Today’s topic is The Roof, and what gets stuck on it.
You think you have things well in hand in life, and then you find out you’ve been doing something wrong all along, and it’s a plumb miracle you’re still alive. Like how you should flip your mattress every other month and throw it out after ten years or tiny bugs will eat your face off. Or like how you’re 23 years old before someone tells you you’ve been wiping your butt the wrong way.
That one’s a stunner.
Not long ago I read that you should make a point of relaxing your tongue so it isn’t jammed up onto the roof of your mouth. This will relieve stress. So the next night that my monkey mind and I were awake when we didn’t want to be, I thought: is my tongue jammed up onto the roof of my mouth? Why, yes it was. I lowered it.
And it zipped right back up again like that piece of cellophane you can’t shake off your hand. I ordered it to stand down again. It wouldn’t. Now I’m really stressed. My tongue began feel large and ungainly and quite possibly plotting to shut off my airway. Sixty-eight years of détente with my own tongue and now we have a terrorist situation. This was ridiculous. Besides, there was no evidence of tension in my jaw. Quite the opposite, according to the puddle of drool on my pillow.
Bother.
There was an article online from a Life Coach who recommends tongue-relaxing. She says it’s effective at “quietening the mind.” Mind quietenation is the goal. The good woman swears that taking her tongue off the roof of her mouth and keeping it from moving reduces internal chatter and allows her to focus 100% on what her clients are saying. She says you can achieve this by holding your tongue between your thumb and forefinger. If my life coach did that in a session, I’d cancel my appointments and go straight back to alcohol.
So today I looked it up, and by gum if there’s not such a thing as Proper Tongue Posture. This irritates me no end. I count on a lot of the daily operation of my corporeal self to be running smoothly in the background, with no direct supervision from me. And I’ve been very happy over the years to have my tongue be one thing I didn’t have to think about. But glory be! It turns out the proper tongue posture is resting against the roof of the mouth after all! Gently resting, away from the teeth, lips closed, teeth slightly parted. We will all agree to ignore Dave when he says he wasn’t aware I had a resting tongue posture. I in fact do, and that is it.
So this story has a happy ending after all, and the added benefit of making me think about the roof. Specifically, I needed to climb out a tower window and stand on the roof to take a picture of the outside of my window to send to a window repair guy. So, there being a ten-minute break in the rain we’re not complaining about, I went out on the roof. Know what’s resting gently on our roof?
Raccoon poop. Lots and lots and lots of raccoon poop. The roof used to be their dance floor and now it’s their latrine. I hope they’re wiping the right way.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
I find that these “life coaches” are full of… platitudes. They tell you all sorts of things that are supposed to relax you. I’ve tried them, to no effect. My mind still chatters away at me in the middle of the night when I just want to get back to sleep. And it’s always about something I can’t do anything about right then… if at all. I’ve read that menopause does that to women, and also that you need less sleep as you get older. Young Mimi never had sleeping issues. She would go out until the wee hours of the morning, saying shit like “I can sleep when I’m dead.” That deluded fool.
Not foolish at all. You CAN sleep when you’re dead.
In 2017 I had kidney surgery involving endotracheal intubation for several hours, came out with a repaired kidney but severe TMJD, aka “lockjaw”. I spent the next 2 1/2 years using my tongue to ‘wedge’ between my teeth to keep them from clamping shut like a vise. It got very strong like a bicep, grew pretty fat and DID fill my mouth! Anyway Murr, Merry Christmas and I’m glad we got to see your own little tongue vs that poopy roof!
I won’t ask why!
I’ll add tongue position to the things I never considered list that probably still don’t need to consider. Not saying that at some point in the future things won’t change, but for now I am happy in my ignorance of tongue position. Of course now I can’t stop thinking about it. Thanks a lot! You win!
See, that’s exactly what happened to me. Until I read I was doing it right all along.
I’ll add tongue position to the things I never considered list that I probably still don’t need to consider. Not saying that at some point in the future things won’t change, but for now I am happy in my ignorance of tongue position. Of course now I can’t stop thinking about it. Thanks a lot! You win!
