Bones And Such (Are Paper Thin)

I’m back on the vicodin.

I had another tooth pulled this afternoon, my third in three months. It was a bottom right molar: another baby tooth, another without a replacement waiting in the wings, another gift of genetics. It’s one more chapter in a long and painful dental record: extractions in grammar school, retainers in junior high, braces in high school, bridges (fake teeth) installed just one week before my junior prom.

Two weeks after that prolonged orthadontic nightmare concluded, the captain of the football team broke and dislocated my jaw with one well-placed punch. I had emergency oral surgery that night, and my mouth was wired shut the remainder of the summer.

It’s the source material of Crash Site’s closing track, “Bone.”

“Broken up and battered in / Fashioned from a safety pin / This hairline fracture’s caving in / I think you already know / Sutured up and stapled shut / Grind my teeth on angel’s dust / Heal these wounds and scar these cuts / I think you already know, I think you already know…”

It’s one of two major themes in my life, and subsequently, in my music: The Divorce, and The Jaw. And it all come flooding back every time some dentist pries open my mouth, peers inside, and mucks around.

I still can’t help but wonder what it all means.