4/22/06
Nobody goes to the dentist because they want to. It's not exactly your average relaxing leisure time activity. And, as witness the plethora of denture adhesive ads on late night tv, most people do their best to ignore their teeth until the day they're lying agape under the all-too-brilliant light while the kindly man in white with the ouch tool tells them to just relax.

And me? No different. I've been a brush floss and forget it guy for a number of years. Haven't had a cavity since I was 12. The last time I got an exam, Bush still had numbers in the high seventies. Of all the various portions of my anatomy prone to the ravages of entropy, my choppers have been the farthest from my mind.

But maybe that wasn't such a good thing. After several increasingly intense gum irritations over the past few months, capped by one that left me dosing on generic Tylanol and weapons-grade anti-inflammatives, Sandahbeth finally did the Good Wifie thing and booked me into a local low-income clinic.

My previous experiences with community dental care were pleasantly contradicted by the remodded building and crisply efficient office staff. The exam area was well-lit and rife with new-car smell. The affable young dentist lamented the absence of digital x-ray equipment, commenting that he hardly expected the clinic to ever get it unless some kind and generous soul donated it outright, given the ever-decreasing funding for public health.

Then he pointed on my own personal zapograph to the dark chasm next to my left lower hind molar, explaining that much of the discomfort that I'd been experiencing recently was due to a disturbing blank space where my jawbone was supposed to be. I learned a fascinating new medical term: peridontal infection. Some brief but intense unpleasantness later, clutching a script for Professor Fleming's Miracle Mold Extract and an application for sliding scale billing, I wended homeward, reflecting on that most eerily unpleasant (or unpleasantly eerie if you prefer) subject, time and decay.

For all that we evolved as critters of temporality, humans seem badly wired to fully appreciate the wonders of entropy. We spend half our time avoiding the subject and the other half ignoring it outright. Admonitions from insurance salesmen, doctors and preachers bounce inelastically off the deaf ears of the great happy herd convinced that they will indeed live forever (and then go to heaven when they die). Only the strongest of software constraints, on the level of divine intervention or stormtrooper-enforced legislation, seem capable of counteracting this penchant.

Again, I'm not the kid in the Exception Proves The Rule costume in this pageant either. I drift along through my tepidly eventful life (compared to, say, a Somali peasant's), blissfully ignorant of the welter of tiny insults steadily accruing interest in the Bank of Too Late. Flat tires, dead batteries, empty bank accounts and blown opportunities litter the medians of my personal road of life. Most of the examples of my seeming temperance and foresightedness stem from blunt force circumstance invoking dumb acquiescence to brute necessity. I'm capable of reading the fresh, still-sticky writing on the wall when my nose is firmly pressed against it, but the rest of the time I'm as willfully illiterate as anyone else.

Naturally, that illiteracy extends to any awareness of my own vertiginous flaunting of the fates. Like most baby boomers, I'm a media child, unconsciously convinced that all problems can be resolved in 46 minutes (with breaks for commercial messages), and that even if they can't there's always the popcorn-scented lobby and the late afternoon sun to relieve any unpleasant down-ending afterglow.

All that changes, however, when the consequences of neglect cease to be theoretical and become personal. Specifically, physically personal. Nothing like a little trauma in your own private live-in body to shake Dear Young Child of Playhouse Ninety right out of his cozy little cradle and down to the hard, hard field below. Or to quote that eminent sage and high unicycle rider Hillbilly Willie, "Not so funny now?"

I've been a reasonably healthy guy. Okay, make that unreasonably -- I get sick maybe once a year if that, I've never broken any bones, I have no horrible old chronic medical conditions to speak of. The worst that generally happens to me is mini-maiming myself on some wickedly sharp piece of handyman equipment or other, which leaves me with a short recuperation and a cool scar but (so far at least) nothing of any lasting significance.

But this little black spot on my x-ray here, it's a whole 'nother matter -- for better or worse, that bone's gone, and without serious intervention, the molar's bound to follow. The prospect of teeth falling out of my head, of being relieved of portions of my anatomy that I'm actually quite fond of, is peculiarly more visceral than any Heraclitian contemplation of the abstract stream of time vis a vis one's abstract foot. Even the prospect of death, grim as it is, is relatively easy to sidestep: if I'm worrying about it, I'm still alive, and when I'm dead I won't care. This dedentation, along with all that other stuff bound to drop off between now and D Day (assuming I'm not wiped out by the odd stray drunk in an SUV or WW what are we up to now, IX?) is a condition I actually have to live with. The whole thing gives me queasy pause to reflect on all the other eensy teensy things I just let slide, from the dust in the corners to the beams in the basement, that have the potential to turn around and rip me a figurative or even literal new one.

On the other hand, I'm not all that unfamiliar with chronic conditions. After all, I wear glasses and I've had a major bald spot on my crown since I was about 25. Familiarity, it seems, does breed a certain complacency even in those more enduring disfunctions of the corpus. Perhaps in a few years I'll regard my wrinkled, toothless visage and think "Pretty good for an old fart." Which, of course, is a bellwether earmark (mixed metaphor? ya think?) of, yes grampy, an old fart.

I know all about them -- seen 'em on tv.