Oral surgery. Again. Sigh.

So okay, that's it; today I finally had the last round of oral surgery that I'll ever have to have again, the removal of my last three natural teeth; of course, it was still traumatic and painful, just like the other three rounds I've had over the last three years, despite it being the last. Anyway, I was telling the doctor how I have these bizarre side effects to the usual painkiller Vicodin that most doctors prescribe me in these situations; see, I'm severely allergic to morphine, so am even slightly allergic to its supposedly safe manmade version Vicodin, with it making me itchy and impotent and restless whenever I take it, very out of sorts. And the doctor said I shouldn't be having that kind of reaction to painkillers, so decided to have me try Darvocet (generic name Propoxy) for the first time; and so I started on that this morning, when I first got home from the doctor's, and on only my second dose of it promptly got high for 45 minutes and then was knocked out unconscious for six hours, right in the middle of the day. So no pain, needless to say; but now it's 9:30 pm and I'm just waking up after an entire day of sleeping, feeling really out of it and wondering if I'm now going to be up all night. We'll see, I guess. But ultimately it's all okay, because I precisely prepared for this kind of possibility; I got all the hard stuff done with CCLaP before the surgery, cleared my entire schedule for the three days or so of the surgery and afterwards, and even gathered up a whole gaggle of movies* so I can be 100-percent passive if I want, including The Dark Knight which I didn't see in the theatre and in fact avoided all information about, precisely so it would be shocking and new at this exact moment when it came in through Netflix. Hooray! So if I'm up all night watching "The Dark Knight" and getting online stuff done, then I am, and that's just a part of surgery, and something for me to simply cope with instead of get angry about and try to avoid. I've learned that the hard way in the past, that medical stuff is simply medical stuff, and that you always fight a losing battle when fighting a human body reacting naturally to medical stuff.

*And then for those who are curious, the other two DVDs I have right now are Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Swoon, a new stylish film about the notorious Leopold & Loeb case. And then let's not forget all the movies and television shows I can now watch through Netflix instantly on my Mac, hooked up to my HDTV, plus all the movies and TV shows available for free at Hulu. I have a HUGE honking list for both these places of stuff to eventually watch, both unseen projects and old favorites I can dial up whenever, like at night as I'm going to sleep. Want a big honking giant example list? Hold your breath and dive in, then, because I'm going fast...

Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Steamboy, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen, An Evening With Kevin Smith, 1 and 2 (six freaking hours!), Into Great Silence, The King of Kong, Lost Treasures of Tibet, Bullitt, Hound of the Baskervilles, In Like Flint, The Lost Weekend, Nosferatu, The Omega Man, Pola X, Renaissance, Soylent Green, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Alien, Big Trouble in Little China, Blade Runner, Clockwork Orange, Night Watch and Day Watch, Eraserhead, Escape from New York, Hellraiser, The Hunger, Ladyhawke, Logan's Run, Phantasm, Ratatouille, Road Warrior, Robocop, The Shining, Velvet Goldmine (quite possibly my all-time favorite movie of my entire life), Westworld, 28 Days Later, Babylon 5, The Fifth Element, Firefly, Lawrence of Arabia, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, WKRP, Master and Commander, Men in Black, Naked Lunch, Starship Troopers, Titan AE, and Xanadu. And that's, like, half my list.

Whew! Man, I'm telling you, I can't begin to adequately express how cool it is to have access to just so many movies and TV shows instantly, whenever I want; 16,000 movies and 36,000 TV shows, in fact, more added each week, hundreds and hundreds of which are ones I've always wanted to see or would love to see again. Now if these services would start getting better at closed-captioning (with surprisingly Hulu being MUCH better at it than Netflix), it'd be perfect, absolutely perfect, and I would never need to actually own a movie again, or shell out the kinds of outrageous prices the movie industry has conspired to keep DVDs when purchasing them. When you can simply dial up a movie whenever you want, and watch it as many times as you want after paying a flat monthly fee, there's literally no reason anymore to actually own a movie, even if you want to fall asleep to it a hundred times in a row. That's where so many of the titles on my particular list come from; they're old favorites that would be great to fall asleep to, watch in the background as I do boring computer work, etc etc etc. Sunday afternoon movies; channel 9 movies. Except I'm the owner of channel 9 now, and can just rifle through the entire catalog of movies that channel 9 has access to, and pull up whichever one I happen to most be in the mood for, instead of some programmer at channel 9 making that decision for me on a Sunday afternoon. That's why I think it's been so brilliant of both Netflix and Hulu to concentrate on building as deep a back library as quickly as possible, one full of cult hits, versus for example Blockbuster whose very marketing campaign revolves around them concentrating on more recent flash-in-the-pan movies for their streaming selection (which is only 2,000 movies at this point), the exact crap that was just in the theatres a few months ago and you didn't want to see then, but happens to be all the stuff with the huge marketing campaigns themselves at this exact moment. I'm sure that strategy makes for a pile of highly paid, highly satisfied middle-management executives at Blockbuster and the movie companies; but the Netflix and Hulu strategy is the much better option for the customer, and results in a happier Jason and millions more like me. And that's why Hulu has turned out to be the most popular online experiment in the history of corporate-sponsored online experiments, and why Netflix has served over a billion movies now, and why this latest Blockbuster trainwreck is destined to be a disaster, and Blockbuster itself destined to eventually go belly-up in this economic meltdown we're going through.

Okay, rant over, drugs kicked in. Off to watch Batman, because I AM A MORON.