One can easily imagine how disheartening it is to wake up in the early morning only to discover that there is blood inside of your mouth. That is exactly what happened to me this morning. I felt some slimy substance sliding around between the inside of my left cheek and my gums, and when I put the tip of my tongue in there, it was clearly the familiar taste of acrid and stale blood. When I spit out this substance, it was reddish in color and looked like pseudo-death. That is a shocking experience to say the least. When you get to be my age, you are constantly on the guard for anomalies, eg. bumps, itchy spots, cramps, headaches, minor heart fibrillations and other potential symptoms and warning signs of some terrible disease which could mean a premature death. How utterly unfair that would be when I still have so much to do in life! Don't want that to happen now, do we? Actually, this bloody episode of the mouth turns out not to be that bad at all, as it is a natural consequence of my night time chewing motions. For a couple of years now I have been grinding my teeth together and thereby chewing the inside of my left cheek, some dreams or whatever causing me to do this. The worse part is that once you start and a slight bump appears, the chances of chewing get even more. As if subconsciously by feeling this growing obstruction you are triggered by nature to bite at it even more. During the day I press my tongue against the long gash inside my mouth which never seems to heal. When I pry open my mouth and peer into the darkened depths to the left, I can see the whitish streak of what appears to be some kind of scar tissue building up. These are the results of grinding teeth at night who have their own lives to live, and there is no stopping them. Unless of course I think up something to stop all of this craziness. What could that be? Swabs of cotton in the side of my mouth, a metal plate affixed to my lower jaw, electrical shocks connected to the chewing motions to wake me up when it happens, shock treatment in general to my frontal lobes, adapting my diet and taking more vitamins, improving my mental frame of mind, adapting the direction I lie down in bed and its orientation to the earth's magnetic fields, removing and/or replacing something under my bed, what else? Actually it does not matter that much, and I do not know why I have spent so much energy detailing this trivial infraction to my nightly slumber which takes me away from all of this.