6/24 Dentist. I had skipped one appointment since my last cleaning almost a year ago. I pay for it with a lot of tough scratching and pulling, a lot of bleeding, and many shreds of gum in the sink. Also, the crown of my already-dead wisdom tooth comes off. The x-rays – made by a machine that is more like a radar gun, it doesn’t hum like they did some decades ago, only beeps – those x-rays reveal that the root canal underneath is inflamed and will have to be redone. This root canal, I remember, is one of the last things I had my dentist in Germany do. Going to the dentist in another country is one of the things you’d hesitate with the most, expecting the worst. They might well be butchers. It turned out the American ones are just as experienced, just as friendly, just as opinionated as the German ones. They would have done the root canal differently, just like any craftsman will tell you the foundations of your house were done wrong. – Also, you don’t ever get to see one. Everybody in the practice has been wearing masks all the time since 2020, and the doctors never take their magnifying scopes off, so it’s hard to remember any of them by their face, since there are no faces.