Keeping Your Teeth Is Harder Than They Make It Sound

I have always had a great smile. My molars, however, have also always hated being in my mouth.

My parents got them sealed when I was twelve. Maybe that was what annoyed them. By the time I was in college—probably skipping brushing once in a while, maybe twice—a food service burrito from the Kelly Deli took the first major chunk out of a rear molar. It’s been downhill ever since.

I even had dreams of becoming a dentist at one point. I have since settled for memorizing every word to Little Shop of Horrors and waiting for the day a local theater company decides to put it on. I’ll bring my best Steve Martin to the auditions.

But I digress.

The route has been predictable. First it’s got a cavity. Then another. Then it hurts all the time. Then it needs a root canal. Then it needs a crown. Then it needs to come out. Then I need an implant. Yay.

I met my implant in 2012. We had a great run, right up until the post snapped at a trampoline park when I faceplanted trying to do a trick I had no business attempting. It now sits on a shelf in a jar.

While the space was empty, the molar behind it got lonely. Really lonely. It pined away and itself had to be extracted fairly recently. I now sit with two molars in my lower jaw just. Gone. Missing.

Such is life.

A cap on the other side is giving me some grief now. Next step for that one? Extraction and an implant. Put it on the list.

I thought I was drinking too much seltzer. Maybe that’s where my teeth were going. So I asked a very smart AI if that caused tooth issues. It said no. I said I don’t believe you, but tell me more. Then I asked it to give me the ideal concentrations for a salt and baking soda rinse. Then I asked if it was worth adding calcium carbonate or essential oils. And then, and then.

This snowballed, considerably.

The next thing I knew, I had invented my own tooth fairy and was picking out domain names and shelling out twenty dollars a month to ChatGPT because I wanted—NEEDED—pictures to go with it.

Why pictures?

Because I want—NEED—my son to read it. He has bad teeth too. The apple doesn’t fall far, and neither do the molars.

And so it goes.

Keep Your Teeth is the result of that snowball.