Fabulous smile - not so fabulous bank balance
07.04.2005

I�m sure you�ve all heard the sayings �beauty is only skin deep� and �it�s not what�s outside, it�s what's inside that counts.� You know, that is so very true. I mean, my lover could be 3�4�, weigh 600 pounds, and have a peg leg, and I�d still be madly in love with him. Oh, I know what you�re thinking � you�re thinking, �Well, Smoog, you�re a big fat freak yourself, so of course you�d think that � if you didn�t, you�d never get laid.� Hey, I�ll have you know I�m a very sensual, hilarious, smooth-voiced, angel-eyed fat freak, and that all I�ve ever had to do to get laid was talk up a crowd, get on a stage, and sing, and I could have my pick of anyone I wanted, male or female. So bite me.

Which leads me to my point, in fact.

It is, indeed, true that beauty doesn�t lie in a human being�s surface, that beauty comes from within. It�s important for all of you to note, therefore, that your mouth is not entirely a surface feature, and that your teeth are, in fact, within you. I do believe the most repulsive thing to behold, even more so than a dead body or Cher, is a mouth full of rotten teeth. Don�t believe me? Look:



OK, all right, perhaps that�s a bit of an exaggeration. Fine. No rot this time:



See? Even pearly whites, when arranged in one�s mouth like a Salvador Dali painting, are loathsome creations.

There is nothing, nothing at all, that makes a worse first impression than a big ol� smile full of raggedy ass, jaundiced, and/or rotting teeth. You could be the next damn Gisele B�ndchen � if you smile at your blind date with a mouthful of toothsome lepers, they won�t just not kiss you goodnight, they�ll run screaming for the nearest bottle of Scope just from the thought. In fact, it affects your chances of employment as well as mating. Frankly, you�ll be lucky if your own family doesn�t disown you for making them have to look at that every time you�re happy.

I had the great good fortune of having two English parents provide me with their stellar respective gene pools. Let�s just say that the people of England have been living on an island far, far too long for their own good. When it comes to teeth, the English have spent hundreds of years genetically perfecting their secret weapon against the world � smiles that can actually kill you when you see them. My mother had false teeth from the age of 12. My father has teeth that have apparently moved in his mouth a good 2 inches from where they were originally meant to reside. I myself have had two major operations and countless dental procedures on my teeth, as I was so very lucky to inherit both my father�s freakishly small mouth, his tendency to have 3 sets of the same teeth grow in the same place, and my mother�s lack of any real eyeteeth. I have 4 less teeth than most adults, simply because they wouldn�t fit in my mouth. My wisdom teeth were removed after x-rays revealed that the top pair was sideways and growing into my cheekbone and the bottom pair was severely impacted and their roots were growing into one of my facial nerves. I actually had eyeteeth, but they were abnormally small, giving my smile a decidedly crooked appearance, so bonding helped to build them up to the size of my surrounding teeth.

I was even luckier to inherit my mother�s resistance to local anaesthetic. So were the rest of my siblings. My two brothers, as a result, never, ever, visit the dentist. They have to be held down whenever a needle shows up. My sister goes to the dentist, but only after a seriously large dose of Valium. Me, I simply developed a very, very, very high pain tolerance. After all, there were times I was having 12 or 13 dental procedures in the span of one year as a child. Trust me, you either go mad or you learn to take the pain. The rest of my siblings went mad. Me, I stayed perfectly sane.

Stop laughing.

I have to give my parents credit; they tried valiantly to give their children the teeth they themselves never possessed, in order that they could move out in the world, off the island of hunchbacks and cleft palates, into a life full of opportunities and potential spouses who don�t look like they should be cast as the next villainous sidekick in an upcoming Bond feature.

Unfortunately in my case, a well-intentioned but overly enthusiastic portly eight-year-old named Randy Boisseneau foiled their efforts.

I was an active child at eight years old, when I lived in a small French Catholic town in central Alberta. In fact, my family were always rather baffled as to how, even when there were 3 metres of snow on the ground, I would always, always come home from school covered in dirt. It was a skill I possessed from a very early age, and retain to this day.

Recess on my school grounds was not something for the faint of heart. There were rocks involved, and 2 by 4�s, and broken glass, and even the occasional cinder block. Children�s faces are still appearing on the back of milk cartons in that town after having vanished during recess. I will never tell.

