**Disclaimer**  This particular blog is about my most recent trip to the dentist.  Those of you with a weak constitution should wait for the VH1 special of my life to come out on DVD, so you can skip this entirely.**

So, my day has been fun.  I woke at 8:49am, craving chocolate milk.  I didn’t get any, because I would have had to leave the house to get it and then come back and brush my teeth again because I was headed to a dentist appointment at 10am.  So I skipped the choco and got on a bus.  It let me off near my destination but a tad early, so I strolled around the neighborhood.  I wanted to peruse the kitschy shirts at Babette Schwartz, but alas, geekdom doesn’t rise until 11am.  So I go the dentist’s office and everyone is happy to see me.  And why not, I’ve already given them over four thousand dollars of my money not to mention what they’re getting from the insurance company.

They ask “Are you ready?”  I say “I’m ready.”  They ask “Are you excited?”  I say “I’m excited?”  They say “We’re excited.”  I ask “You’re excited?”  They say “We’re excited.”  I say “Okay.”

And they are excited.  I’m a little pet project for them.  You see, most people come in with relatively good teeth and just need a deep cleaning or maybe a cavity filled waaaaaay in the back.  I came in with Darth Maul‘s teeth, only worse.  Each time they work on me, there is significant visible improvement, and today’s procedure would yield the biggest results yet.

I fill out two sets of forms, then proceed to the examining room.  You read that right, the examining room.  The “lab”, where the beautiful gas and euphoric music are, is down the hall, but I don’t need that stuff.  The doctors and techs there have already discovered that I’m freaky tough and so they just sit me in a chair, shoot me up with some local anesthetic and go to town on my teefers.

So my doctor comes in and puts a few q-tips dipped in Orasol on my gums and my upper cleft.  I put an earbud in one ear and turn on the iPod.  When she takes the q-tips out, I know next will be the novocaine.  I close my eyes when her hands come back into the view because I don’t want to see the needle.  I’ve seen it before; don’t need to see it again.  It’s steel, which I’m reminded of when it rests on my teeth, and has a fucking needle, hence the name.  So she needles around in my mouth for a spell and my upper front teeth, gums, lips, and nose all go numb, and I’m immediately certain that snot is flying out of my face.  It isn’t, I’m assured.

So, after that has taken its affect, she goes in with the… drill?  polisher?  It’s small, loud, high pitched, and works in conjunction with a strong, thin stream of water.  With this tool she wails on my canines for a while, then grabs the buffer, hand-sander, grinder tool that I absolutely hate and goes in on my left canine for what seems like way too long.  In addition to being terrifyingly uncomfortable, this machine is also loud and smelly and makes my entire body break out in goosebumps.  And up goes the volume on the iPod.

Now for the extraction…s.  She reaches in with her handy metal instruments (have I mentioned I have a thing about metal in my mouth?) and pulls out not one, not two, not three, but four teeth.  Four!  From my head.  Interestingly enough, I only felt one go out, and it seemed to be a doozie.  She was wailing on it for a while; prying, pulling, twisting, whatever it takes.

Let me take this moment to share my concerns with you about this visit.  Since I began seeing this dentist I have gone into her office four times without fear.  This time I was a little nervous because of the multiple extractions and loss of blood.  Mostly the extractions.  You see, what dentists do these days to pull an erupted (meaning past the gumline) tooth is wiggle it out a little bit, then put a tiny crowbar in the newly exposed tapered area and pry it out the rest of the way.  Now, from my vantage point, she’s really leaning in to that prying maneuver and if the tiny crowbar were to slip, she would stab me straight through the tongue and into the throat and I would bleed out onto the table.  Bye, bye Wedding Planning.

Anyway, back to her wailing on this one tooth while I’m holding my body rigid like I’m getting my brain scanned like in that movie.  What was that movie?  Where they did the scanning?  Oh right, Scanners.  Anyway, after it comes out she says, much to my surprise, “All right, they’re all out.  The hard part’s over with.”  She eases the chair up and I sit with gauze beneath where my teeth were in my clenched jaw.

