Dem Bones

My bones are receding. As they shrink, pieces of me which depend upon these bones for bedrock are loosening, and as these pieces wobble, here and there, bits have begun to fall away like withered leaves trickling off a dying oak tree. Essentially, I am beginning to rot.

Last year, I lost a tooth, one of the back teeth, an upper left molar (the second in a row of three). It isn't immediately apparent that there is a gap back there in my mouth, but the voice of my inner-Narcissus, one of several non-stop chattering voices that not even booze has been able to silence, forewarns me that unless I do something about this empty gorge in the back of my mouth, a day of remorse and regret lies ahead.

It might go down like this:

I'll chance upon an ephemeral moment of bliss posing as a nymphet, some "light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. . ." and all that jazz. My vainglory voice conjures up a scene on a midnight train from Budapest to Bucharest.

My Dolores will chat me up on this train in this distant locale, the scene of what could be the perfect zipless encounter, and it just might be my lucky night except that I will forget my maxillofacial infirmity and laugh at her fractured-English smiles and jokes. My mouth will widen, and in that instant, my Romanian forest sprite will take a closer look in the dim light of second class intimacy. She will inspect me as one might when they are about to purchase a work horse. She will see then and there in the back of my mouth an empty grave into an oblivion that if she were to enter, would offer her no return.

So the obvious solution is: I need a new tooth. The problem is the bonal area, the thinning white line of periodontal substructure outlining my shit-eating X-rayed grin is becoming shallower and shallower year after year; it's the narrowing of the marrow. In the back of my upper jaw, there is now not enough bone to hold a post that will support a shiny new crown. This bone loss is why the damn tooth God gave me plopped out in the first place. So unless I have osteo-inductive surgery sooner than later, in the next few years, more molars and their incisor, cuspid and bicuspid cousins will also start to drop, one by one.

This need for bone augmentation has decided where I will holiday in January. I am going to Bangkok. Cosmetic surgery tourism flourishes in BKK. I can have the procedure done there for half of what I would have to pay for it here and that includes airfare, food, hotel and a variety of recreational opiates that I will, on this trip, actually need.

So, Kevin and all my venerable, august brothers who are, like me, just beyond the Labor days of our lives, and who will reach within the next too few, too short years that bad ass, ballsy milestone birthday, that one within arm's reach of the finish line, where we will be introduced to a decade of rapid decline and possible body parts replacement surgeries, I am off to Bangkok in January to have a little piece of me scraped from here to be transplanted to another place there. I'm going to Thailand, a place that western running lackey dogs of Arab oil money often frequent for a little comfort, tea and sympathy, but this time, the bone implantation is not the one we generally think of, hope for and dream about.