“Just sit still,” the dentist said. “It’ll feel like a mosquito bite, and then like you’ve had a few margaritas.”

The needle was no mosquito bite — more like someone shoving a needle in my arm.

And the anesthesia was unlike any margarita I’ve ever had — more like the floor dropped out, and I slid down the rabbit hole with Alice.

Next, I was in another room. A nurse I hadn’t met was smiling at me from behind a flowery surgical mask.

“It went well,” she said. “They only had to hammer one out.”

Who knew getting your wisdom teeth removed was a vision quest?

The receptionist gave me a gift certificate for a McDonald’s milkshake, then they rolled me to my friend’s car for the short ride from Glenwood Springs back to Aspen.

I made a mess of the shake — it’s hard to eat with no feeling in your face. And with my mouth full of bloody gauze and a head full of anesthesia, I barely remember stopping at Carl’s Pharmacy to load up on Vicodin.

Then I went underground.

I buried myself in the pillows of my couch and “rode the snake” like Jim Morrison in the desert for three days.

I’d get up every hour or so to change the dressing on my missing teeth and take a few minutes to gulp down something soft.

And with “The Big Lebowski” playing on a loop in my DVD player, the six hours between doses of Vicodin passed like miniature Fellini films.

I kept having visions of a grinning Bigfoot, and once dreamed I was naked on a mountain, holding a cello and delivering a sermon in another language.

I woke up talking aloud.

I tried to go back to work Monday and shake the Vicodin monkey, but the pain drove me to pop another happy tab, and before I knew it I was curled up in an empty office talking to Bigfoot again.

Forget the Halloween rave bash. Give me dentistry.