And during this period the max wind = 16 mph.

So I’m putting the umbrella back up.

***

For three days I have lived in four hour increments, because that’s how long it is, in between safe doses of the painkiller.

At first, four hours was way too long, and the pain was excruciating after two.

So I asked the AI about it. It said, well, clove oil.

I said I didn’t have any. It said, well, here are some second-best ideas.

And the one that worked best was peppermint tea bags, jammed up around the pain place, whether I was awake or in fitful sleep.

Allegedly it works because it’s anti-inflammatory.

It didn’t take the pain out, but it did make it bearable.

Now at the end, or what I pray is the end, I can make it without tea bags. Even without the pills it seems.

I have a theory.

Three years ago I had a root canal in the pain place. It didn’t go well. I had to go back to the dental office twice more.

I believe what happened was that the root was so deep that it was poking through from the mouth cavity to a sinus cavity. And so … they didn’t get it all, because they feared that getting it all would turn inpatient surgery into a blood-soaked emergency, 30 miles from the nearest hospital.

There’s been minor discomfort at times since then.

This time, I believe the root grew back enough to have nerve endings, and when they fired, it hurt like hell, until they died back.

Will it grow more sometime? Maybe, probably.

I’ll discuss that when I go in for my cleaning.

In the meantime, it was … a chance to study the nature of my suffering, in detail.

And I did so.

There will be other chances, because at some point it won’t just be a few random nerve endings dying, but my mortal being.

I would like to face those moments with an even more refined sense of grace than I managed this week.

Is that enough to consider myself a man of ambition?