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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   dental alchemy
Tuesday, November 27 2007
In the mouths of human beings there are four incisors on the top and four on the bottom, and these are bounded on either side by canine teeth, which (due to God's mercy, that He spared us from better resembling our ancestors) serve as additional incisors. In my mouth in the Fall of 1994, the top left incisor nearest the canine experienced blunt force trauma (a beer bottle held by a friend dancing at a punk rock show) sufficient to crack off a corner the size of match head. This left a painful triangular hole in my smile. A few days later a dentist repaired the tooth with a temporary amalgam filling which lasted eight and half years. Through the nineties this tooth gradually became discolored until in 1998 it finally abscessed, producing a pustule on the outside of the nearby gum. I'd rub and drain the pustule now and then, but didn't do anything more about it until the Spring of 2000 when my then-girlfriend Bathtubgirl set me up with a dental appointment. In the Spring of 2000 I received a ghetto root canal at a corner shopping area in my predominantly Iranian West Los Angeles neighborhood. I say "ghetto" because my dentist wasn't a fluent English speaker and because the procedure probably should have been more comfortable and expensive than it was. The recommended course of action at that point would have been to replace the outside of the tooth with a proper crown, but the root canal had been so traumatic that I never returned to that dentist.
In the Spring of 2003 as Gretchen and I prepared for our wedding, I was finally fitted for a proper crown, which wasn't actually installed until after the wedding. I still have the temporary crown I wore at my wedding, as well as the models of my upper and lower teeth.
Several months ago, before Gretchen and I set off for Scotland, I noticed that the gum near this crown had become inflamed. I developed a habit of rubbing it, and when I didn't do so regularly, I'd always be disheartened by the fragrance of whatever it was that came out when next my rubbing resumed.
Thanks to free market extremists and my own personal decisions, I don't have good dental coverage, so I've been postponing a trip to the dentist. In the meantime I've experimented with hot saline soaks, antibiotic ointments, and increased toothbrushing. Nothing has helped. So last night I decided to try a little good old fashioned alchemy.
I'm aware that bacteria do not grow well in the presence of copper, so last night I fashioned a piece of copper wire that I could use to encircle the base of my troubled tooth where it disappears into the gum. The crown only simulates a tooth disappearing into a gum; without much effort, I can slip the gum off its base and wiggle a fingernail under it into a gap that persists between it and the original tooth upon which it is impaled. The copper wire I used was 0.8 mm in diameter, though along the center I hammered it flat so as to better fit it into the gap beneath the crown. I managed to get it into that gap okay, though the wire was far too wide to fit into the tiny gaps on either side of the tooth, so I routed the ends up on the outside of the gap to the nearest place where the interdental gap widened enough, and then just folded them over flat against the inside of the teeth. If you know it's there the wire is visible as a coppery frame around the tooth, but otherwise it was fairly unobtrusive. It felt a little funny when I closed my mouth, but it wasn't anything I couldn't get used to.
Today when I rubbed the gum above the crown, I was unable to produce any (or at least much) of the nasty fragrances that had greeted such efforts in the past. Perhaps my alchemy wasn't based entirely in faith!


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