In 2000, the second year that I lived in Boston, MA, one of my closest friends was Kevin Corey. I am not sure where he is at this point but my guesses are either somewhere in New Jersey or California. Amongst other wild goings on, we would frequently have intense match ups in the Playstation game called NBA Live 98. The following paragraphs are a recollection of an event which happened during a particularly lengthy winning streak that I was on.... I think it lasted for almost one full month of a few games per day. Even if I hate the subject (sports, cars, etc.), I can destroy at almost any video game.

For whatever reason, we decided to move the game console into Kevin's room to play a few rounds aka rack up more points during my victory tirade. We set up two chairs between the end of his bed and the television, so we were fairly close without straining our eyes. As time passed in our first game, my score and statistics quickly bulked up while Kevin struggled to even pass the ball from player to player. It was another typical game, really. I don't think Kevin was very pleased about any of this because he was shouting and getting red, which is amazingly funny because he is one of the funniest people I have ever met. So, I was just laughing and winning like I do during most video game encounters. He was certainly used to this experience but on this day, Kevin's anger and frustrations led him to hurl the Playstation controller to his left, towards the window........ or so he thought. Neither of us were aware that the wires for both controllers were wrapped up around the legs of the chairs we were sitting on. The accidental vine of black cords caused the thrown controller to come directly back into my face at high velocity, smashing one and one half of my teeth out of my head.

I immediately put my right hand to my mouth because of the tremendous pain. After a few moments, with Kevin absolutely freaking out in the background, I withdrew my hand and realized that there was no longer any pain. I'm pretty sure I started laughing and then Kevin pointed at my hand with a look of horror. He was speechless but I knew something weird was going on. I looked into my palm and discovered some useless tooth fragments. There was no blood at all and my mouth felt disgustingly dry. Kevin kept shouting variations on the sentence, "OH MY GOD, IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING RIGHT NOW??!!" There was really no pain unless I breathed too quickly, causing my exposed nerves to give me feelings of bitter coldness. After walking around for two days looking all fucked up, I made it back to Connecticut for some dental procedures. Since one of my teeth was almost completely gone, I wound up having to get a root canal to remove the rest of it and the other damaged tooth just needed to have a new bottom half. The one that was root canalled had some kind of weird post put into it, where my real tooth once was, with a temporary replacement tooth. Then, I had to have a molding of my mouth made and a permanent porcelain tooth implanted.

I have no explanation as to why this is true but I never remember any of my dreams except for ones that somehow involve my fake tooth falling out.