Having a series of extremely painful injections delivered straight into your infected tooth's wildly inflamed nerve can really put things in perspective for you. It can reduce formerly irritating and enraging events to a series of mere trifles. It also tires you out. After having endured what was basically 45 minutes of an un-numbed root canal, and having really done nothing more than laying down for the duration, I came to my small one bedroom yesterday exhausted, able only to couch, eat pudding cup after pudding cup, and pray for my own death.
     Today however I am feeling cheerful, if not sore, and have been left with the shaky and triumphant optimism of a man who has undergone a great ordeal. I feel like a scale model version of a torture victim. I know I have been hurt, and now knowing how bad things can get, I am liberated. I want to share my experience. I want to collect the sympathy I am owed. But here is the trick, NO ONE CARES. Nobody. I tell countless people, and all of them look at me with the same humoring grin, as if to say, “So what, I've been to the dentist. What do you want a God Damn metal? Don't be such a baby.” But I am not angry.
     Because they don't know. As Larry Miller said, it's like the difference between shooting a bullet, and throwing one. I can get no pity because we have no common frame of reference. But I forgive them. Pain has made me benevolent. I am wiser now, and I will leave them to their ignorance.