In the chair at the dentist’s office K, the person who had been cleaning my teeth for the past few years, asked me, “Have you been feeling any pain lately?” My brain was quick to scan for my old-fashioned behavioral patterns, and I began to meander with my word salad, sputtering off at the speed of light.
“It’s strange because it’s not so much pain but just more sensitivity. So I guess in a way, I’m feeling more sensitive these days. But pain? Not so much. Maybe just a little.”
She laughed. I laughed back.
“It just sounds like you’re just getting older,” she said.
*
I didn’t grow up as a punk or hardcore kid, really. As much as I’d like to pretend that wearing all black and having a brooding affect could qualify as tough, I was actually very much the opposite. I stayed inside. I was sheltered. Being a 17-year-old in a small town could be a cruel existence, but it was the leaping-off moment into a more-than-a-decade long search for true belonging. I listened to mopey rock bands that had brushed the town of Ketchikan a different shade of color on an often gray prism. But I especially felt an attachment to alternative hip hop, gravitating toward labels like Definitive Jux and artists like EL-P, Camu Tao, or Cage Kennylz. Before the algorithm would emerge to confuse my adaptability to tastes, Mikee B., a fellow Filipino kid (and brother) and I kept our digital correspondence throughout our travels and relocations as third-culture alternative kids. In Alaska, stuck at home while it poured down piss, I would painstakingly search for out-of-print B-sides to Company Flow or Myspace demos of a recently deceased Camu Tao, unaware that my illegal downloading would preserve a rarity amongst a current digital landscape corroding under the compression. Then at the end of another long week, I’d hit up Mikee and we’d trade notes on what we were listening to (“I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” for the 15th time”).
It was on one specific occasion when Mikee had messaged me as usual, except instead of a “What’s up!” he posted a link to the FaceBook message inbox to a YouTube page. I opened up the link and it led me to a Death Grips song. The opening with an almost chipmunkish-like invitation sampled off of Chebba Wassila’s song “Hwa Heda,” originating from an album that was preserved on cell phone memory cards. The sample becomes truncated by the force of Zach Hill’s drumming, convincing your ears to oscillate between vocal rupturing and compressed pulsations. But wait, an explosive blare that hits you like a left hook where MC Ride begins his thesis “to sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.” The entire song was akin to an initiation, beckoning to swap confusion for bloodthirsty curiosity. I didn’t particularly love it, but knew that throughout the the remainder of my 20s, from leaving the Chesapeake shores back to the smalltown then to central Seoul and eventually to the outskirts of Queens, that the sonic throughline had made an impression on an angsty, more impressionable me.
*
Before K started cleaning my teeth, between the conversations about life and children, our day-to-day jobs, and the ephemeral summer that was eclipsed by October, I thought about the way I had associated tooth pain. I clenched my teeth when I was stressed. This had always made way for sensitivity in the mornings, soft teeth that felt brittle, and one bite away from irreversible damage. I had a habit of biting my lips too, the sting it would produce, and leaving behind weeks-long canker sores. I had even woken up most nights gasping for air, reaching for a bottle of water to sate my dry throat. When K placed the scaler onto my molar to begin the cleaning, I reflected on how it had been a year since I had found myself confronting a specific type of pain. This wasn’t pain I had felt in my upper molars from time to time. No, this was the physical pain of being in a mosh pit, remembering that it had been a year since I shed the punk weight of my adolescence.
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