The Ex4mined L1fe

There are songs that get held hostage by their titles. R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion might be the clearest example for me. I started having these thoughts at a summer concert before COVID came barreling into our lives. Hootie and the Blowfish did a live cover of Losing My Religion ; they quipped it was the only REM song they knew. Up until that moment, people, myself included, had assumed this was a song about faith; about religion, belief, spirituality slipping away. The title seems to invite that interpretation. And maybe that’s part of the problem. We like clean answers. We like things neatly labeled. Caught up in the awe of that moment, I began to interpret those song "lyrics" differently. As an older guy, I am less interested in neat answers. The more I listen to this song, the more convinced I am that it isn’t really about religion at all. It’s about emotional overinvestment. It’s about caring so deeply that the caring starts to consume the one doing it. It’s about reach...

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 ...

The other day I was listening to an interview with Stewart Copeland, and I nearly laughed myself off the road. He was explaining to younger listeners what a cassette tape was. Then he explained what a Walkman was. Then he explained that people used to actually own their music and carry it around with them. At first, I chuckled. Then it hit me. There are adults walking around today who have never known a world without streaming. To them, music has always existed somewhere in the cloud, ready to appear on demand. For some of us, music used to live in the living room. I've been around long enough to experience nearly every major format that carried recorded music. I've listened to 78s, 45s, LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, MP3 players, iPods, and now streaming services. At this point, my musical résumé looks less like a playlist and more like a museum exhibit. What's interesting isn't just how the technology changed. It's how every new form...

America is turning 250. Semiquincentennial. A word so awkward it sounds less like a national celebration and more like something your doctor discovers during a colonoscopy. Naturally, we Americans have decided to celebrate this milestone in the most American way possible: by combining history, spectacle, nostalgia, civic pride, county fair energy, professional sports entertainment, neighborhood cookouts, drone swarms, and enough fireworks to briefly alarm low-flying birds and insurance adjusters alike. Washington, D.C. is preparing giant state fairs on the National Mall. Tall ships are sailing into historic ports. Philadelphia will celebrate where the Declaration of Independence was drafted by men who somehow launched a revolution while wearing wool coats in July. New York plans a summertime Times Square ball drop because, apparently, America looked at its existing holiday traditions and said, “Needs more descending objects.” And here in St. Louis, we are preparing to become the ...

I took a little audit trip down memory lane recently. When I grasped the ring and fully committed to writing again during the first week of August 2025, this whole venture looked very different. Truth be told, that first week was something of a literary recycling project. Fourteen posts went up, many of them repurposed pieces—including monthly Gospel reflections originally written for the SSP parish. It was good material, certainly, but polished and reintroduced. That early work formed the foundation of what became Ex4mined L1fe and is now slowly evolving into Gard3nofWeed3n . That first week? About 120 reads.  Respectable. Encouraging. These days, Ex4mined L1fe and Gard3nofWeed3n can quietly hit that mark in three or four days. June 2026 has been particularly kind to the readership numbers. But the numbers themselves are not really the story. Over the past nine months, what began as a writing project designed primarily to purge thoughts from my head—in hopes of creating a healt...

  Some blog posts arrive with a clear purpose.  This is not one of those.  This is the pile of rejected naming ideas found scattered across my mental cutting room floor at 4:47 a.m. You’ve heard of The Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition.  This is Middle-Aged Man With Wi-Fi: Excessive Edition. If I controlled the naming rights of household life, civilization would deteriorate rapidly. The bathroom scale?   “Emperor Brutally Honest.”  No encouraging lies.  No diplomatic rounding.  Just raw numerical violence before coffee. My printer?  “Paper Jamal.”  Because it creates drama nobody understands, and nobody invited. The thermostat?   “The Geneva Convention.”   Every marriage eventually becomes a multinational peace negotiation conducted in fleece and passive aggression. Laundry?   Laundry is no longer laundry.  Laundry is “The Never-Ending Broadway Revival.”  Same cast.  Same plot.  Eight thousa...

Spoiler alert: this is one of those 4:45 a.m. blogs. No coherent thesis. No elegant takeaway. Just a brain dump because apparently my subconscious opened twelve browser tabs and forgot where the music was coming from.  I can’t go back to sleep until I drain the cranial swamp. See? I knew some of you MAGAs thought I was going there. Every time I begin a post like this, I feel like I’m channeling my inner Rod Serling.  Submitted for your approval… a middle-aged blogger wandering through naming conventions no reasonable human asked for. Lately, the Garden of Weeden  is outperforming The Examined Life . Apparently, readers prefer stories involving me chasing squirrels, guineas, rogue rabbits, and my dignity around raised beds rather than my cerebral attempts to connect obscure song lyrics to emotional growth. Noted.  The people have spoken.  They crave fertilizer, feathers, and self-deprecation. Anyway… naming rights.  If I were an absolute monarch of my castle...

There are times in life when certainty feels less like true confidence and more like muscle memory. You know how to do the work, you show up, and you understand what's expected of you. But eventually, something shifts. You start to notice a quiet, strange gap opening up between your competence and your conviction. Tommy Shaw’s song "Crystal Ball" lives right in that gap. The song's backstory makes this tension even more striking. When Shaw—a kid from Alabama—auditioned for Styx, he was stepping into a floundering rock band desperate for an identity. He didn’t just fill a vacancy; he completely jolted the group back to life. As the new guy, he wrote three of the album's eight tracks, including what became one of their biggest hits. By all measures, Shaw had found his calling. Yet his title track isn't about a triumphant arrival or a dramatic crisis. It’s about something far more unsettling: functioning uncertainty . It's the kind of doubt that doesn’t stop ...