Had fun at the Comedy Connection last night. I really should try harder to post about shows in advance of their happening, you know, like promoting them. But, ah well, some of us are marketers and some of us just date them.

Hanging out with some other comics afterward, I had shooting pains radiating through my head. In and of itself that’s not unusual, as anyone who has hung out with comedians will attest. But rather than the psychic pain of “funny” people, this pain was organic. For a long time, I’ve had a gaping hole in a tooth where a filling used to be. Finally, the nerve is making it’s presence truly known.

I have a weird dental fear, though. It’s not so much the drill and the pain and the drill and the pain, as the sense of shame. I can tolerate pain, as evidenced by my continual use of in lieu of actual medical treatment. And, no one I was with last night knew what electric shots of numbing, excruciating, throbbing pain forced me to put the tortilla chip down and swallow my beer gingerly (not to be confused with ginger beer). Yeah, I’m pretty fucking macho when it comes to pain.

But, when the hygienist picks away and picks away and tsks and murmurs and mentions adequate flossing and brushing and rinsing, I wilt. I hate that whole rigamarole worse than the pain. OK, I also fucking can’t stand the novocaine needle. (But judging by the stuff I found when I tried to find a picture of the typically gi-normous needle, I’m hardly alone.)

I fucking hate the lectures, though. Worst thing about dental shame was I found a dentist a while back who I liked treatment-wise. However, his secretary or billing company or whatever kept fucking up every single payment that I made, as well as those made by my insurance company. So, I was continually getting dunning notices and a few times the dentist himself called looking for his cash. After the third time of sending off copies of my cancelled checks and insurance statements, followed by another imploring phone message explaining how his practice was small and he counted on people to be honest and pay, I gave up and stopped going.

I almost could live with someone thinking I lacked oral hygiene, but erroneously considering me a deadbeat was more than I could bear. You combine both a tsking hygienist and a secretary saying you’ve stiffed them over the cashola, and I am long gone.

Sooo, now years have passed, and left on my own I do brush and rinse and try to floss, but I don’t go for checkups.

Faced with the inability to enjoy a scone this morning, though, I screwed up my courage and made an emergency appointment. A nice dude with very little attitude packed some temporary shit in the hole and tried several times unsuccessfully due to a machine in need of something or another to take a diagnostic X-ray. I’ll go back, since he didn’t seem like a dick, and, in fact, after a quick going over the other teeth, which do need some work, said something like apart from the lost filllings he would have thought I did regularly get checked.

‘Course the flipside is, assuming he wasn’t lying just ‘cuz I said I hate getting lectures on oral hygiene, if I can keep the plaque down on my own, why the fuck do I need to go back, once the holes is plugged?