I went to the dentist the other day to get a tooth extracted and it has not been pleasant. One of my wisdom teeth had an infected root and all dentists could do about it was pull the thing, because the easiest way to handle dental problems in America is to not have teeth, I guess.

Even getting to the dentist was a chore. The problem sprung up rather abruptly, and I couldn’t find a single dentist who did “emergency” procedures and took my insurance. Even my normal dentist told me they couldn’t do the procedure for a week, so, in the interest of saving thousands of dollars, I acted like a good mid-westerner, took some Advil, and suffered for a seven days.

Eventually I got in to have the tooth pulled, which was its own unique form of hell. (The tooth’s root was apparently shaped, in the dentist’s own words, “like a fish hook.”)

Anywho. They broke the tooth apart and yanked it and I had stitches in my mouth for a few weeks, chewing food on the other side the whole time. I got the stitches out the other day, at which time the dentist decided to tell me that I should probably get another root canal (on a different tooth) because, hey, life is horrible so we might as well drill around in your mouth a bunch, you fucking pleb.

The dentist makes me so … abjectly miserable I can’t stand it. There’s no mystery as to why: The dentist is a constant reminder that our bodies are falling apart. Minute by minute, day by day, year by year, we are breaking down like old cars. Brush and floss all you want, but your teeth are still going to be messed up. Eventually, they’ll all be in the dirt. Nothing beats entropy.

Should I feel bad about this? No. It’s natural and it happens to everybody. But the dentist doesn’t just make me sad. It’s beyond that, somehow.

One time in 2014 I had an emergency dental visit in Seoul. I’d broken a tooth at school and was able to get in to see a dentist the same day. (Crazy! And I didn’t even have to pay hundreds of dollars a month for the “benefit.”)

I vividly remember sitting in the dentist’s chair with a bunch of gauze in my mouth thinking, “I suppose I could just go home and end it all.”

I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t experiencing a “depressive episode” or being driven batty by pain. I’d gone beyond conventional emotions into an unusually pragmatic realm, a darkness so deep it was beyond anguish or fear. My body will fall apart, I thought. There’s no use in prolonging it. This is how everything ends.

I thought about it the way I thought about eating dinner, or tying your shoes, or blinking–it was just something that you did. As natural as breathing. There was nothing frightening or unusual about it.

Worse than that, worse than feeling such abject numbness, the part that drives me up the wall, is that these insurance asshats expect people to pay thousands of dollars for this? I’ve got to pay special insurance just for the privilege of A) Waiting a week to get any help, and B) sitting in a chair and feeling like dying while somebody sticks a needle in the roof of my mouth and tells me what a good job I’m doing?

This whole thing is a scam.