He showed me his teeth. The ones in the jar. The ones he pulled.
I observed them real closely. I asked if it hurt. The ones he pulled.
I went home that night and smiled extra wide in the mirror, admiring how nicely my teeth had aged. I wondered whether, when I became an old(er) man, if I would be the guy that walked the Bridge which connected the Crown that was hiding in the Root Canal, OR was I going to be the dude that just yanked the fuckers out when I couldn’t take it any longer. I thought about the tooth fairy and how that might affect her bottom line. I thought about how many years removed it might well have been since I had gone to the dentist, had that dentist not been the commissioner of my fantasy football league. I thought about the insurance companies skimming the top, middle, and bottom. I thought about how long I would have to bare the pain before the tooth would be rotten enough to where it could be wiggled free with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. And of course I thought about why we call them pairs of pliers OR pairs of scissors, when we really only mean one pair. There, I did it again.
