Crown Meditation, Part I

I am in the process of getting nearly all of my teeth crowned, due to an unfortunate medical condition that has been wearing them down for years (I'm trying to make this tastefully vague but fear I'm instead coming off as a reverse superhero whose exceptional disability is explained in a way that not only fails to pull off any sort of acceptably "sciencey-sounding" believability but suggests about as much imaginative rigor as that of the writers of "Turok: Son of Stone," my father's comic of choice for poorly executed backstories ["OK, so there's this Indian...and he lives among dinosaurs...." "Good, good!" "A-a-nd...each week he has to fight a different dinosaur." "Wait, why does he live among dinosaurs?" "Oh...I dunno. Because he's an Indian?"]). The bright side of this pretty unpleasant business is that soon I'll have a mouthful of new chompers to flash to the world, hopefully inviting speculation that once I got done with the whole martyrdom stint in Africa, rather than the pedestrian boob job or a snoresville recessionista shopping spree at Marshall's, I decided to treat myself to a new set of teeth, much like my favorite "love to hate him" senator, Norm Coleman, did not long after he managed to beat a dead guy and Walter Mondale to win Minnesota's Senate seat back in '02.

Anyway, this process is pretty time-consuming, and if you make the fatal mistake of not bringing along your much-maligned but still beloved Sport Discman (TM)--your goal being to be the last member of your generation with neither a tattoo nor an iPod--you have a lot of time to think, especially after somehow getting so used to the noise of the drill that you wonder if you could sneak in a nap while leaving your mouth hanging open.

I started, as I always do, by wondering where I should be looking. Does anyone else worry about this at the dentist's? When I was a even more self-conscious and neurotic youth, I used to think I should try to make eye contact with the dentist himself (I have no idea why), until I realized, to my embarrassment, what an unsettling thing it must be to have some spotty kid glaring at you while you're trying to fill her Big League Chew-related cavities. Thankfully, that was a long time ago. Today I decided to alternate between a charcoal sketch of Mickey Mouse golfing and the blue sky of the window opposite me, still half-thinking that if either the dentist or the hygienist confirmed my bizarre adolescent theory and happened to wonder why I wasn't making eye contact with them, they would immediately understand through the understated longing in my eyes that I was imagining freedom just beyond that window--freedom from drills, lite FM background music, post-Novocain conversations in which I look like the Elephant Man and sound like Peter Boyle from Young Frankenstein, admonishments not to look in the mirror "because your teeth are essentially pegs now," and all the other things that will always make me hate Plymouth, Minnesota.

But that got boring fast, so then I began pondering Hermie the Elf from the TV Christmas classic, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Remember him? He was the blonde, inverted triangle-faced elf who was willing to brave certain death at the hands of a comically unfrightening yeti or just Kelvin-scale temperatures to follow his dream of being, yes, a dentist. Doesn't that seem weird to you? Does anyone want to be a dentist that bad? Dentists are commonly believed to have the highest suicide rate among professions (the link says it's not true, but it also says that even dentists believe that it is). Dentists also make a nice chunk of change. That sums up all I know about them, and I was trying to figure out what it reflected about this elf's character. Granted, he was probably right to not want to toil without pay in the particularly grim, colorless and conformist North Pole presented in "Rudolph," but for some reason I concluded this line of thought with a markedly diminished respect for Hermie. Which is really saying something since he already mostly lost me with that piece of shit song, "We're a Couple of Misfits." Maybe it gets to what always irked me about "Rudolph"--its attempt at the standard "You can do anything you put your mind to/being different is okay" message, while perhaps inspiring to young, possibly gay reindeer just a few years before the Summer of Love, was also embodied by a character who represents a threat the Establishment because he wants to pursue dentistry. Rebellion that ain't! No wonder Burl Ives signed on to it.

Anyway, I was there for four hours, which left much more time for thoughts in this Millenium Generation-type vein, but I won't bore you with them or what I subsequently learned about Neanderthals in the National Geographic they gave me while they forged my temporary crowns or the heartbreak of later going to IKEA and not being able to even consider eating any of the Swedish hospital food they make look so good, because even overcooked pasta earlier in the day was too painful for me to chew. In fact, I don't even really know what the point of this post was, but I'll leave you with a nifty picture that is regrettably more pertinent to this election season than any such thing should be in an educated society. Maybe Palin just read a few too many Turoks?