Mark my words – no good things can come from going to the dentist.

That’s right, ladies, gentlemen, and distinguished members of the press, for this week was my previously mentioned and adamantly dreaded with an indescribable fear normally reserved for Bar Mitzvahs and that semester you spent at clown college … dentist appointment. I knew before I even made the appointment some twenty-seven months ago that only horrible, horrible things could come from that fateful day, and yet still I showed up at that disdained office earlier this week with the soft-spoken chance that maybe, just maybe, my teeth weren’t really as bad as I thought and it’d only take a bit of minor maintenance to bring the good ship Scott’s Mouth back up to perfect working order. Instead, however, I learned that the once good ship Scott’s Mouth is now actually far from good, in fact, and currently finds itself on an express trip to Cavity Island, but that’s only if it even makes its way through the stormy waters offered by Root Canal Pass.

I know, there were an awful lot of nautical metaphors in there, but please just try to bear with me … this ship’s run aground and it’s going to cost many a Spanish doubloon to get her seaworthy once again!

Yeah … so needless to say, the appointment didn’t exactly go “good.” Things were going great all the way from the parking lot up to the front door, and even up through the point where I finished the eight pages of insurance paperwork and watched a couple minutes of Judge Joe Brown before getting called back to The Chair of No Return. It was then, however, when the man in blue crocs began writing notes on his little chart … and kept writing notes on his little chart for roughly a fortnight … that I knew that something was awry. He condescendingly asked, “Do you floss?” to which I replied, “Ha – who flosses?!” but clearly he got the last laugh. Shortly thereafter, he left the room to privately scoff at my inadequate dental hygiene with his “assistant” before sending her back in behind himself to finish his dirty work and read me my last rights. I was to have approximately 143 cavities filled, not to mention two crowns installed and all four tires rotated and balanced. The cost, ironically, even plays along with that auto repair reference, as the figure presented to me on that “Recommended Dental Plan” was comparable to what it might instead cost me to lease a new car.

A very, very nice car!

So I now find myself at a crossroads, unsure of which color convertible to choose, or alternately which side of my mouth that I would like to have throbbing with pain first. And it’s a tough choice because rotting teeth or only slightly rotting teeth, I’ve grown rather fond of both sides of my mouth equally and at the end of the day (or mid-afternoon, based on my dentist’s availability), I don’t think you can ask a man to choose which side he prefers anymore than you can expect a woman to choose whether she prefers cleaning the bathroom or the kitchen first on a Saturday afternoon. Both need to be done, regardless of how much I’d rather blow the whole thing off and go buy a convertible instead…

But where do we go from here? That’s actually a good question – one to which I was kinda hoping that you might have the answers for because frankly, I haven’t got a clue myself! Do I just blindly follow the “suggestions” of this so-called “dentist” and take his “recommendations” to “spend thousands of dollars fixing my poorly kept teeth”? Or do I throw caution and dental floss to the wind, laughing in the face of gingivitis with the wind in my hair as I cruise throughout the Bay Area with the top down in my new convertible, careless of the fact that sometime in the near future teeth may very well just randomly start falling out of my head like the Tooth Fairy’s rejects that they are? At this point I don’t know what’s going to happen because as much as I’d like to throw that proverbial caution to said wind, I really don’t have the money to go get me a convertible, either, so if anyone out there happens to know the number of a good discount dentist, or perhaps discount auto salesman, drop me a line and we’ll make me moderately happy one way or another!