One day, my classmates and I were playing a rowdy game of �tag�. Oh sure, you�re thinking, �Pshaw. Tag? Give me a fucking break. You�re trying to make out like you kids could have been the models for Lord of the Flies, and you were playing tag?� Yes, yes we were. However, this was tackle tag. That�s a whole different animal. When you were �it� in tackle tag, your goal was to latch on to whatever body part of another human being happened to be handy, rip it out of whatever socket it happened to be sitting in, and hurl it to the ground while screaming, �Tackle tag you�re it!� If the recipient of said tackle tag could actually stand up again after being tackle tagged, they became �it� � a vengeful, raging �it� driven by dark thoughts of blood and compound factures.

On this particular day � a sunny, pleasant spring day full of damsel flies and buttercups, daisies and roses and happy, shiny faces, la la, hey now, git yer freak on � Randy Boisseneau was �it�.

Randy was a sweet boy, albeit quite shy and sadly somewhat of an outcast because of his weight. He had a great sense of humour, and tried so very hard to fit in, but it was never quite enough. Poor kid. This was why, when Randy Boisseneau was ever �it� in tackle tag, the rest of the class ran for cover. There was nothing quite so terrifying as a fat kid with a chip on his shoulder given the job of hurling one of us to the ground.

Me, on the other hand � I was an iconoclast even at that early age. I stared fear in the face. I goaded it. I crossed my eyes and stuck my tongue out at it. It was when said eyes were crossed and therefore out of focus that fear grabbed me by the arm, swung me around to build up a terrific amount of centrifugal force, and released me just in time for my face to slam directly into the brick school wall.

While I was screaming, not only did blood spatter quite gruesomely all over the wall, the grass, a sickened and terrified Randy, and my new jumper, but bits of bone also appeared to fly from my mouth and ricochet off poor Randy�s head. In his rambunctious and gravitationally aided desire to fit in, dear Randy Boisseneau had managed to break my 4 front teeth.

My 4 front adult teeth.

Because I was still a child, I couldn�t have permanent caps put in place until I turned 18, so in the decade-long interim, I was given a variety of temporary composites that I lost in another variety of bizarre incidents � for example, one of them fell off while I was laughing and I inhaled it, almost choking to death.

When I reached 18, it was decided that I only really needed one permanent cap, on the left of my two front teeth. It was seriously broken, whereas the other three could be built up with composite bonding. In other words � my parents, although willing to put out to a certain extent for their child, had reached their limit and were not going to shell out a thousand bucks per tooth just so their daughter could have a permanently fabulous smile.

Now, the thing about composites is that they have a time limit. They�re not really designed to last all that long � they�re essentially just a kind of plastic, after all. The average lifespan of a composite is somewhere around, oh, 5 years.

I had mine for 16.

Needless to say, for those last ten years, I didn�t smile a whole hell of a lot, which made laughing a rather difficult and complicated process and caused me to regularly snort my drink up my nose or somesuch.

Well, I finally had them fixed. The only reason I could was because they had gotten so bad that replacing them was no longer considered a �cosmetic� dental process, but a vital, necessary, oh fuck we must process. Therefore, the procedure was covered by my group insurance plan.

I look fabulous! I have fabulous hair, and now, I have fabulous teeth! See? *ting* Fabulous! And it�s such a lovely feeling to run my tongue along my front teeth and not come away with a gaping flesh wound torn out of it. I�m going to have to get used to not tasting blood on a daily basis. I can smile again and people won�t flinch and quickly turn away while muttering prayers based on their respective religions � and that includes staunch atheists. I can go for a job interview without wearing a burqua, which is good, because there�s only so much professionalism you can wring out of a burqua. I can offer to kiss someone and they won�t throw up a little in their mouth anymore.

And I have five years. Five years, and then the whole degrading, dreadful journey down into the depths of dental hell begins all over again.

No way. Nuh uh. This time around, I don�t care if I have to mug a few old ladies or rob a liquor store or two � this mouth is staying with me, man. I�ll sell a kidney first. I�ll sell my body. Hell, I�ll even sell insurance. This smile is mine. Mine! ALL MINE!!!

So I guess that means I�ll have to cut back on opening beer bottles with my teeth, huh?


Hey, I just got notification from Diaryland that I have to renew my super gold member. Uh, ship. Super gold membership. Anyone craz- uh, kind enough to do an unemployed person a favour? If you are, you have 23 days to make me want to kiss you with my fabulous mouth by going here.

This moment of shameless begging has been brought to you by my dentist, who, even though I had 80% coverage for the dental work, still managed to clean out my credit card as well as my tartar build-up.


make idle gossip (10 comments so far)

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Last 5 entries:
01.14.2007:Finally, a support group we can all get behind
01.09.2007:The City That Ever Reeks
01.08.2007:Waiter, there's a uterus in my soup
01.03.2007:Long Lost Mummy of Nefertiti Found in Smoog's Apartment
12.30.2006:New Year's resolutions we can actually keep



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