CHOMPING DOWN ON GAUZE: My morning was pretty weird. Tooth extraction day. Had to face it head first, er, tooth first. Take this hot tooth out! I did my best to be courageous.

I filled out my paperwork, and was in the big seat in no time. The assistant asked me some basic questions and got me all prepped up. The doc came in, applied a little topical numbing agent to the gums and then injected me with that sweet, prickly Novocaine. He juiced me up real good. The pinch of that needle really woke me up. Not fun. But I did it, and did my best to be stoic. Not so down with needles in my gums, you know?

So the doc leaves to let me “numb up” and this gives me some time to ponder just what the fuck is going to happen when they come back into the room.

That bad tooth is coming out, in minutes. So weird. Kinda scary. No turning back now!

The doc came in, did a little probing with what looked like a Philips screwdriver? Then he did some prying, and then horked that goddamn tooth right out of my mouth. Didn’t feel any pain. Just pressure. Weird pressure. Foreign pressure.

Like, the kind of pressure that doesn’t belong in yer mouth, or on a tooth, or on yer jaw.

I remember this much from that big moment: There was tile on the ceiling. The off-white kind with the little cracks and nicks. I found one little crevice and focused on that thing the whole time, my mind lifting out of my big medicine ball head and right up into that fissure on that tile. And that’s where I focused while the rest of me was anticipating what felt like a a “jaw removal” or something.

And then the tooth came out. Just like that. Just like everyone told me it would.

Very, very surreal. Cosmic thoughts flooded my halfwit head…visions of evolutional happenstance…dinosaur teeth ancestry…the sadness of losing a little piece of me…the brainbuzz relief felt to have that dead little cuspid out of me. A weird couple of moments.

So I’ve got some gauze going, some pain meds a mellow antibiotic just to kill any infection that might’ve been lurking in that hellhole of a tooth socket. Big fun.