Some day I am quite simply going to have enough of my goddamn traitorous teeth and have all the little bastards yanked out and replaced by form fitted titanium. If it’s good enough for submarine hulls, it damned well ought to be good enough for teeth.

I have very nearly spent more time in my dentist’s office this year than I have in my actual office. While that is a very slight exaggeration, I’m confident that if I laid out the days, there really would be only a hair’s breath difference between the two.

I took two hours of leave today to go sit in my dentist’s office, get and x-ray, and have him poke his head in the room and tell me I need to schedule a root canal as soon as possible. He wouldn’t work on me today because apparently I have an infection to go along with the general tooth-rot. He won’t work on me until I have at least two days of antibiotics in my system. The kicker is, this cavity developed under a filling that he filled two years ago. As I recall, his statement was, “looks like we didn’t get all of it after all.” Thanks for the fucking update, genius. I’ve managed to figure that out by the throbbing in my jaw.

Today’s trip cost me $89 with another $40 or so kicked in by Joe Taxpayer through my oh-so-generous dental plan. I’ll be taking another flipping day off on Monday, so we can spend some quality time with two relative stranger’s fingers in my mouth for the better part of two hours. That’s going to run almost $900, not including the taxpayer’s contribution. That’s more than my damned rent. It’s almost two freaking car payments. Bloody hell.