Yesterday as I sat in the dentist's chair while Brooke scraped nine months of double lattes off of every gilded and be-porcelained tooth in my head, and my hands clenched as though my saliva contained my own cerebralspinal fluid, I remembered a meditation that a sex therapist once taught me. You imagine a bowl full of warm golden oil balanced in your pelvis, and there's a tube running from the bowl up the back of your spine to the top of your head. The tube then loops over and runs back down the front of your spine and into the bowl, and with each inhalation you imagine the warm oil rising up the back of your spine to the top of your head, and then as you exhale you imagine the oil running -- or perhaps trickling, or oozing, depending on whether you're imagining olive, grapeseed, or honey-infused 40-weight STP -- back down into your secretly rousing and warmly rubiginous nether regions. The sex therapist swore that this was an Ancient Chinese Secret for building health, charisma, and a relaxed attitude toward having your fillings removed without novocaine. The meditation kind of works, depending on your powers of concentration and how much your gums have receded, and better with your eyes open than closed, I found. And you know what else? According to Brooke, porcelain and gold crowns, you can still get cavities. You'd think that after the nuisance of bad enamel, numerous root canals, and the expense of eight new teeth that they -- THEY -- could make me some cavity-resistant choppers. Men have walked on the moon, etc., and I still have to floss? Bastards. Bastards!