There’s some law of life somewhere that says things will go wrong at the worst possible time.

Let me add the phrase “and it will probably be something impossible for you to fix”.

This weekend, right in the middle of ice and snow…a front tooth crown fell out into my oatmeal.  It might have been due to all of the  the steaming hot coffee this weekend…I splurged on a bag of Starbucks to propel my work during the ice and snow.

It’s both a bad and a good thing.

The better part of the incident is that number one, I didn’t chomp down on it and do more damage…and number two, I didn’t swallow the doggone thing.  It has a pretty sharp spikey-thingy on the end, and I imagine it could probably do a number as it traveled outbound from my innards.

Now.  I look like a fat hockey player.

Or a retired cage fighter.

Or… in reality- a man who dreads trips to the dentist.

Put David Campbell on alert.

My long-suffering dentist will load up his veterinary dart rifle.   As soon as I get out of the truck in the parking lot, he’ll open fire.  I might get a few hundred feet, but the staff will truss me up and drag me back to the office.  The nitrous oxide schnozzle will be clamped on…Joe Bonamossa will start blasting from the I-Pod, and before I know it, I’ll be on my way to better dental hygene.

I hope.

But I doubt it.

I am one of the worlds worst procrastinators for dental work.  It’s more than a dread, it’s a phobia.   I believe it goes back to some terrible times at the dentist when I was a kid.  I took a lot of antibiotics, including tetracycline for bad ear infections, and I believe that might be what started me on the road to snaggletoothedness.

It really isn’t that bad…  unless it scares the hell out of you.

And that is what the dentist does for me.

It’s a shame..because outside of his office… David is a cool, cool guy.  We have hollered and yelled side-by-side at football and soccer games.  He is a man of faith and purpose, and someone to look up to.   Unless he has that mask on.

Let’s take a short inventory of my life.

I have been at times:

Shot at

Chased by rioting Klan members

Inside burning multi-story buildings

Ran over myself with a truck (a story for another day)

Had two major surgeries, one of which nearly killed me

And… as my friend Hallerin will tell you,  I have been in a couple of helicopter wrecks.

And that is not the complete list.

It would seem logical that a trip to the dentist would be a piece of cake.  I am not Mr. Spock.  My mind is not logical.

When I was a kid, I got over my fear of riding on a Ferris Wheel.   In college I learned (because they made me) to swim.  I will be one year shy of three score this year.   I don’t think this one is gong to go away.

This afternoon, I drove to Walgreen Drugs and bought some temporary glue to see if the offending implement will at least stay in place until the deed can be done.  I like to smile at people.  I maintained a grim countenance today at the drug store and at Food City, lest people see that I have a hole that makes me look like a ’49 Ford without that round doo-dad in the middle of the grille.

First the moustache.

Now the tooth.

I hope this is not a trend.

Here are some wonderful photos.  Click here.

This guy ran the customers off in the front yard.

And Gracie was pleased with a new home entertainment system.

Here’s an article that might put a different perspective on being a sports fan, and our beliefs.  It’s from Christianity Today.  Click here. It’ll make you think about some things, whether you agree with the author, or not.

Variously described by those inside and outside as narcissistic, materialistic, violent, sensationalist, coarse, racist, sexist, brazen, raunchy, hedonistic, body-destroying, and militaristic, big-time sports culture lifts up values in sharp contrast with what Christians for centuries have understood as the embodiment of the gospel.

I can remember checking in at a motel in Daytona Beach, and the floor of the place was so nasty that Dena wouldn’t let the kids walk on the floor in their bare feet… and we had to tote them across the floor to the bathroom.  After a few hours of much-needed sleep for the driver (me), we checked out to better environs.

Here is the list from The Tennessean.

Here’s the story.

I am editing several essays intended for a book.  I thought I would publish these two on the blog, and possibly get your comments, critiques, rotten produce, or otherwise.    You can leave your message in comments, and I will reply to each one.   Thanks, and I hope you enjoy.  - Dave

Butt Cheek Terror

I am writing this on what could turn out to be the coldest night of the year. And every time it gets this cold, I remember the hours and hours I spent strapped into a cold Plexiglas bubble, sometimes colder than ice, for three or four hours at a stretch. It’s easy to remember the cold, because those winters have left me with arthritis in my knees, hips and feet. I can easily predict close storms or weather changes.

Now, the traffic helicopters are mostly jet engine jobs, which use heated air from the engines for heat,. In the dead of winter you can stay almost shirt-sleeve warm inside. Not so with the little Hughes 300-C helicopter. It has a heater that is about as effective as having a dog pant on you. The piston-engine Hughes is a wonderful aircraft, but it is indeed as cold and drafty as an arctic research station. Volkswagen beetles had notoriously ineffective heaters in their earlier years. Hughes must have swiped their design.

The air blast around the doors was equally as miserable in winter. And, they leaked in the rain from bad door gaskets. I bet I went though a ton of paper towels sopping up water before it would drip into my radio equipment. In the cold, the ice water would blow into the cabin at a hundred miles an hour.

