Tooth marks

I am frequently asked conversationally, in zoom meetings for instance, how I'm doing with isolation.  I try to give stock human sounding answers, but between you and me, I feel I may have been made for social distancing.   Truthfully there have been some perks.  I get to work from home.  I got a reprieve from jury duty.  And perhaps best of all, a dentist appointment I had for the end of March was postponed indefinitely because the office is closed due to the threat of coronavirus except for emergencies.  I am fine with that.

I am told I was born with teeth.  By virtue of this I consider myself an expert, and therefore you can believe me when I tell you this: nothing could provide better evidence that there is no benevolent omnipotent creator god than human teeth.  Oh, they don't do a lot: they're just supposed to keep you alive by chewing your sustenance for you.  You only eat every meal of your life with them.  They only need to last you a lifetime.  You get three strikes in baseball, three rolls in a bowling frame, three guesses and the first two don't count.  With teeth you get one do-over when you're a kid and that's it.   And a lot can go wrong with them. They come in crooked, hurting all the while.  They chip, they twist, they drift, they come apart.  They fall out.   They do among the dirtiest jobs of any part of your body -- and they hurt and they stink and they disappoint-- and you still have to smile with them.

They are high maintenance control freaks.  Without obsessive catering to their fragility and fickleness several times a day, shit sticks to them and goes rancid and makes your face smell like the gates of hell for those unfortunate enough to have to deal with you.  The intricate activity that they engage in assures that even with the most meticulous care, a residue of spit, foodstuff and used toothpaste will radiate at least somewhat from every mouth.   (I'm telling you this as a friend: Your breath stinks.)  And your words have to pass through them.

They are accomplices in a web of extortion that haunts you all of your days.  They can rot in your head for weeks acting like nothing's happening until one morning you wake up and find that your cheek has inflated like a gluteal prosthesis because of one of them and you now have to scramble to pay a professional an absurd amount of money to make the problem go away.  For this reason, it behooves you to schedule regular appointments with a coterie of professionals trained to make you worry about your dental hygiene.  What sort of people spend their days sorting out the conditions in other people's smelly pieholes?   Well-compensated people, I assure you.  I don't think you'll find a lot of fans of universal dental care among DDS's. Speaking for myself, though, you couldn't pay me enough.

I'm not the best dental patient.  When my dentist and I were both younger, he brought a certain zeal to his work and took seriously his role as dispenser of oral counsel.  And I listened.  But live long enough and you observe that a low tech and mechanical science like dentistry when applied to the high concept yet overwhelmingly futile task of preserving teeth will have diminishing returns with even the most diligent practitioners.  A situation pronounced an emergency one visit will turn into something to monitor the next even when the advice in urgent conditions was completely ignored.  Meanwhile, a tooth that your dentist wouldn't give the time of day on your last appointment has conveniently hollowed out from decay for the dentist's benefit in the intervening months and provides an excuse for an emergency filling next week. The teeth have a mind of their own when it comes to the whimsical prognoses and methods of dentistry.  Once my dentist capably played the role of steward of my oral health. Nowadays, he takes a look at the current state of things in my mouth, shrugs and says, "It is what it is."

My hygienist is young, and her spirit remains to be broken.  She instructs me at every appointment in the ordeal of tooth care and I nod my head and act like it's the first time I've heard the information and pretend to make a note to myself to apply myself to proper performance of the rituals until my next visit, but she and I both know that this is a charade.  Too late in my life I learned the simple trick of spraying a stream of water at my face as a method of dental care, and this seems both to have added an element of excitement to it and to have reduced the twice a year lecture time considerably.  But it's also made me too cocky for my own good and I still get scolded.

This is why I have a codicil in my will that stipulates that upon my death my twice annual dental checkups shall cease.