The first time I had a giant hole in my tooth and not enough money to fix it, it was an upsetting decision to have it pulled. Those molars don't grow back. And I didn't even know at the time that my bottom molar would eventually begin to rise up, without a tooth on top always tamping it down. I was upset that this lack of cash I (perpetually) had was going to now show as a space in my mouth. I smiled as wide as I could to see if the hole would show when I talked to people. But it hardly mattered. I couldn't afford a thousand bucks, and I couldn't walk around anymore with a tooth rotting in my head. The dentist didn't offer a payment plan, and there didn't seem to be a choice. I reluctantly told him he would have to pull it.

This man was an oral surgeon, and I chose to be knocked out, rather than sit through that horrific tugging and crunching that I remembered from my youth. The pliers. They actually used pliers. So he shot me up with some stuff, and talked a few words to me as he jammed a rubber stopper between my teeth. He asked me what I did, I told him I was an artist. It sounds better than taxi driver, or laborer. What I'll never forget was when he told me to count backward, as the anesthesia took me down a long, dark tunnel, was the tinge of dull glee in his voice as he told me bye-bye. He just interrupted my words to make clear that I had no more control and then the drug interrupted my consciousness and everything disappeared, like a TV shutting off, I became the dusty, black screen.

I opened my eyes but thought I had only blinked. He asked me how I felt. I told him I was afraid, the truth serum doing its dark magic on my mind. Sharing my emotions with the gum-snappy surgeon dude! I thought the operation (he was an "oral surgeon, wasn't he?) was still in the future. But with an echo of that sadistic joy he laughed at my confusion and asked me why. It's over! he said joyfully, ushering in dawn with only three syllables and casually waving me to the Recovery Room.

That was during a time I could afford to pay for a tooth being pulled. Then there were the six years I walked around with a giant hole in the next molar. The one that would show a gap at the edge of my smile if I lost it. Yeah, I know! You'd think I brushed my teeth with a pineapple. But actually, a filling fell out of my tooth one night. And while at first the giant hole felt monstrous and sharp and dangerous to my tongue, I actually did get used to it after enough days with no other choice but to accept it as part of my mouth's geography. I've since had it taken care of (filled by amazing new Space Junk®), but I lived long enough to do that. There were many days I really worried over what might be happening with that tooth.

When I read about Deamonte Driver's death, my stomach fell. I remember fearing this very thing for myself.

Another quote from that same private journal I quoted in a recent post:

Friday, November 21, 2003 – 11:54 I guess a journal is for talking about oneself. Reading back, it seems I have no trouble doing this. Again, I suppose the self-centered quality is justified by the vehicle. Good thing, that. [...]

I don’t know what to do. I fear this rotting tooth (back molar) will kill me any day. Sometimes it decays and I feel the poison rinsing down my throat. Wherever it touches, my throat reacts horribly. Spasming and sticking either with muscular reaction or chemical, I can’t tell. I have to drink prodigious amounts of water to relieve it. I keep thinking of Kenny Smith, who died from an ear infection he let go too far. I don’t have the money to have it pulled. But the real reason this thing is still in my head five years after the filling came out is that I have already lost a tooth on that side. I think this one will leave a tiny gap in my smile. I am stupidly holding out for a root canal, when I can’t even afford a tooth-pulling. [...]

I exist in a state of self-repulsion and shame because of this rot I carry in my mouth.

Today is the day J&R may call, if they do at all. I really had hoped they would call earlier in the week. By today I fear they will not call. And I really do need a job so bad.

The damage turned out to be worse than I was imagining. It's true that my throat would react, and I even began having indigestion issues because of this. But after I had it filled, the dentist said he did not imagine what I thought was happening could have been happening. Nobody could account for that part of my experience—the reaction to the "poison" or decay "rinsing down my throat"—and I am left to conclude that my mind was so freaked out about the idea that the muscular and digestive reactions I was having were just a manifestation of my own fear.

Playstations should be a luxury. Pools, cars, livingroom bars, huge houses and expensive vacations in expensive cities. Limos.

Food should not be a luxury. Health care should not be a luxury. Peace of mind should not be a luxury. To have humans walking around with illness we have the power to heal? To have it affecting their mind and bodies and lives, and the overall happiness of the world, entire? To withhold health for lack of money. There has to be a better way. I know I can be persistently naïve on certain cynical and worldly matters. But is not tying profit to healing an irrefutable negation of the nature of healing? Are we satisfied with this violent contradiction in our midst? This admission of what could only be described as a truly backward People?