One morning, the combination of cold and wet nearly made me the first butt donor recipient in Atlanta medical history. It was just warm enough for it to keep from sleeting, but cold enough for the water to be like ice when it combined with the wind. Also- when the water dampened my clothes- the wind acted as an evaporator, and made it even colder. Pretty soon, the leaky gasket had made by backside cold, really cold, really numb. By the time we landed, my right side butt cheek was as red as a Washington Apple. Back home, my wife tried warm towels to treat what amounted to frostbite. But she could not seem to quit laughing, and even appeared eager to have me show up at the doctor’s office to present my frozen cheek for inspection.

After that, I would always take ducting tape and seal the door after I got in on wet and rainy days. I might not be able to find a suitable butt donor, and have to live my life wearing suspenders to hold up my pants. On a typical cold morning, I would wear two pairs of socks, double insulated underwear, shirt, coveralls, and sweater, double gloves, a scarf, and even a toboggan stretched over the headphones. My pilots said I looked stupid. I told them, they looked cold and envious. I did not have to move the controls…all I had to do was sit there push a button and talk.

Maybe the Georgia climate thinned my blood. It could have been the fact that early mornings and pre dawn darkness seems colder than it really is. But I damn near froze to death in winters and still have a miserable time during the cold season. But as God reminds us, there is something for every season. For me, winter is the time to remember how nice summer can be.

The Purse

When I was an Atlanta radio reporter, killings  were still rare enough,  that when one happened, reporters usually showed up.   And in the earlier years at WSB,  we had a lot more leeway around crime scenes .  Police were used to a the regular reporters, and they usually trusted us around the scenes to  behave and not mess with evidence.

This call was a signal 48- (dead person) – call in an alleyway that ran behind some buildings on Ponce De Leon and just east of the midtown area.  The neighborhood had a combination of folks in it.  There were enough shady  looking characters that the churches in the area hired police officers to keep dope addicts and winos from wandering into services.   In addition to the down and out, grifters, and dopers, there was also a good-sized population of people who made good money, some even professional who chose to move back to the city’s  “in-town” life, and were re-populating the old neighborhoods and fixing up the old places.

She was on the grass,  up against a chain link fence.  She had not been there long, because a lot of people  walk the alleyway and would have noticed and called the police.   Or, on second thought, she might have been there all night long, with passerby’s mistaking her for a drunk or druggie  sleeping it off.

You couldn’t tell how old she was because her face was disfigured by the violence done to her.  But when officers searched up and down the graveled alley, they got a pretty good idea of the last moments of her life.

One shoe was found several feet from the other…as if she  lost them running away, or trying to fight. Her clothing was partly removed, the crime lab would have to see if she had been raped.

The story wasn’t big enough to break into regular programming for a bulletin. But the desk anchor wanted me to stay on the scene and report live at the top of the hour newscast.   There wasn’t a whole lot I could do at the scene, interview detectives for some short comments stating the obvious, and no details.   I had some time so I walked up and down the alleyway, talking with people, getting a little more tape, and just nosing around.

A couple of people told me they had seen the woman before- in that neighborhood. But nobody could tell me her name, or where she stayed .  And I wondered how people can still end up living on the street when there are so many shelters available.  I wondered if the woman would ever be identified by the medical examiners’ office.  Chances might be slim unless she had a criminal record, worked for the government, or had some kind of security job where her fingerprints or photo might pop-up.  There was no identification at all on her body.

I seriously doubted she could be identified by a relative who would report her missing.  If she lived on the streets, it was likely nobody cared enough to do so.

If nobody claimed the body, I knew what would happen. After the detectives and medical examiners investigators did all they could to get evidence in the killing, the body would be stored for a few weeks. Then if nobody claimed it, she would be buried in a pauper’s grave, in a donated coffin, on land the county bought in a cemetery in the city.  I had talked with the medical examiner investigators about that and did a news piece on it earlier.

As I walked back toward my car to get ready for the live report at the top-of-the-hour, I noticed something brown in a clump of tall weeds. When I got closer I saw that it was a woman’s pocketbook. I knew better than to touch it, so I hollered for a detective who came down the alley, used a stick to pick up the purse and place it in a bag.

I never heard of anybody being arrested in the case. But I do know the woman was finally identified. Maybe there was a mama or a sister or brother… somebody who could claim the body for  burial.

I wondered how she got there in that  Atlanta back alley.  Was it by choice?   Maybe selling herself to pay for a drug or booze habit, being shooed away from in front of  churches by the security officers?   Did she come to Atlanta from the country,  looking for a job only to find  dreams are sometimes only dreams, and hard to make into a dollar?   Maybe she was  a longtime resident, who watched as her pretty neighborhood broke down.

I might have found her purse, but there was so much more I didn’t know about her. .

And there have been so many like that.

Too many.

Too close for comfort

The North American Bear Center has a bear named Lily.  She’s showing signs of an imminent birth- gathering balsam branches, and doing other things bears do before they deliver.  Thing is, they have set up a camera in her den, and for the first time, a bear birth might be broadcast live on the Internet.  Here’s the link if you want to watch.

http://www.bear.org/website/visit-us/lily-den-cam.html

I don’t often promote commercial enterprises on this blog.  But this is an exception.  Brian is a young man who is trying to get his security business started.  If you need a security officer, or your property taken care-of, you might do well to give him a look.   Here’s his link:

Tennessee Threat Assessment