessing cat crap), so that’s another disgusting task i’ll have to add to my repertoire.

But it’s justice. If i can pull the baby act when i have a sore tummy once a year, the least i can do is empty my wife’s bloody drool bowl in the morning. Isn’t it? Or is there some bare minimum where the bar is set low enough that i can play video games and enjoy myself while she wails about her swollen beefy manjaw?

Sigh. Bloody gauze it is. If this ain’t love, i dare any one of you hair metal bands to play an extended power ballad to tell me what is.

i never expected that 80% of all entries in my journal would be about slang, but there you have it. Who knows what beast lurks inside the mind, scratching at your ear canal trying to get out? My beast has apparently taken the form of rabid etymologist. Wild.

Sooo … without further blather, the slangy exclamation that’s been on my mind lately is …

“HOKEY DYNAH!”

Now you have to understand that i almost shuddered as i typed it; i am NOT a fan of this phrase. The person who uses this phrase just got finished using “pritneer” in a sentence, and something has just startled him … the cost of a can of peas, maybe, or an especially good-looking lady with big hair who smokes the same brand. If you ever hear this phrase uttered, you should run - not walk - toward the nearest exit, because you are in a steel mill, and your IQ is dropping by the second.

i am not very kind to people who aren’t intelligent. It’s a problem i have. Whenever i go back to my home town, i find it very difficult to mask the disdain i feel whenever i run into someone i used to know, and that person says “Jever see Pete agin? i seen him last week.” i’m like the Hulk at this point … i grit my teeth and think “intellectual elitism … MOUNTING … must … correct … GRAMMAR …”

Then my muscles get all big and bulgy and i burst out of my clothes and scream “HULK EDUCATE!! HULK EDUCATE!!!”

In truth, my muscles have never been all bulgy, and that’s because i lack BODY intelligence, as some people lack BRAIN intelligence. i’m extremely lumpy and uncoordinated, which gets to be a problem on crowded streetcars in the wintertime with slippery floors when i have a big heavy backpack and i’m stepping on peoples’ feet and elbowing them in the boobs and all sorts of clutzy nonsense. At that point, i’m sure there are athletic elitists who wanna just burst out of their clothes Hulk-style and make me play basketball. … come to that, i kinda WISH there was some big green monster forcing me to go to the gym or take an evening walk, but all i have is my own lazy ego and a like-minded wife who sneaks candy into the house but makes no effort to hide it once it’s there.

A few years ago, Geraldo or Jerry or onea those goofs did a show on a fantastically obese man named Hambone, who weighed something like 90 gajillion pounds, and they had to knock out a wall of his house and lift him onto a flatbed truck with a crane to take him to the hospital, where the doctor confirmed that “yes, this man is very fat. He should not eat so many foods.” Anyway, Hambone died within the year, and my wife and i just shook our heads. The big mystery was that he couldn’t stand up and haul his loaf down to the local KFC to buy a few buckets, so SOMEONE was feeding him. And wouldn’t that person think twice about bringing home another deer carcass for a man who had ballooned to, say, 80 gajillion pounds? The big question became “Who feeds Hambone?”

The other day my wife brought home a big bag of cinnamon hearts. She ate a few, because she found them delicious. i don’t even like the things, but i found myself shovelling them into my quivering maw the entire night until the bag was empty.

At that point, i turned to her and said “It’s you, honey. You feed Hambone.”

Last night, i met Satan in a dark alley.

i remember thinking that it was such a typical place to run into someone of that ilk, to the point that i felt a little embarassed. Running into Beelzebub, say, in a grocery store or at a soccer game would have been so much more … interesting … but here i was, oafishly clomping through a dank alleyway replete with rats and rust and spiky bits of metal poking out of piled-up containers – tubes and boxes and things, with ratty vermin scampering about them. i didn’t actually see any vermin, but as i said, it was dark, and who knows what could have been in there? Nothing more terrible than the Devil himself, i suppose, who – as i have mentioned – was walking through that dark alleyway at that very moment.

It’s a strange thing that happens to someone when he is walking through a narrow corridor through which the Prince of Darkness is walking. i became so nervous about what could have been crawling around in the boxes that, for a moment, i completely ignored what was actually physically there in the alley to the point where, in mid-gait, i swerved away from a particularly suspicious pile of crates towards the Dark Agent of Evil. It seems foolish now, when i look back on it, but i do affirm that it’s a strange situtation to find oneself in.

Stranger still was the thought that next came to me there, in the dark alleyway through which none other than the Malevolent Overlord was presently strolling, which was how much more laundry i had to do. It was true, there was probably a more pressing matter at hand – that being the encounter i was about to have with Mephistopheles as i walked alone through a dark alleyway late at night – but just as i had swerved into the High Demon’s path to avoid the creepy unknowns in the trash heap, i thought about how filthy my clothes must be getting brushing past all of this infested debris. But as i looked down at my wrinkled chartruse shirt, the very shirt which every man has in his closet that was given to him by an aunt when he was thirteen which didn’t fit but which fits now, but there’s still no chance he’ll be caught dead wearing it except if it’s the absolute last thing in his closet which, for this particular man, it was … and so i was wearing it. It wouldn’t, then, be such a big loss to get it dirty or torn on a sharp metal thing because a shirt like that had a very low place in my clothing hierarchy. The shirt was only suited for painting the garage, or for wearing as a gaudy costume component on Hallowe’en. Or, on that note, for wearing to a meeting with the Unholy One.

i should mention at this time that i had no prearranged meeting to keep with the Horned High Demon. It was, for all my knowledge, a chance meeting that just happened to be in a tiringly archetypal dark alleyway, full of metal and bats and swooping high cathedral windows with their stained glass scenes smashed out with rocks. i’m adding this last part for effect, mind you, if only to convey how patronizingly unoriginal these surroundings were. You might as well have thrown in some weeping children and bleeding statues while you were at it. Big, grotesque statues of gargoyles and horned goat-fish creatures holding pointy sceptres that would come to life as you walked past, pointing at you mockingly and breathing flaming evil at the back of your hair, chanting some arcance and unpleasant death wail about unhappy bread bakers and puppies on fire, and all the while you’re walking and walking towards the Ungodly Spirit of Ultimate Nastiness, growing ever nearer, each footstep advancing you towards your inevitable meeting with the Angel with No Soul, the Leader of the Fallen Host, and large black flying things with paper-thin wings are screeching and fluttering past your face while your feet sink into some bloody tar carpet stickily oozing across the pavement and your eyes would be gaping, your heart bulging and your jawbone retreating to the back of your head for the maddening terror of it all if you could just stop thinking about laundry.

Just as this last thought crossed my mind the Devil brushed past me, tipping his hat as he went.

i walked on into the depths of that foul abyss, vowing never to forget the night that i met the Satan in a dark alley, and i had been wearing that stupid shirt.