So I got my wisdom teeth out last week, and while it was cool to take off work for a couple of days it wasn't exactly all roses and porno around the Thompson house while I was recovering from the operation.  It was pretty tough for a while, and I decided this week to document my experiences so that any of you folks out there who are getting their teeth yanked out will know what to expect in the days following your procedure.

Day One:  Helllloooooo Percocet

Well I can't really speak a whole lot about the operation itself, not so much for lack of want but rather because after they gave me the Nitrous and let it run for a couple minutes and I was starting to buzz my ass off they asked me if I was "feeling a little relaxed", and like any good substance abuser worth his Vicodin I told them "I don't think I'm feeling anything" so they jacked the nozzle on my Top Gun-style laughing gas dispensing flight mask up to eleven and the rest of the morning is pretty much a blur.  I do recall that they let me listen to my iPod during the procedure, which was great, but from now on every time I hear the song "Lie to Me" by Johnny Lang I'm going to think of this crazy Saudi Arabian oral surgeon chick in a hijab violently wrenching my teeth out of my head while another chick held me down and applied suction (in a very non-dirty way).  I will say that considering how much I hate my dentist, I was expecting this whole deal to be a goddamned nightmare of Tim Burtonian proportions, but between the OD on N₂O and my surgeon's snarky wisecracks everything went far better than I expected.

After getting home, the rest of the day didn't get less foggy for me.  She prescribed me some Percocets, which are dope as all hell, and explicitly told me to take two as soon as I got home because otherwise I was going to be hating life around the time that the ten gallons of Novocain they injected into my face wore off.  So I got home and popped two, exactly per doctor's orders.  I should mention that I hadn't eaten in about sixteen hours at this point, so it's pretty safe to say that I spent the first half of the afternoon tripping balls and watching Animal Planet's Most Xtreme Lion Maulings or Maury Povitch Super Slut Paternity Tests or some other freaking crazy shit on TV and laughing my ass off at the fucking commercials for crying out loud, and the second half of the afternoon curled up in the fetal position feeling like I was going to hurl out the entirety of my small intestines.  It was very sexy, to be sure.

Day Two:  Amazing Ben Does Something Retarded

So you would think that since I took the day off work and spent the entire morning laid up on the couch hopped up on pain meds eating roughly two-thirds of my body weight in chocolate pudding I would have just taken that evening and just relaxed.  But no.  Things just don't work like that when you're as big a dumbass as I am.  No, I decided that I wanted to go out and play a spirited game of shitty D-league softball.  We had a game that night against a team put together by the local Korean Church and I was determined for whatever reason to get out there and play.  I figured that my mouth wasn't really bothering me all that badly and our team was going to need our starting First Baseman if we were going to beat those crafty Koreans, so what could go wrong?

Then in the top of the third inning I hit a ball into left and subsequently attempted to stretch a close play at third base into a standing triple.  I knew I should have slid.  I saw the third baseman reaching for the throw from left field and instead of hitting the dirt I stretched my foot out for the bag.  That's when the ball cracked me square in the right temple with a sickening THUD that could be heard clear across the diamond.

Now say what you want about softballs not being as hard as baseballs or whatever, but when you get drilled in the fucking face with a hard throw from the outfield, especially when you aren't expecting it, it hurts like a motherfucker.  I went down like a sack of bricks that had just been whacked by a wrecking ball and started rolling around in front of the Korean team's bench swearing a seemingly endless torrent of sailor-grade profanity and holding the side of my head while the co-ed über-Christians looked on with their mouths gaped open, horrified by my incredible ability to take the Lord's name in vain five times in a single goddamned sentence.  After the umpire tested me for a concussion I managed to "walk it off" and finish the game.  We still ended up losing, and not so much because we were facing a team of twelve Hee-Seop Chois, but rather because our team totally sucks this year so badly that after every game our team captain Hot Andrea yells at us, insults our virility and then throws sand in our eyes before hurling someone's glove into the outfield and storming off.

Day Three:  Agony

I woke up on Saturday morning feeling like my head had been run over by a convoy of tour busses carrying the Japanese National Sumo Wrestling Team on their way back from the China Super Buffet.  I spent the entire morning laid up on the couch with Hot Andrea watching American Gladiators on ESPN Classic and holding not one but two bags of frozen vegetables on my head - one on my mouth to try and get the swelling down from my surgery, and the other on the gigantic throbbing lump on my head that was already beginning to morph into a full-sized replica of the softball that had created it.  I had so much fucking cold stuff on my face that I had to drink like two gallons of anti-freeze just to keep my brain from solidifying into a block of really nasty gray ice.  Moving the ice bags hurt.  Moving my head hurt.  Watching TV hurt.  And as much as I love American Gladiators, especially when they try to interview Nitro and he speaks almost exclusively in outdated clichés ("Well Mike, I always like to push it to the limit, claw your way to the top, reach for the stars to the max - you gotta strive to survive and always do your best, say no to drugs... you've seen the rest, and Nitro?  Well Nitro's the best"), it was a horrible time to be alive.

