The Ex4mined L1fe

This morning, while brushing my teeth, I noticed something unusual. There was hardly any toothpaste on my toothbrush. Not because we're experiencing an economic crisis. Not because Tina hid the spare tube. Not because I was rationing minty freshness for future generations. I had simply remembered something I read a few months ago. Dentists say that a pea-sized amount of toothpaste is all most adults really need. Which immediately raised a question. Why does every toothpaste commercial show enough toothpaste on a toothbrush to clean a hippopotamus? You know the image. A beautiful, perfectly curved ribbon of toothpaste stretched from one end of the brush to the other like a minty work of art. It looks less like dental hygiene and more like something Michelangelo would have painted on the ceiling of a toothpaste factory. That's when it hit me. The toothpaste companies aren't showing us how much we need. They're showing us how much they'd like us to use. Now, befo...

Earlier this week, I wrote a marathon Naming Rights blog post, hoping to drain my brain and slide back into sleep. That was the plan. Close the iPad. Set it down. Return to pillow. Exit stage left.  Instead, Bob Seger showed up uninvited.  Specifically, with the song  Turn the Page . O nce that song starts rolling in my head, it doesn’t politely fade out. It walks in like it owns the place.   “You walk into a restaurant all strung out from the road…” That opening never really stays on the road. It drags the road with it. It drags the stares, the assumptions, the half-heard comments, the way a room can decide what you are before you’ve even fully taken your coat off. Honestly—who among us is immune to that feeling?  Not me. That  road in that song isn’t just highways and motel rooms. It’s people. It’s perception. It’s the quiet, constant sense that you’re being sorted into a category you didn’t apply for. I know my readership well enough to assume I’...

I've always had an age thing. Not in the creepy way. In the carbon-dating way. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, I'm usually trying to place them on the timeline. Older than me? Younger than me? Same generation? Could we have gone to high school together? Could I have taught them? Could I have fathered them? These days, and this is a sentence I deeply resent, I occasionally discover I could have grandfathered them. Nothing prepares you for that realization. One day, you're the young guy in the room. The next day, you're doing mental arithmetic and wondering whether someone was born after your first mortgage. I've been doing this for as long as I can remember. My sister Debbie is two years younger than me. Growing up, she often had friends spend the night. Many of those girls seemed perfectly comfortable developing crushes on older high school boys and college guys. Meanwhile, I thought they were babies. Not actual babies, of course, but in the mind of a teena...

There is a strange moment in adulthood when you realize you are no longer in the season you think you are in. It doesn't happen dramatically or all at once. It happens quietly—like a classroom that looks the same every August, until one year you notice the faces inside it have changed in ways your memory didn't quite prepare you for. Hootie & the Blowfish’s “ Time ” carries that exact feeling. It’s not urgency or panic. It is something much more subtle: the awareness that life is moving forward even when you are standing still long enough to think about it. Or, perhaps more accurately, life is moving forward,  especially when you are not paying attention. The song is unsettling in a very ordinary way because it doesn't announce change; it reveals it. Most of us do not experience transformation as a singular event, but as an accumulation. One school year becomes ten. Ten becomes twenty. Roles expand, responsibilities multiply, and the language of work becomes fluent in ...

 There’s a certain kind of philosophy that doesn’t arrive through lecture halls or dusty books. It shows up in weird places—rock interviews, concert tickets, and, if you’re lucky, a T-shirt rack that stops you mid-step in a store aisle. I saw one the other day:  “Vintage since 1962 — all original parts!”  I almost bought it. Then I remembered I’ve had both shoulders repaired, both knees replaced, both hips replaced, and I’m currently negotiating with my spine like it’s a contractor who keeps submitting change orders. So unless that shirt comes with an asterisk and a legal disclaimer, it no longer applies. But it did get me thinking. What do you call something that has been replaced piece by piece, over time, yet still insists it is the same thing? Philosophers have a name for this discomfort. They call it the Ship of Theseus—the ancient thought experiment that asks: if every plank of a ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? It’s a neat idea when it’s abstr...

I enjoyed listening to an interview with drummer extraordinaire Stewart Copeland, the founding member of The Police. He was explaining cassette tapes to younger listeners. Then he had to explain Walkmans. Then he had to explain that people once actually owned their music and carried it around with them. I laughed. Then I realized there are adults walking around today who have never known a world where music wasn't streamed from an invisible cloud. That realization sent me down another musical rabbit hole. Not the one involving vinyl versus streaming. A different question entirely. Why do people keep buying tickets to see bands when almost nobody on stage was there when the songs were originally recorded? Welcome to the strange and fascinating world of the legacy band. Philosophers might call it the Ship of Theseus with amplifiers. The ancient thought experiment asks a deceptively simple question: if every plank of a ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? Rock music ...