Here’s where it gets really uncomfortable.  She lets the bleeding subside and then tries the bridge on me.  It goes on gently enough, feels fine, seems like a good fit; everything I’d hoped for.  Once she sees it’ll fit well, she removes it to prepare it to be set into place with adhesive and what have you.

Or so I thought.

She takes it out, eases me forward in the chair, and then starts polishing the bridge independent of me.  (I did appreciate that when I came into the room she showed me the piece, explaining it’d been on the counter in her kitchen all week.  It made me feel like a part of her home, which seems nice.  I’ve met her husband and their youngest daughter and they seem like a really great family.  I also liked that she pulled it from a box with my name on it, including impressions of my teeth.  I like that somewhere out there, my mouth is boxed for safekeeping.)  So I’m facing forward, staring at this poster for InVisAlign, featuring a model that gets proportionately more attractive depending on how much Novocaine I have in me, and she’s behind me grinding away at my new fake teeth without me.  She’ll polish, shape, divot, what have you, then place it in my mouth, look at the fit, remove, repeat.  Four times.

So, for an hour today, I had no front teeth.  Let me clarify: it’s not that I had my former black tooth pirate death mask teeth (they offered to show them to me after the extraction; I declined viewing; they threw them away), I had nothing.  And I’m sitting upright, staring at InVisAlign girl wondering how her right breast is so perfectly sloped in her light summer top.  ‘Cause what the fuck else am I going to do?  A dark, sinister, evil part of me that I do not want to have drinks with wants to reach out my left hand and take the mirror from the table there and see what I look like without front teeth.  Why?  Why?  Why would I do that?  To shut him up, I take furtive explorations of the area with my tongue.  What I find alarms me.

First off, four teeth are gone.  Duh.  Gaping, pulpy holes in my gumline are the only evidence they were ever there.  To say this experience is unsettling is to say that Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” was long.  But I also discover that my canines have been filed, drilled, cut down, reduced, however it happened, to nothing but tiny, dagger-like roots.  It is to these roots that the bridge is fused.  I did not know that.  I thought it had fake roots that would be jammed into my gums.  Shows what I know.

Anyway, she finally finishes fussing with my bridge and puts it in, and not a moment too soon because the anesthesia was wearing off.  She hands me a mirror and I take a look.  It takes me a moment to realize what I’m looking at, if only because I haven’t seen it in so long.

I'm all smiles and thumbs.

It’s me.  With teeth.  And a smile.  It took a lot of getting used to, and at first glance I felt I looked more like Billy Bob Thornton than Eric McClanahan, but it’s growing on me, like only something fused to your skull can.

Wrecked him? Damn near killed him!

Now, this is only the temporary bridge, which I’ll wear for seven weeks while my gums heal and then I’ll get a permanent bridge, made in a laboratory by an artist, with shading and definition and points of authentication.  So I scheduled that and a root canal and left the office exploring my new mouth with my tongue.  As I passed people in hallways and elevators I noticed that I spoke differently.  Yes, I would have to re-learn how to talk.  Won’t this be fun?

I'm as happy as a little girl...

So I swung by the grocery store to get the chocolate milk I’d wanted so many hours ago (life’s too short to not get what you want, kids) and walked home, the whole while practicing biting and noticing with remarked interest that my new front teeth didn’t have nerves.  I could feel my tongue pressing on them but they couldn’t feel my tongue.  I got home and took a look at myself in my mirror here.

Remarkably, I feel no pain, but as a precaution, I’m drinking Scotch.  And I don’t know if it’s the Scotch talking, but the only way I could tear myself from the mirror to write this blog was the insertion of the pictures.  Oh, you didn’t think they were for you, did you?  Oh, no.  Seriously, though, look at that guy!  I want to fuck that guy!

And that was my long and extremely uncomfortable day that led to this blog and hopefully a long and extremely comfortable life.