Inbred Jed and the Dentist, part one

I went to the dentist today. What an adventure! First, you should know that the dentist I see now is located in Santee, which those of you who live in the San Diego area know is a real hotspot for ignorance, racism, and low literacy rates. A real hoot! I am afraid to drive my anti-Bush-bumpersticker-bearing car into that area sometimes for fear of being run out of town on a rail. Here are a few of my favorite sightings from today: a nice new pickup truck with a stenciled overlay on the upper brake light (the one on the back of the cab) so that when he puts on the brakes it flashes “JESUS” at you in big glowing red letters; on the way home I was stopped at a light next to an beat-up mini-El Camino looking thing in spotty mustard yellow paint with fake wood paneling stickers on the side. The driver was a weather-beaten man of indeterminate age with a tangly grey ponytail, a shirt you wouldn’t be able to give to a thrift store, and a cigarette hanging from his fingers out the window. I was intrigued not only by the color and model of his car, but especially his face. Lots of lines and an inscrutable expression that made me want to take a photo. What makes a face like that?

The real coup-de-grace, however, is the waiting room in the dentist’s office (he really is a superb dentist; that’s why I subject myself to this occasional immersion in hickness and slovenly paint jobs). No National Geo or Time magazines. Nope. However, if you are employed as an auto mechanic or have a couple of old cars on cement blocks in your yard, this is the place for you! Auto magazines galore. And (drum roll please) they even carry “Trailer Life.” I kid you not. Upon closer inspection, though, it was not a housekeeping mag for the mobile-home crowd, but a treatise on towing trailers--you know, for your quads, dirt bikes, and motorboats and such. Almost as good.

I am now finished maligning the good folk of Santee. There are some of those, you know. I actually saw a guy driving a car with one of those purple “Family” bumperstickers on it and was amazed that a gay man would be brave enough to venture into the area without a full escort of bodygaurds. But now that I think of it, maybe he was a straight guy with kids who thought it was a sticker espousing the much touted “family values” that actually promote hating homosexuals because they are evil and want to eat your children. That would actually be incredibly funny. I do love irony! Particularly when executed by the ignorant.

Okay okay, really. I’m done. I apologize for the unfriendly and cynical tone of this post. On to the root canals! Yep, I need one of those. It turns out that that slightly yellow front tooth I have is dead--no nerve action whatsoever. This is bad because it is slowly decaying from the inside and if I don’t do anything about it it will eventually fall out and I will become Kathryn the hillbilly gap-toothed wonder. Then I’d have to move to Santee. Eesh! I originally bashed that tooth in when I was in 3rd grade in terrible playground mishap. I was sitting on this giant 4-way seesaw thing which I’m sure has since been outlawed due to the number of young children being seriously maimed and disfigured while playing on them. As I was saying, I was sitting there pondering the mysteries of life when a snotty girl I didn’t like very much (evidently the feeling was quite mutual) came up behind me and pushed down really hard on my seat. I was instantly launched and flew through the air in a graceful arc, flying, flying, flying, and then I landed face-first on the metal dome in the middle. I lost a baby tooth, chipped my permanent front tooth, and had a mouthful of blood that I tried not to spill all over myself on the way to the nurse’s office while crying hysterically. And that, my friends, is why I have a yellow front tooth.

So they can do a very simple test to discover whether or not your tooth nerve is still alive and kicking. All they do is dip a q-tip in something like liquid nitrogen or some other such freezing cold substance and hold it against your tooth. Easy. The dentist held it onto my dead tooth and said, “Feel anything?” Nope. He continued holding it there-- “Nothing?” He looked slightly amazed. No really, not a thing. The instant diagnosis: dead tooth. He asked me if I wanted to try it on a live tooth for comparison, and I was about to say, no really, that’s not necessary, I trust your medically trained opinion, but he was already leaning toward me with the dreaded q-tip. Holy mother of god!!!!! I can’t even describe the feeling--ice applied directly to a cavity times 10? I swear I could feel it all the way up into my forehead. I can still feel it if I think about it. So, don’t ever do that, all right? The moral of this story is: don’t whack your teeth on playground equipment and you’ll never have liquid nitrogen applied to your teeth and you won’t need a root canal and you won’t end up losing a tooth and having to move to Santee.

On the way home I saw two hawks, one circling silently above the freeway, the other sitting tall on a lamppost on the freeway overpass, sharply eyeing the mist-covered landscape. Even Santee can be beautiful in the morning.