Just got back from the dentist. It's a new dentist. (My old one was very nice, but was getting old and had very shaky hands.) It turns out you can get nitrous for only $30 here! Hell yeah I'll take some nitrous with that filling! They also have a big collection of CDs so you can put on headphones and listen to music while you're high. I took a quick look at their stack and then grabbed Elton John's greatest hits. Then I tell them that I have a really low tolerance for pain, so the more nitrous the better. "Oh, in that case, I'll put it up to 10. If it's too much, just start breathing through your mouth," says the assistant. I make sure to not breathe through my mouth. Also, right after I started breathing it in, I got the idea that I should get my little moleskin notebook and take notes. Of course, I already had the dental dam thing and other various instruments in my mouth, so I had to do a lot of gesturing and miming to get the assistant to go through my coat and find the notebook. Then push play on the CD player and relax. It was so fantastic. Of course, I couldn't see what I was writing in the notebook. I tried to draw a picture of the dentist. You can see the results. I have no idea where the fish came from.
It's a strange thing. Here I am getting totally high in a perfectly legal way right in front of two total strangers. The dentist occasionally messes with me: "Can you open your mouth and we're going to swish you out here. Don't worry, we siphon this right out of an old beer bottle. Just kidding! That's a little nitrous joke, you know."
I'm going back on Friday for some more filling work. I think I might sneak in my digital audio recorder and get a sound recording of it all. Maybe I could turn it into a 12 Minutes Max piece.
Here's another page of free writing I did while in the dentist's chair:
Translation:
"Big bang. then bla bla bla and stuff... bla bla bla and then my parents are under a tarp in 1968, high out of their minds and the rain on that tarp and they're writing with pens, more in love than any pair of fucked up people can be... Black Bart the LSD man... then... me. Next thing you know I'm at the dentist with nitrous. The dentist is telling me I should have put him scuba diving in that school of fish... Jen I love you. I love so so much. Wanna see a movie?"
Down in the lobby of the building where my dentist is, they're giving away free chips and salsa and Mexican soda pops for Cinco de Mayo. Just the thing to grind into my new fillings with my numb face.
-David
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2 comments:
When I went in to get four teeth worth of wisdom chiselled out of my skull, I remember lying there in the chair, whacked out on nitrous, first thinking "Man, this is great!" and then, in the loopy logic that sometimes accompanies altered states, "Oh god, I can't let on that I'm enjoying this, or they might turn it off!"
When I was on nitrous having my wisdom teeth out, I remember the sensation of feeling like my arms were alternating between sitting on the armrests and floating up in the air. Sometimes it felt like both at once, which was kind of mindblowing.
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