It’s become the default to have a screen on in every room of a dentist’s office. When I was a kid, the TV was perched in a ceiling corner, like a stuffed owl in a Hitchcock movie, but over the years the screens have drawn closer and closer. The other week at my yearly check up, I spent an entire appointment with a giant monitor on a swivel arm about 18 inches from my face. It was showing a stream of baking competition episodes where celebrities guess if something is a real object or a replica of that object made of cake. The most boggling thing about the show was that the panel knew which object was cake every time, which undercut any element of competition that the show might have had. Over and over, poor bakers who spent hours cooking up edible suitcases and traffic cones had to have actors from cancelled sitcoms tell them they suck at camouflage baking.

Structural issues with the show’s premise aside, none of this felt very medical. I was too meek to ask the hygienist to turn the TV off, but it did get me wondering if there might be a better option.

I have a small, probably unworkable proposal: let me read something on that dentist computer monitor while I’m in the chair. Can I hook up an e-reader to it? Or browse a newspaper or flip through a magazine? I’ve got a million articles open in tabs that I’ve been meaning to get around to, how about passing me some kind of dentist screen aux cable so I can pull up some of these articles?

Could be fun! It might be a little finicky to work out technically, but if they’ve figured out how to get an X-ray of the inside of your mouth, I don’t think a solution will be that elusive.

Is it ideal to read when someone else’s hands are in your mouth? Probably not, but it’s also not a great context for watching a baking competition either. I just think the option to read would be nice.

And yeah, I know the goal of the TV screen in your face is to provide background distraction that’s minimally engaging and maximally buzzy, but we all have comfort reads that we turn to when we need to zone out.

What I mean is that if the metric for dental chair entertainment is something comforting that doesn’t require a full depth of attention, there’s writing and comics that fit the bill. Let me flip through a bunch of Peanuts or Calvin & Hobbes strips. If the dentist has to interrupt to tell me I’m not flossing enough, there’s not a lot of danger that I’ll lost my place in the narrative.

I suspect I’m fighting a losing battle against the screens here. I know the dentist can be unpleasant, but I don’t love the assumption that it always has to be TV time. If we’ve pickled our brains so badly that every discomfort needs a sensorially captivating fidget spinner to endure, it would be nice to choose our disassociation.