Every so often, a squirrel finds a nut.

I had one of my quarterly teeth cleanings this morning, after which I walked out with bad news as more healthy teeth are starting to fall out of my rotting gums. Granted, I wasn’t booked with my regular dentist. Despite my crystal clarity on the par of one giving a DNR order that I am a high-risk patient who sees Dr. N—- ONLY , the front desk gave me a random DDS from the practice’s lazy Susan anyway. I know I seem like I’m being all princess about it, but the problem is that any practitioner looking in my pie-hole for the first time ends up saying, “Sweet lord! You have the mouth of an octogenarian! Get this woman a full upper plate denture STAT!” So while I’ll go back next week to have Dr. N—- poke around, it ain’t like she’ll be reading tea leaves. Loose teeth are loose teeth.

Sidebar: Every time the topic of my severe periodontal disease comes up in a new situation, I have a compulsion to point out that I have always taken VERY good care of my teeth and gums. I can’t understand people who are all like, “I pretty much only floss like the week before my checkup” because, EW? I don’t like having a dirty mouth, at least not in the hygienic sense (insert rim-shot). It turns out that I don’t make enough saliva to wash away funk that gets into in even the cleanest mouth, plus also I had crappy dental insurance back in the aughts which made it impossible to see anyone on a regular basis as the process for getting a primary care person took months and then once I got in they’d stop taking my coverage. At the risk of whipping out the tired old “But I didn’t do anything WRONG” chestnut here, this is why I see my thin-skinned-ness around having a jar of perfectly healthy teeth on my dresser as kinda justified.

So I sniffle-cried a little on the bus ride home and then nodded off and missed my stop. Not a big deal, as I got to appease the FitBit gods with the walk home. But still. I am thinking the only way this is going to end without the kind of debt that will make my husband and me clutch our chests and cry “Elizabeth!” will have me looking like something from a Chuck Palahniuk novel.

Then I arrive home, check my mailbox and see that I have won A Thing.

Not anything that will provide for bone grafts and dental implants and Make It All Better, but a nice luxury Thing I’d not have purchased for myself otherwise. I know I’m not supposed to look for happiness in Things outside of myself, but this afternoon, it was helpful.

New year, new half-century, new blog.

This seems like a good enough time as any to revive my blog.

“Snnrk!” You wake with a start, wiping your nose on your sleeve. *sniff* “Oh, have you been gone, Disco?”

Yes I have, smartass. For the past almost five years, I’ve been in limbo between my last blogosphere and here. I LOVED my last blogosphere. I was on it for a good ten years or so. Initially, I started it in the early aughts to read my friend’s travelogue. Oh, I suppose I could have found out where my friend was and what she was doing just fine without a subscription to the specific blogging platform ; however, I 1. wanted to get the real poo she made available only to peeps on her “friends” list and 2. was looking for a corner of the Interwebs anyway to post random randomness what amused me.

“You both should have just gone on Facebook ,” you yawn. “Oh, wait, this was before Facebook was invented. Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.”

Correct. Jesse Eisenberg had not yet sketched the plans for his mighty social empire on the walls of his cave. I believe you can see a daguerreotype of this artifact at the Smithsonian, after the government shutdown by President Voldemort ends.

Now shut up, millenial, and let me finish.

So, yeah, I got the travel updates and the posting of “memes”. Then I found a few of my local chums who were members, and I coerced additional friends from in real life to sign up, and then I was both the consumer and the consumed and that happened pretty quickly. On the one hand, I’m embarrassed to admit it because if I say “I was a part of a warm community of individuals who even though only online I could call friends” I feel like the nerd in high school who says he does too have a girlfriend but you don’t know her because she lives in Canada. On the other hand, the communal blogging kept me writing on a regular basis — if nothing else, about my bland-ass life in stultifying detail, but also it got me a couple new posses in cities outside Chicago, as well as through the Bush years (remember, back when we thought America had problems?) and a discriminatory work situation and postpartum depression and my child’s diagnosis and a subsequent departure from the rat race.

Then came the Russian hackers invading everyone’s accounts, plus also the introduction of the Book of Faces, and suddenly there was a mass exodus of users to this new shiny thing. “Sorry!” my online friends called over their shoulders as they left the building carrying their plants and desk tchotzkes and thumb drives in a bankers’ box. “Come join us over on Facebook!”

“No thank you,” I replied, cleaning my fingernails with a letter opener. “It’ll never last. I’ll be here keeping the lights on in the meantime.”

As with so many other decisions I’ve made, you can see how well that worked out for me.

LiveJournal is dead.

I still ain’t caving in to Facebook though. Trust me. I am too thin skinned and nothing good will come of it.