But so anyways, when Dan eats his food, he chews in tiny little bites and occasionally closes his eyes like he's contemplating the texture of it, and then he'll stop to put his fingertips to his jaw. This makes sense from two different angles: first of all he is one of those people who are never in any particular rush and by their nature tend to savor everything. When we went to the museum I think Dan was the only one to stop and read every placard of every exhibit, and I very nearly ditched him in Beverly Hills when the guys jaywalked (or ran) across Beverly Drive to get to my illegally-positioned car (stopped mid-traffic) and I didn't realize he was like ten to fifteen seconds behind. But really I think the eating thing is more due to Dan's having had his wisdom teeth removed prior to arriving in the States and thus having no choice but to savor his food in tiny munches and meditative pauses. He's also been popping Panadol and antibiotics and salt-water-rinsing but appearing unaffected or not wanting to be affected by it.

On Sunday night, after a complaintless and seemingly free-of-jaw-pain meal at a raw-food vegan place in Culver City, we drove over to The Smell, literally a hole-in-the-wall in downtown LA where So So Modern was supposed to play the next evening. Three sets into the night, the sutures that closed the hole in Dan's lower-right jaw where a wisdom tooth used to be apparently started to undo. Dan was spitting blood into the concrete in the alleyway outside. After what was probably too much deliberation we decided that me and Dan ought to go out and find some ice for Dan, and then we spent the next fifteen minutes making a huge rectangular loop around the immediate neighborhood trying to find anything like a purveyor of ice, which was irrefutably a failure. We did, however, succeed in discovering that you could experience a rough capture of the palette of LA demography in that block's worth of space: right down the street from The Smell (full of hipster kids, mostly white and pretending to be living and entertaining themselves below their means) was a massive and exceedingly attractive crowd of yuppies gathered outside of a club (the kind with a nondescript facade and surely extravagant interior, also the kind that provokes (as it did in our case, after the fact) recall to that small but nonetheless meme-level canon of action films about trendy urban vampires that hang out in shitty techno clubs after midnight), and then a bunch of emptied but still-lit skyscrapers, and around the corner and taking up most of the space are Mexican clubs spouting kinda generic-sounding (by my ears, anyway) ranchero music and men in loud shirts and cowboy hats. During our walk, Dan and I semi-coherently tried to reassure each other that Dan would actually be Just Fine and that the air would do him good. We ended up grabbing some ice chips, more congealed than specifically frozen, out of the bottom of The Smell's kitchen freezer and wrapping them with a recycled paper napkin.

At that point Dan claimed that the bleeding had slowed down and that things were back to normal. Exactly how things got worse from there on I'm not exactly sure, since I can only rely on what Dan said, and Dan despite his talents is no doctor. The circumstances might be something like this: Dan hadn't taken a real break from the rock and roll life since getting his wisdom teeth taking out, even though that's normally a procedure that would level your average adult human for a good week. He'd continued to play the tail end of So So Modern's NZ tour, and he gamely jumped on the plane to Los Angeles only like a day later, and then he started to eat some rather intensely solid and not at all soft-and-chewy foods, like a raw-food vegan wrap (collard greens around a combination of tomato, alfalfa, and beans--better than I would have thought really) at the aforementioned restaurant. The real kicker, I think, was that he could feel his sutures coming undone in his mouth, and this led to a vicious temptation-aggravation cycle in which he would prod and probe and rinse the sutures as a way of simultaneously learning more about just what the hell was going on, and mollifying the inevitable oral itch-tickle you'd get from having poky strands in your mouth, and this of course made the pokiness and itchiness worse and made him bleed more and so he was even more curious about what the hell was going on, and before he knew it he was basically yanking bits of blood clot out of his gums. I'm paraphrasing here, both in terms of what Dan said and the order in which these things happened. We actually left The Smell one act early and ended up back at my house in Granada Hills thinking things would be okay, and so I thought all was well and went to sleep, only to have Mark come into my room maybe an hour or two later with a look of contagiously despairing concern on his face. By this time Dan was seated quasimodically in a dining room chair, spitting blood into a progressively less-empty juice glass. Mark had caught me at a bad REM moment and I swear I could not figure out what to do for ten minutes; it wasn't until I was lamely calling what turned out to be a 24-hour crisis line (the kind for the suicidally depressed) that I realized we should take him to a hospital.

So we found ourselves sitting in the emergency room at Providence Holy Cross Hospital (incidentally the site of my birth, but nevermind), me, Mark, Dan and his juice glass, on Sunday morning at let's say 3:00AM or so. The place was mostly empty except for some inebriated dregs who I'm a little ashamed to say annoyed the shit out of me, because I was agitated and my friend was leaking rapidly into a juice glass and I sorta felt like they were all wasting our time. But the triage nurse kicked some ass and got Dan into treatment right away. I took off a little after dawn while Mark stayed behind with Dan; what went on with the treatment I'm not sure of, but I know that they'd had a hard time stopping the blood flow and ended up jamming gauze with clotting agent into Dan's tooth-hole, which although it was prefaced with an application of liquid cocaine was apparently still incredibly painful, and also that Dan progressed through various stages of apoplectic rage and pain-induced dementia of which I know very little, except what Mark said Dan had written down in a little notepad so he could communicate with the doctor--the only excerpt I'm aware of reads cryptically "I'm in pain. 7 AM.", which for whatever fucked-up reason Mark and I found sorta funny. Eventually the doctor shot Dan up with morphine.

(Well while we were waiting for the initial word on Dan, Mark and I flipped through a copy of Adbusters (which actually Dan had gotten at no less a temple of capitalism than Fry's Electronics. Every member of So So Modern is aggressively smart and well-read, and they all carry around a kind of globalized, millennial punk chip-on-the-shoulder: they're all some degree of vegan and vegetarian, suspicious of politics and authority, and intensely ironic and maybe a little smug towards the mainstream.) and talked about the politics of dissent. It was the sort of conversation we'd get into a lot if you got the two of us alone, each of extremely prone to geeking out and basically way in over his respective head re: philosophy and social critique. Mark's basic concern, not in so many words, was that middle-class, privileged dissent in its many modern forms--e.g., eating organic, shopping at American Apparel, straight-edge, PETA, hunger-striking when the university regents cut funding to your marginalized humanities department of choice, &c &c--is either unaware of or unable to reconcile the tension between its Basic Message and its class and privilege, and that the discourse of non-conformity has become a kind of fashion (like, "No-Brand" becoming a brand in and of itself), and that as a result of all that, the Basic Message is cheapened and maybe even morally bankrupt. Anyway, I basically agree with Mark, although the problem is that we've merely dissented against the dissent, and meanwhile big problems are going down around the world.)

Finally, at 7:30AM or so, Aidan and I went back to the hospital to pick up Mark and Dan, the latter of whom was a rag-dollish and sedated mess. He was nowhere near game shape, and it was pretty clear they weren't going to be able to play the show that night. It's to their credit that nobody seemed particularly upset or resentful towards Dan (not that there would've been a concrete reason for that) as a result--I think they were mostly concerned that he was doing okay.

Grayson was asleep the entire time all of this was going down.