Support Nathan's Journey to Dental Implants

My name is Nathan Rabin. For the last twenty-seven years, I have been a full-time pop-culture writer, primarily as head writer of The A.V. Club, a title I held for most of my eighteen years there.

I’ve also written many books (with a whole bunch more on the way!), beginning with 2009’s The Big Rewind, which chronicled my tragicomic upbringing and early adulthood. I went on to write seven more books, including Weird Al: The Book (with Al Yankovic), The Weird Accordion to Al, and 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, which chronicled my unlikely transformation into a Juggalo and Phish Phan.

For the last seventeen years, I’ve written a column on famous flops, first for The A.V. Club and then for my site, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. It was there that I coined the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe Kirsten Dunst's character in Elizabethtown. Yes, I am the man who gave the world the concept of the MPDG. Not only did it not make me rich, but I am almost impressively broke and have been for as long as I can remember.

Like many people who grew up poor, I had terrible teeth. I also did not take good care of my teeth as an adult. They got worse and worse until I had to get dentures in my mid-forties.

The surgery was challenging in every sense. It’s expensive, and of course, insurance doesn’t cover it, so I spent a good five hours getting every last rotten, degraded, misshapen, and ill-formed tooth in my mouth removed.

It was traumatic. I’ve never experienced torment like that in my life. When it was over, I was in excruciating pain, with a mouth full of blood and scars and a weird, uncomfortable set of molded plastic in place of my teeth.

I was in intense pain for weeks afterward. Because I was awake for the entire surgery, I came to associate the dentist’s office, the dentist, and teeth in general with one of the worst experiences of my life.

It was brutal—and that was just the bill! No, the expense was terrible, but the harrowing part was having all of my teeth removed, one by one, until they were all gone.

I hoped that, at some point, I would get used to having dentures. I hoped that I would become so used to them that I would forget that I even had dentures because they would work as well, or even better, than my old teeth.

That did not happen, unfortunately. It’s been over a year since I got dentures, and I have never gotten used to them. At all. Little bits of food are forever getting stuck in them. I constantly have to take them out, clean them, put adhesive paste on, and then put them back in. Having dentures has made the act of eating so arduous and devoid of pleasure that I lost forty pounds, not because I was on a diet but rather because eating had lost all of its pleasure.

Eating is pretty central to being a human being. After all, you cannot exist without eating for too long. So it sucks that what previously was a source of pleasure—eating food—is now generally more trouble than it’s worth.

And then there are the creams and pastes you use to keep your dentures in place, which leave your mouth a gloopy, gloppy mess all the time.

The worst aspect of having dentures might be that if I keep them in for too long, by the end of the night, they make me want to throw up. It is a relief when I can take them out at night, but then I feel bad when I look at myself in the mirror. I never stop feeling guilt and shame that I allowed the situation to get so bad. I’m not even fifty, and having dentures makes me feel too old for the AARP.

Needless to say, I stress the importance of dental hygiene with my sons, using myself as a cautionary warning of the dangers of not brushing.

I don’t want to cast judgment on other people with dentures. I’m happy that they work for other people, or at least that’s what Fixodent commercials would lead us to believe, but they have very aggressively not worked for me, and I have tried, oh yes, brother, I have tried.

It’s no exaggeration to say that having dentures seriously impacts my quality of life daily negatively.

Thankfully, I have a permanent way out of this mess. I can get dental implants that will be like actual teeth but much better because they’re not yellow, chipped, and half-formed.

I’d be able to eat happily again with dental implants. I wouldn’t need to put my teeth in every morning and take them out every night. I would never have to buy Fixodent or Poligrip ever again, and one of the many weird, unfortunate things about having dentures is that there are only two adhesive creams, and they both suck.

As a Bipolar, Autistic man with ADHD and the father of two sons who are similarly autistic and also have ADHD, life is not easy, particularly since pop culture media is a challenging field. I have been struggling professionally and financially for years. I work very hard on my podcast, Travolta/Cage, my books, and my three websites—Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, and Every Episode Ever—but I am nevertheless in massive debt with little in the way of savings.

Getting dental implants would considerably improve my quality of life and boost my self-esteem.

I am a good candidate for dental implants.

Unfortunately, getting dental implants is very expensive, in part because I would be under during the whole surgery. That will spare me the PTSD I gained from the brutal hours I spent getting my teeth removed.

That’s why I am asking the universe if they would be kind enough to help pay for this surgery. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t need this. The surgery would be covered by insurance or the state. In this imperfect world, broke, desperate people like me turn to GoFundMe with fragile hope.

Of course, no one has to give me a penny for this, but there are many rich people, millionaires and billionaires, trust-fund kids, and Crypto bros, for whom this is not a vast amount of money.

For Mr. Beast, this would be an insignificant amount of money. So, Mr. Beast, if you are somehow reading this and choose to donate the amount (or more!), I would appreciate it. I’d brag about how Mr. Beast paid for my dental implants everywhere I went.

Besides, I have been, if anything, overly public and honest with my struggles with mental health and money and whatnot, so there’s no reason to keep this a secret.

So, if you can, please consider contributing to the GofFundMe. Getting dental implants would change my life in a very real, profound way. So, I hope that the universe is kind and that this proves to be a good, validating day when all of the seeds I have planted over the decades bear fruit.