Day Four:  Conquering the Galaxy

I was feeling a little better on Sunday, so when my wife ditched me at home to go spend the day with her hetero life-mate I decided I was going to sit down at my computer and start getting into the amazing game Galactic Civilizations II on my computer.  I hadn't done anything other than complain and feel like shit for the last four days, so I felt that it was time to do something of consequence with my life, like grind the universe and all of it's citizenry under the heel of my unrelenting combat boots.  So for all of you out there who send me e-mails telling me to write updates about what I would do if I ruled the world, here's about how it would go.

I was elected the ruler of a custom-made race that (in my mind at least) resembles giant talking brains that look like a mix between The Brain From Planet Arous and Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, along with a "warrior caste" made up entirely of Dirty Harry Callahan clones.  I named all of my planets after Badasses of the Week and even photoshopped a picture of myself holding a lightsaber while standing regally on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise to serve as my Empire's avatar, which by itself should have been enough to convince every civilization in the known galaxy to surrender to me unconditionally.  From an angular throne on my homeworld of Badassia I played on a gigantic-sized galaxy against nine rival civilizations.

Now it may surprise you to find that in these sorts of galactic conquest games my first goal isn't to go out and crush all of my enemies militarily.  Instead I like to put together a solid core of productive planets and research as much technology as possible before building a fleet of warships the far outclass everything in the galaxy and then using that to either pummel everyone into submission or convince them to ally with me so I can get the Diplomacy Victory.  In the meantime I tend to get by on diplomacy and other such pussy bullshit like "not vaporizing alien douchebags even if they deserve it".  This game didn't really pan out that way unfortunately.

After getting a pretty sizeable empire together, I learned that my buddies the Humans discovered some crazy piece of ancient alien technology that was basically going to transform them into an unstoppably powerful civilization, so of course I had to crush them before it came to that.  Sorry Humans, but thems the breaks sometimes.  Basically I set up a propaganda network the likes of which would have made Josef Stalin look like the assistant editor of a middle school student newsletter, and any planets too stupid to revolt against the Humans and join me were stamped out by the ever-stamping heel of my 1970s-era Clint Eastwood Army.  Earth fell within weeks, and the last remnants of Humanity were incorporated into the great melting pot of the newly-christened planet Bill's Gay Land.

Unfortunately, one of my neighbors in the galaxy didn't really appreciate my so-called "unprovoked aggression" against the Humans and decided he was going to fuck with me by declaring war and calling my wife a whore.  Since he was basically asking for me to jam a laser gun in his eye and pull the fucking trigger until it goes click I obliged and sent a fleet of John Paul Jones-class Frigates to fuck up his fleet in the way that only a race of giant floating brains with glowing eyes can.  Well everyone started getting fed up with my bullshit and almost the entire galaxy - six of the remaining seven races - simultaneously declared war on me.  Even the fucking Altarians, the touchy-feely do-gooder hippies who I had forged an alliance and several economic treaties with, stabbed me in the back.  Well this was fucking it.

I forged a new alliance with a hyper-evil race of sentient cyborgs who resemble the illegitimate love-child of the Terminator, a Cylon and one of those expensive toasters that make like an entire loaf of French Bread at once, converted all of my research buildings and places of higher learning into industrial gothic war factories and ran my bustling economy into the ground by pumping out endless waves of General Zod-class Heavy Cruisers stocked to the brim with enough weaponry to nuke the Sun.  The entirety of the galaxy was packed with these fuckers as I proceeded to obliterate every living creature in the universe.  It was sort of cathartic in a way, especially once I got tired of trying to micro-manage my planetary troop invasions and just started wasting hostile planets by dusting enemy colonies from orbit and moving on with my life.

Ironically I did end up achieving the Diplomatic Victory, but only after the soulless Killbot Cylons and I had exterminated or enslaved every race in the galaxy and I didn't have the heart to break my Alliance with them.

And that, my friends, is why you don't want to ever put me in charge of anything.

Day Five:  Weird Cravings

I won't get into the specifics of it here, but five days after the surgery I was still having trouble with one of my extraction sites and wasn't able to eat real honest-to-god solid foods no matter how hard I tried to activate my Mutant Healing Factor.  Now while it was fun to spend four days ingesting nothing but chocolate pudding, Ensure, Coke, ice cream and Percocets, at this point it was starting to get old fast.  Especially when you consider that I wasn't able to brush my teeth or even rinse with mouthwash.  Eeesh.

Anyways, my inability to snack on anything of substance led me to have more weird cravings than a pregnant woman with multiple personality disorder, and at some times I was so blinded by my desire to eat something greasy and disgusting that I thought about going to some desperate measures.  Here are some of the seriously disgusting things I *actually* thought about doing to satiate my desire to eat some real fucking food:

• Chucking a big fucking greasy cheeseburger, some steak tips, taco shells, Doritos, green olives, black olives, black beans, rice, fried chicken and ham into the blender with some A-1 sauce, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, salsa and nacho cheese and then frappéing it all together into a horrible meat slurry I could then drink.
  
