Wisdom

So I am all jacked up on laughing gas, sitting (laying) in the dentist chair and there are these two dudes with sharp objects poking around in my mouth… What am I thinking about? Well, I will tell you…

After going through the starting lineup for both of my All-Star-Baseball teams, I started to think about several strange things… When my Mom was a pediatric nurse, she used to have all sorts of weird stories about how kids would do crazy shit. One day she came home with the story of a kid who was in the process of being potty trained. His mother noticed that each time the child would go number two in the toilet, he would go ape-shit when it came time to flush his creation… I remember telling my mother that that was the weirdest things that I had ever heard. Why on gods green Earth would a child have a hard time flushing THAT down the toilet?… Like a good mother would do, she explained the gentle psyche of the child at hand. “He is having a hard time flushing it because it was part of him” she said with a grin (laughing from the 13 “turd” jokes that flew out of my mouth at the conclusion of her story).

“It was a part of him” obviously being the key words to this sentence… Those teeth, no matter how small and insignificant, were “a part of me”, and I was morning their loss. In that moment, laying on my back, I understood what that toddler was feeling, and part of me wanted to stand up, kicking and screaming, attempting to hold on to this small piece of me being pulled from my face.

Believe me, I do not want this to sound like a BIG dramatic thing, I know that they are just wisdom teeth… I am just telling you what was going through my head.

Anyway, I felt the stubborn male side of my brain feeding those doomed teeth strength and energy. I felt it hoping beyond hope that the teeth were just to damn tough to be pulled. I wanted the dentist to yank for the better part of an hour, stand upright and say, “these are just to strong, I can’t get them out”… I found myself rooting for the teeth to win the battle, to persevere and to stand their ground… “My dads teeth would not come out this easy” I thought to myself the first time I thought I saw the dentist pull away with something. “It would take a team of dentist to get a tooth out of Howard Hagen’s mouth” (small numb-afied grin appears on my face)… “You OK Joe,” the dentist said… “Ah, hu” I would mumble, half laughing.

For some reason, I felt very poetic laying in that chair, I had 1,000 different thoughts about the world floating through my head, each of which left my mind as fast as it had arrived… Damn, I wish my brain was bigger.