Yesterday I went to the dentist. This is a new kind of dentist where they actually care about you, but that didn’t make the experience much easier. They stuck a camera in my mouth so I could see what my teeth look like up close: they look like an asteroid field. It’s actually a wonder I have any teeth left at all. Through the wonders of an exotic and incurable anxiety disorder, I have ground them into a fine powder. Sadly, I chewed through all of the dental appliances I have been prescribed to address these problems over the years. I am like a piranha. My aunt was the dentist’s assistant and kept telling me how I take after her with my oral and coronary problems. For once, I’d like to take after someone’s physical benefits. If my teeth or heart don’t explode when I’m not looking, my health is generally all right, but I don’t have a single bodily feature that anyone would write home about. On the other hand, my prodigious mental abilities could knock a satellite out of orbit; I used to think I inherited this from my father before I discovered he was a fan of Rush Limbaugh, that radio monster whose bellicose mendacity is transparent to kindergarteners and dandelions.

I just had a flashback to a time when I went to a deli with my father, or it may have been with the door-to-door salesman who kidnapped me that time. I think it was in a strip mall. That was back when I had teeth and they were more or less white.