A few years ago, my calendar became an obsession, and any long stretch of empty space on it a reason to panic. I was just starting to really get bookings, and an empty day meant 24 hours when some corner of some bar didn’t get to hear me tell my jokey jokes for a few bucks and some chicken tenders, and this, of course, was an untenable situation.
Post-covid and post-comedy, blank white squares on the calendar elicit the opposite reaction. A week or two of stability and routine to get some big projects done? Time to rest, cook meals, continue processing the last few years of my life, and do unrushed creative work? A chance to maybe finally put some CDs away? What a calming meadow of blankness to see on a calendar.
This current spate of activity – the big trip and record show discussed in these pages earlier – came to an end today with one anxious appointment. I was going to see my new-ish dentist, my third visit with him, and my first somewhat major procedure.
I am making myself talk about this publicly because people don’t, and it’s stupid, but I’ve had fucked-up teeth my whole adult life. It’s amazing how something can linger, unresolved, and you just keep living and living and it never gets fixed, and you realize you’ve spent thirty or forty years dealing with various incarnations of a problem that money and attention could have knocked out in a year.
Teeth are one of the last physical vestiges of social shaming. We live longer than we ever did and the modern Western diet might as well have been specifically designed to sandblast our mouth bones into what Kurt Vonnegut called “rotting crockery.” But someone who’d never mock a disability or fat-shame a bigger person will have no issue clowning on someone with a missing side tooth or discolored front chompers.
I know, because I’ve experienced it, and I’ve also done it.
As soon as I was old enough to have disposable income and unsupervised time as a teenager, I was off to the races with soda. Our local carryout’s 44-ounce fountain death bombs were called the “Big Boss,” and no trip to my friends’ houses to play Commodore 64 games and watch Headbanger’s Ball was complete without a Big Boss and a bag of cookies or chips.
My mouth fell apart in record time, and soon I was seeing a dentist in my hometown, a real play-through-the-pain type who wasn’t big on uninsured patients. I got some stuff fixed, got a lot of grief for complaining when drilling hurt, and went off to college with most of the repairs unfinished.
Years later, during a brief spell with a full-time job and insurance through work, I got in with a dentist in Akron who started putting caps and crowns on things while telling her assistant how glad she was to be in law school and how much she couldn’t wait to quit being a dentist. I moved to Toledo and her handiwork started literally falling out of my mouth within a year.
There were years of drinking too much and passing out with a bag of chips in my lap, and then came parenthood and marriage and a couple decades of slow, intermittent progress on repairing stuff even as it kept actively breaking down.
My final act of self-neglect was missing an appointment one morning a few years back because I’d forgotten about it, booked a show, and woke up hung over in a hotel room in Indiana with the dentist’s office calling to ask where I was. It had taken me years to get up the nerve to make this contact, let a new dentist see where things were, and start working on them; that missed appointment embarrassed me right back into the shadows until well after the pandemic.
The new guy is nice, and he did some great things already, but today I asked for an assessment of how we were going to proceed, only to realize he’d completely forgotten about the whole first appointment we had where we talked about formulating said plan. There’s nothing quite like entrusting yourself to a medical professional and then having them remind you that you’re really on your own the whole time.
One gift my daughter gave me in this respect was an ability, one I never had before, to advocate and speak up and politely but firmly insist on staying the course until the right thing is done. We got back on track, and today I got the roots of a long-broken wisdom tooth extracted, one of many things that should have happened years ago and didn’t. There’s more of that deferred maintenance to deal with in future appointments, and then we can start on the task of rebuilding the infrastructure to an acceptable level, functionally and cosmetically.
I used to fantasize about getting a big break – selling a screenplay, getting a fat advance on a novel – and walking into some mythical gleaming Hollywood dentist-to-the-stars campus with a blank check and a simple demand: gimme them Hollywood teeth.
You can get those, by the way, anywhere in the country – big slat-fence veneers pasted right over your rotting crockery by unscrupulous quacks, your real grill allowed to fester and rot behind a pretty façade till the problems get too big and redolent to ignore.
Getting down to the foundation and rebuilding from the ground up is slower, more painful, less glamorous, and it’s about to be considerably more expensive, at least in the short term. (And how great is our insurance system that the pieces of us that literally prepare the food for our body to survive on have a separate set of totally capricious and arbitrary rules that even the front desk lady never seems to fully comprehend?)
But midlife is a good time for those “if not now, when” moments, and this is one of them, for sure. My life has been more or less burnt to the ground, and part of whatever comes next has to involve taking more and better care of myself, or this act won’t be a long one. I’m gonna do the work, and I’m gonna own the mistakes, and I’m gonna talk about it, because sometimes that heals things more than a mouthful of gauze and a scrip for the hi-test ibuprofen.
And now I’m gonna take that white space on the calendar and I’m gonna make each one of those ordinary days another little layer of the foundation I’m rebuilding.
(And I’ll probably talk a LOT less than this for the rest of the week.)
Fill up the blank squares with something fun to do every day. The more you smile the more you can show off your beautiful teeth.