To celebrate my birthday I went to the dentist. It had been a long, long time since last I'd been to a dentist. I've managed to develop a healthy fear of those bearded sadists with trembling fingers and mercury-crazed eyes, but I recently decided that it was time to take control of my fear and my mouth (Rule No. 1: Control your mouth. Courage will follow.) and make an appointment. The dentist was surprisingly young, with long hair, heavy eyeliner and acne. It was like a having a highschool rocker chick lean over you and stick her fingers in your mouth. Extended contact, minimal movement, no conversation. It was creepily like high school. They were even playing Men at Work on the radio.
I actually enjoyed the appointment. Is this perverse? I loved the little instruments of torture, the high-pitched wail of the cavitron, the relief of the suction device. The tray mounted on a mechanical arm with all the hooks and prods and pumice wheels laid out. The hydraulic chair that kept on leaning me back, back, until I felt suspended in some weird vertiginous position tilted just beyond zero degrees. I liked the exactitude and rightness of the equipment, the specific relationship between each item and its mounting. I suppose I could feel the same way about a car or a lamp, but the antiseptic and faintly fascist quality of dental equipment fascinates me. I can see why dentists are considered attractive: it's not their money or looks so much as the fact that they have mastery over the equipment. And you don't. You just sit there and take it. A big subconscious Hubba Hubba for all those lonely homemakers out there.
Dumbest dental equipment photo ever. Are there awards or merciless systems of justice for photos like that? Is there a machine that will descend from the clouds and dispense immediate justice with hooks, claws, gas jets, high-oscillation chamois cloths, lasers and masers and macadam hammers? No? 'Cause that would be cool.
FINALLY, TRUTH TO POWER
Free of rheological restrictions, Cavitron can process solids, liquid, gaseous, fibrous and pasty media. That makes it widely applicable in a variety of industries.
Man, I am so sick of rheological restrictions! When I want to turn the lights up or dim them down a little (for the mood, right?), I don't expect some bogus 'rules' to keep me from achieving the light levels I deserve. I so richly deserve them, see? Some guy gonna come up to me with a ticket when I turn the rheostat so low that the lights make that buzzing sound? Dude, God gave us those lights and dials.
Retracted on 2003-07-23::5:53 p.m.
parode - exode