death of a tooth, or al dente

for years now, i have lived without insurance (or more properly, i have not taken full advantage of it). once, i was hospitalized due to an allergic reaction to an as yet unidentified something, and that required coverage. but for my teeth, i've gone roughly twenty years without a visit. i recall a couple of times when things were a bit rough; i had stubborn toothaches that i only treated with anbesol (or the equivalent) and some acupuncture. actually, come to think of it, it's the same tooth...

so anyway, roughly one year ago, at the gas station, i decided to "snap into a slim jim." i NEVER eat slim jims, btw. i was just hungry for any protein, and i didn't have enough time to even go through a drive thru (nasty!). i must have been pretty hungry, because the dried out slightly greasy fare would have made most up-chuck. anyway, taking "that other randy's" advice, i "snapped..." odd, something snapped back. i honestly thought that they'd put some kind of bone (a fragment of shoulder blade or something) in the slim jim, and reflexively spit it out. into the weedelia bushes. but then, my mouth still felt wierd. i felt around with my tongue, and noticed that one of my teeth (about the fourth to the right) had a different shape; in fact, it was actually kind of "ridged." when i looked in the rear view mirror carefully, i noticed that about half of that tooth had shattered...

snap forward to the recent past, yesterday. i'd been "polishing" that tooth fragment for a year, still refusing to take advantage of my wife's insurance (largely because i thought we needed it for the kids). and at willow's b-day party, while eating a catered sushi with takuan in it, i swear, the takuan was SOLID, i broke the rest of the tooth. again, it felt more like i had bitten something solid, as opposed to it breaking my tooth... but a quick exam in the bathroom, and a not-painful tearing off of the remnant of the swinging fragment, left a clean hole. i put the fragment in my pocket after wiping off some of the blood... but in the chaos of the party, i think i must have dropped it. oh well, easy come easy go.

i have a lot of dreams of tooth decay. and mortality. i often feel like i'm rotting on the inside. maybe rotting is just an extension backwards of the post-mortem process. we like to compartmentalize things that way. that way, pre-mortem seems like a "positive" life-affirming process, to be separated from all of that nasty maggot-ridden nonsense. but it's always going on. it's always a struggle to maintain order and life against the forces of decay and entropy. and not that decay is such a bad thing. it's a process, after all, that goes on always, all around us...

...or maybe i'm just spouting words from my tooth deficient mouth, when i should just visit the dentist.

(btw, i just saw charlie and the chocolate factory, new version, with johnny dep. it's awesome! i especially sympathize with willy's situation with his father. see the movie, you'll understand.)