  
• Eating a jar of reddish-brown "meat" flavored baby food, which does actually exist and (as I now know) is very disgusting no matter how much salt and melted cheese you add to it.
  
  
• Putting a can of green beans, a handful of chips, a fruit roll-up, a package of fruit snacks, three slices of turkey meat, two slices of muenster, a graham cracker, two marshmallows and a sliced up pickle all on a sandwich and then smashing it up with a claw hammer until it's liquidated enough to eat.
  
  
• Frying up some potatoes with a bunch of spices, giving the potatoes to Andrea and then just drinking the fry grease right out of the pan.
  
  
• Microwaving a large handful of cheese until it becomes a liquid, throwing it in a food processor with some super greasy french fries and two spoonfuls of sour cream, chopping it all up into a paste and eating it with a spoon.

I really wish I were joking.

Day Six:  ST:TNG FTW

ON THE SIXTH DAY, Andrea once again ditched me to go on a job interview in some remote part of the country and I was once again left to fend for myself.  I wasn't quite feeling up to reprising my role as a super diplomat turned genocidal maniac with another game of Galactic Civ, so I turned to my old reliable backup - the TV.

Now aside from the occasional Arrested Development rerun, I was under the impression that G4TV consisted entirely of shows where large-breasted semi-attractive women jumped around waving their tits in front of a camera saying inane shit like, "Oh my God I totally like love video games SO much hee hee check out this mobile phone and watch as I try to use sex to sell you a bunch of useless tech crap like THIS AWESOME DIGITAL COMPASS!  It's also a pedometer AND you can play Tetris on it!", sort of like how TBS is really just nothing but Braves games and old Friends episodes.  I usually think of G4 as being one step removed from the Home Shopping Network, because you can't turn that fucking channel on without someone telling you what the "cool" shit is to buy at your local G4-approved retail locations or what brands are "hip" and "edgy" and are the most deserving of your hard-earned spacebucks.  I guess they also have those programs with twentysomething "cool guy" hipsters bitching about something fucking stupid like video game legislation or whether or not some obscure pretentious video game developer is an "artist" as opposed to "some guy who programs games and tries to sell them to you in exchange for money", but that's all about as appealing to me as a swift punch to the ballsack with a mailed fist.

Well it turns out there's another show that runs pretty much constantly on G4, and that's Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  And this night, as I was parked in front of the TV with an ice pack in one hand and a tub of ice cream in the other, I not only watched an episode of Next Generation for the first time in probably ten years, I watched like A MILLION OF THEM.

Now I wouldn't call myself a "Trekkie" by any stretch of the imagination, but I remember I liked TNG back when I was in middle school and my dad, brother and I used to watch it pretty much every Saturday night (or whatever the hell night it came on).  Not having seen an episode in a long time, here are a couple of things that came to mind during my late-night nerd-a-thon:

• I wonder if there are Starfleet regulations about the amount of cleavage your uniform is allowed to expose?  Because if there is, someone should fill Councillor Troi in on the rule, because dude she's about to bounce out of her spandex half the time.  Not that I'm complaining of course, because Greek chicks are hot even when they have huge 1980s rock star groupie hair.
  
  
• Why is Patrick Stewart's character French?  He's got this great British accent, but his name is Jean-Luc Picard.  What is up with that?  It seems like they should have either made him British or gotten a French dude to play the role.  I also don't know why it took me ten years to make this connection.
  
  
• I saw an episode where I SWEAR TO GOD there was a fight scene which consisted entirely of four dudes standing in a circle in one of the crew quarters taking turns kicking each other in the face.  There must have been ten face kicks in the span of about forty-five seconds, all accompanied by the cheesy standard Bruce Lee-style "wha-pishhhh" face kick sound effect while the face-kicked man went flying across the room.  It was like face-kick christmas or some shit.  It was so awesome I can't even begin to explain it... I just wish I remembered the episode so I could link to a YouTube of it.
  
  
• I don't care that it's like the battle cry of nerd clichés everywhere, but I don't know how anybody can think that Klingons aren't fucking awesome.  There's just something inherently cool about warrior cultures, especially ones that revolve around leather jackets and shivving people with three-pronged blades.  I know if I were around in the Star Trek universe I'd probably wind up being some whiny bitch Ferengi or something, but god damn Klingons rock.
  
  
• Does nobody use contractions in the future?  I don't know what the deal is or why I never noticed this before, but everybody on the show talks like they've got a stick lodged ten feet up their ass.

Day Seven:  Finally, Real Food

Seven days after my operation I finally got to eat some real food, and it was everything I hoped it could have been.  I ate junk food until I almost barfed (in a good way) and then I attempted to continue eating but Andrea eventually made me stop.  For the most part things are back to normal now, and despite all of the horror stories I heard (many of them via emails through the website, so thanks for all the encouraging words and the "you are so fucking fucked it's going to hurt like a motherfucker"s) it wasn't really that bad.  Well, I should say it wasn't really that bad until I got cracked in the head with a softball.  Then it sucked.

My advice to you:  If you're going to get your wisdom teeth out, do your best to avoid massive blunt trauma to the head.