the ongoing whatever of my teeth

this is my temporary bridge. obviously it should be in my mouth bridging the missing tooth (that i've written about before) - instead, it's on this cardboard box. meanwhile, in my mouth, the two teeth that are supposed to have this glued to it are very senitive and fairly painful... because they're exposed. it's hard to drink or eat.

money, health, & art

a lineage of images on health & my work from past year:

screen capture of my purchased health insurance plan (catastrophe insurance)

an x-ray of my teeth, after my abscessed tooth was removed (more on that experience here)

tree/stump in England which people have hammered coins into for good luck

 

detail of the above stump

 i pick up lucky pennies, and keep them in my left pocket till they are no longer lucky

Adam Farcus - Lucky Pennies (lucky pennies, wood, glue, and shellac) 2012 [for the Octagon open house]

 Lucky Pennies (detail)

text from "Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft" that detail the healing powers of colors and how to charge water with colors

Adam Farcus - Charge (jars, lighting gels, tape, water, US dollar coins, bricks, and light) 2011

Charge (detail)

living like a weasel with tooth decay

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton - once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found a dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle hand pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before it was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?
-Annie Dillard. Teaching a Stone to Talk. 1982.

the quote above is from Annie Dillard's story, "Living Like Weasels", plays a primary role in Laurie Anderson's Speechless (Eagle and the Weasel) from the album Bright Red. both address passion and impulse and holding on to life, no matter what happens. this is important to me, this week, because i just went to the dentist and found out that almost all of my teeth need dental work:

some teeth are not represented, because they're ok, or (as in one case) missing. the teeth that need anything with "resin" in them have surface cavities that require drilling and filling. the two that need to be extracted are rotted wisdom teeth. tooth #3 has a large filling that i had worked on when i was a kid - it is evidently "leaking" now, and requires a lot of work. in total it would take 4 visits (one for each quadrant of my mouth), and total $3658.00 - for someone with health insurance that does not cover dental. i now know what is wrong with my teeth, and thereby have a goal. before this i lived in denial and fear of what might actually be happening in my mouth. so i'm going to latch onto this, save/find some money or other dental options (UIC clinic?), and hold on. hopefully i won't be gutted - but if i were it would be a good case for how our health system in the US needs to be fixed. (really, i could only dream to live, or die, as a martyr for my liberal beliefs.)