Spoiler alert, but this one has got kind of a twist ending. It turns out that no matter how bad you thought listening to some East Asian second son who shamed his parents by going to dental school instead of becoming a surgeon prattle on about the weather or the Red Sox while he's got a metal spike jammed into the inside of your face was, the opposite is far, far worse. Dude I'm seeing right now, you know, dentally, does not say shit the entire time. I just had a crown put on yesterday, which if you don't know is like a hat for your tooth, except it costs a thousand bucks and makes it feel like you're chewing on a stone for the rest of your life. The procedure takes about three hours on the first visit, which is bad enough. But try sitting there in stone, grim silence while you stare into another man's eyes. It got to the point where I wanted to pull the drill out of my mouth and ask the dude how his fantasy football team was doing. Just the whir of a tiny bone saw and the meaty, metallic smell of decayed tooth being burnt away by a drill to keep me company. If I hadn't already had to ride the bus to get there in the first place I might have easily imagined that this was my own private VIP area of hell.

Literally anything would have been preferable to staring into that gaping, silent void. Come to think of it, someone write that shit on my tombstone.

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