People make stuff up all the time. Especially about posture. “Has that study been replicated?” will sometimes shut them up, because generally there hasn’t been a study at all, let alone anyone trying to replicate it. (Actually, of course, I’m making that up, in turn: nothing makes those people shut up.)
Oh… don’t get Murr started on posture. Pete Egoscue (author of Pain Free: a Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain) is all about posture! And I must say that I agree with him. I have terrific posture and have managed to avoid a lot of the infirmaties that hunched-over people have. Whenever I have a problem, I do his exercises and they resolve themselves. The trouble is that they don’t do studies on things that don’t bring in money. Exercise doesn’t do much for the bottom line. Drugs do. Surgery does. So that’s what they study. But maybe I’m just cynical. (Ya think??)
Maybe walking away from them makes them shut up, Dale, but we’ll never know.
I heard about relaxing the tongue to get to sleep faster years ago and tried it for a few days until I forgot about it. I don’t recall it making any difference.
I really truly do not want one more thing to think about.
Happy Hollidays, all. Now I’m stuck with concern about what’s been scrambling around on my roof lately. Also, here’s an idea for 2021 Winter distraction: what should we, Murr’s posse, be called? Perhaps a contest to name this fan base would be fun.
yes, a contest would be fun! Nothing comes to mind immediately, but as Eeyore says, “I will give my mind to it.”
Oh dear! Heh heh.
Years ago, 25 or 30, my dentist created a night guard for me that I have used pretty much every nighttime sleep of my life ever since. It’s just a little thing that fits mostly in the roof of the mouth and prevents the jaws from locking the teeth together in a demented friction war of opposing cracking molars. Then I started wearing those little rubber earplugs because someone was snoring. Now I go to bed with my ears locked shut and my teeth retained, and it’s all so incredibly peaceful in here. Merry Christmas!
Paul uses one, but it’s on his bottom teeth. He grinds at night. I have to remind him almost every night to put it in, because he is high-maintenance, but it’s better than spending copious amounts of money to put in implants (which has been suggested by his dentist — after numerous crowns and root canals. We could use that money for something fun… like food… or alcohol!) Anyway, between the night guard and a mouthwash that contains xylitol (Spry), which apparently is VERY sweet — which bacteria LOVE — but actually has NO sugar — the bacteria in the teeth which cause cavities and other problems eat this product because it’s sweet… but since it has no sugar, it starves them. So far, it’s been working very well for him.
After looking all over the internet for a mouthwash that was 1. dye-free (the dental hygienist told me that dye was just staining my teeth between visits and giving her more work to do) 2. fluoridated and 3. sans-sucralose, I settled on a different xylitol-sweetened thing, CariFree CTx3 rinse. But it seems that Spry, which I’d never heard of, is a bit cheaper. Is it colorless and fluoridated?
Marsha & I both use night-guards or whatever they are called, to prevent what our dentist called bruxism. After she had a tooth capped, hers didn’t fit quite correctly anymore and snapped under the toothy pressure, which surprised me, since when I see her sleeping her mouth is almost always wide open. Good thing we don’t have flies. The dentist still hasn’t quite got the fit right. And our insurance pays nothing for nightguards.
Jeremy, Spry only contains the natural plant colors — nothing artificial. It’s not fluoridated. It contains all natural ingredients and no alcohol. Paul uses the herbal mint (Healing Blend) since it tastes less odious to him ( we are NOT sweet eaters.) He’s been using it religiously several times a day, and has had no problems with his teeth/gums. I first read about this mouth wash in a natural food magazine, then did a little online research on my own, and it sounded credible. And it is certainly cheaper than taking teeth that have already been root canaled and crowned, removing them, and replacing them with implants. Jesus Christ… is EVERYONE a shyster these days?
It definitely is sounding like a war zone is in your-all’s mouths. I don’t think I grind my teeth because they don’t even match up anymore. Anywhere. And I’ve never heard of starving bacteria. I wonder if they slurp up the mouthwash and take it back to their nests…
I notice that I clench my jaw when I drive, but that’s about the extent of it.
Well, for Chrissakes!
The last time I thought about tongue placement was my freshman year at Allegheny College, where as a budding French major we studied Pierre DeLattre’s <>. Until then, I could never pronounce the letter “T” in an authentic way in French. As someone else described it (in simple English), it was all about **correct tongue placement**: “First of all, the French pronounce the letter T slightly differently than English-speakers do. In French, your tongue rests against the tip of your upper front teeth, whereas in English your tongue stays behind your teeth. This tongue position results in a softer and smoother T in French.”
I had gone through 6 years of French classes in Jr. & Sr. High School, and this had never been pointed out to me? I was shocked and embarrassed, the way a man feels when he gets home and only then realizes that his fly has been unzipped for half the day at work…..
And….raccoon poop on the roof? I want pics of this! Does raccoon poop really look all that distinctive?
Merry Christmas.
Really? I thought about tongue placement back then for an altogether different reason….
Of course raccoon poop is distinctive. Don’t you have a field guide to poop? I thought everyone did, but maybe that’s just in my family. Also, I know there are raccoons up there. “Dancing.”
I’m sure that you’ve heard raccoons mating? The first time I heard it, I ran outside with a flashlight, thinking some small dog was being torn apart very slowly. How relieved I was to find it was just two raccoons gettin’ it on! (I felt a little bit of envy, like that woman in “When Harry met Sally” who said, “I’ll have what she’s having!”
Raccoons used to come at night to dig around the planter pots in our back yard and lick up the extra water that drained out the bottoms of the planters. I got tired of that and sprinkled lots of cayenne in the area where the water puddled. That night there was a noise that even woke the neighbors. Have you ever opened the faucet in an apartment several stories up when the water main has broken and the falling water is pulling a vacuum in the pipes? It’s a horrendous reverberating gurgling noise. That’s what the peppered raccoon sounded like.
“Peppered raccoon.” I like the concept. Shall apply it to squirrels. Mimimanderly, please note “dancing” is in quotes.
I read up on what to do about raccoon latrines in one’s yard. Apparently parasites (perhaps like the ones that Farley Mowat mentioned in his account of doing research on wolf poop, in which he wrote that he wore a mask when handling the stuff so the eggs wouldn’t become airborne and get into his nose and then his brain) are an issue, so the instructions included masking up and bleaching the area afterwards. I never did shovel up the poop — I’m just letting it join the earthworm poop and feral cat poop in the soil — but I did buy a bottle of coyote urine to discourage the raccoons. It smells so powerful that I won’t store it indoors, or even in the garage. I never got around to sprinkling it around on the latrine area. The bottle is still in a ziploc, propped in the corner by the gate, but even that seems to be enough to keep them away from the poop city they used to frequent.
What disturbs us is in the Spring, when the raccoons bring their progeny to our fish pond, where they frolic — which doesn’t disturb us — but they also eat a bunch of our fish — which does. Every Spring, after they visit, we have to go to the pet store to replace a lot of our pond fish. The thing I hate the most is that they don’t even truly eat them. They bite off their heads or tear off their fins, and just leave them. Dudes! At least eat your kill! Otherwise you may as well be a cat! (Sorry, cat lovers. But you know it’s true.)
I found gobs of advice on what to do about that at https://helpusfish.com/50/koi/protect-koi-from-predators.html but I confess I have never tried any of it (except for coyote urine, which may not really be what’s keeping the raccoons away — they may have left because we took down our fountain).
Well, we have our fountain in order to oxygenate the water, and also the fish seem to like hanging out under it. I will check out that article, because we get really attached to our fish.
We have a milk crate under a large flat rock. The holes allow the fish to hide. Still, I’ve seen great blue heron dip their heads sideways under the water and under the rock and come up with goldfish. I never thought I would be anything but awestruck when a great blue heron lands in our yard; they’re amazingly huge and beautiful. But then they hop over to the pond and start fishing; I chase them off. At least the raccoons don’t eat our fish.
I loved and love Farley Mowat. “Never Cry Wolf” was one of the first science type books that I read outside of school, and I found it amazing, funny, scary, and irresistible. The wolf keeps the caribou strong. And Farley lived on mice for some number of weeks to prove that the wolves could, and did, survive on eating mice by the hundreds. Thank you, Farley Mowat, and thank you, Jeremy, for reminding me of this author I so loved.
I’m terrible at remembering anything I’ve read, but I sure remember “Never Cry Wolf.” It got made into a pretty decent movie, too.