The Ex4mined L1fe

Some songs entertain us. Some songs accompany road trips, high school memories, awkward dances, first apartments, long commutes, broken hearts, and those playlists we refuse to admit still live somewhere deep in our streaming history. And then, there are songs that do something altogether different. They interrogate us. Quietly. Patiently. Sometimes decades after we first heard them. I’ve been revisiting a handful of songs that have remained strangely persistent companions in my life. I return to them not merely because I enjoy them musically, but because they seem to understand something profound about adulthood, purpose, identity, leadership, exhaustion, and the complicated business of becoming who we thought we were going to be. This is not a nostalgia series. At least, not primarily. This is a series about songs that function more like mirrors. Five songs. Five very different emotional landscapes. Five questions many of us quietly wrestle with, whether we admit it or not. Dan Fogel...

Look closely at the image at the top of this post.  The raw energy is almost physical. The colors aren't just applied; they're a psychic eruption. The figure, a weathered artist, is caught mid-roar, his face a complex map of passion and perhaps exhaustion. I've had a lot of fun with this image, but it’s more than just a cool piece of graphic art. To me, it perfectly captures how I have felt, as a living, breathing creator, for the past forty-eight years. (And no, I don't count my elementary years—that was just dabbling for fun. ) I'm talking about the serious life of an artist, a life that began in a pivotal moment: high school AP Art. In those early days, the casual joy of creation was suddenly replaced by a heavy expectation: to produce "quality" art that could be sold at the high school auction. That's where the pressure first found its footing. It’s that first squeeze, that internal knot, that is visualized by the massive, man...

There is a drawer in every American home that could single-handedly confuse archaeologists for centuries. Not the silverware drawer. Not the junk drawer. No… I’m talking about The Cord Drawer. The tangled, humming graveyard of unidentified technology that everyone in the house agrees is “probably important.” Nobody knows what’s in there. Nobody organized it. Nobody remembers putting half of it there. And yet—under no circumstances—is anyone allowed to throw anything away. It is the modern equivalent of a pirate treasure chest if the pirates were deeply anxious RadioShack employees. At some point in life, every family quietly accepts that they are now custodians of wires they do not understand. You open the drawer and discover: three USB cords, two mystery adapters, one charger for a device nobody has owned since the Obama administration, and a thick gray cable that appears capable of launching a Soviet satellite. Still someone in the house says: “Hang on to that. We might need it...

In our modern world, we are deeply committed to comfort. We mute people. We unfollow accountability. We curate our lives with the precision of museum exhibits, showcasing only agreeable opinions, pleasant photos, and a hand-picked audience that claps on cue. I know this because I’ve lived it. In years past, when the social media noise became too much—the arguing, the posturing, the endless squawking from keyboard warriors and the occasional flock of human guinea fowl—my solution was simple: Shut it down. Delete the account. Walk away. Exit the room. If you’ve read my guinea fowl stories, you understand the reference: some creatures make noise because breathing alone apparently isn't enough stimulation. At the time, I convinced myself I was "protecting my peace." But if I’m honest? Sometimes I was just butt-hurt. Someone said something I disliked. A group behaved badly. Opinions flew faster than facts, and I decided the healthiest solution was to burn down my own fro...

Donald Trump spent years preparing for the presidency by practicing a phrase on The Apprentice. "You're fired." Frankly, educational leadership offers a slightly different version. "You're hired… to emcee Catholic Schools Week, troubleshoot the boiler, calm an anxious parent, inspire exhausted teachers, find three substitute teachers before 7:15 AM, host graduation, survive accreditation, and pretend you slept last night." Welcome to educational administration. No golden escalator required. Somewhere along the line, I accidentally became the President of a small republic known as Catholic School. Population: hundreds of students. A couple of dozen faculty. Countless parents. At least four people are crying at any given time. Including me! The strange thing is this: People who know me in my administrator role probably assume I thrive on this. The microphone. The assemblies. The Mass announcements. The graduation speeches. The “Good morning, SSP family...

Names are funny things. Parents spend months arguing over them. Teachers butcher them on the first day of school. Telemarketers weaponize them. And somewhere along the way, many of us collect nicknames, aliases, gamer tags, pet names, church names, work names, and those mysterious family nicknames nobody can explain anymore. You know the ones. “Buck.” “Junior.” “Sparky.” My Kentucky kin call people and start off sentences with “Yeah Buddy”… why, I really don’t know!?! Recently, I was listening to Alan Hunter, Yes, that Alan Hunter , MTV VJ Alan Hunter, and he shared stories behind several famous stage names. And like anyone raised on music videos, useless trivia, and caffeine, I immediately went down the rabbit hole.   Turns out, some of the most famous names in entertainment were born from sweaters, teacher insults, accidental typos, and circumstances no marketing department would ever approve. Take Sting . Before he was selling out arenas and making us all question whether...

Yesterday, we talked about the guinea fowl in the Garden of Weeden—an odd bird at best. It’s a feathered alarm system with the emotional stability of a caffeinated toddler and the volume control of a tornado siren. And yet, strangely enough, it is indispensable. Ticks disappear. Snakes suddenly reconsider their travel plans. Predators lose the element of surprise. The garden stands a fighting chance against the Woodland Mafia. Living with a guinea fowl is like living inside a fire drill hosted by conspiracy theorists. You may not sleep peacefully… but you will sleep informed. The Sermon in the Screeching What I didn’t expect, however, was discovering a hidden sermon buried underneath all that screeching. Who knew wisdom would show up sounding like an emotionally unstable chicken having a public breakdown in your driveway? The more I thought about it, the more it felt uncomfortably true to life. Because salvation rarely arrives the way we imagine it. We expect soaring eagles and cinema...

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve blogged about music.  Not because I stopped listening. Music still serves as a regular dose of medicine around here. But lately, some of my listening hours have been hijacked by a completely different obsession: NFL talking heads. Yes, I have been deep in the offseason weeds — consuming enough analysis about the Kansas City Chiefs’ free agency moves, draft picks, cap space, wide receiver depth charts, and hypothetical third-down packages to qualify for honorary employment in the front office. Every expert seems convinced the Chiefs can be even better this year.  Unfortunately, most of the other 31 teams apparently got the same memo.  Somewhere between quarterback rankings and discussions about whether a rookie defensive back can “elevate the secondary,” a SiriusXM commercial interrupted my football rabbit hole to advertise something called Classic Rewind. Now, seasoned SiriusXM veterans may laugh, but this was new territory for me. Turns ...

*]:pointer-events-auto R6Vx5W_threadScrollVars scroll-mb-[calc(var(--scroll-root-safe-area-inset-bottom,0px)+var(--thread-response-height))] scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" data-scroll-anchor="false" data-testid="conversation-turn-2" data-turn-id-container="request-WEB:96ecd38f-7898-45de-8058-e05ec53e7d51-0" data-turn-id="request-WEB:96ecd38f-7898-45de-8058-e05ec53e7d51-0" data-turn="assistant" dir="auto">   There are moments in life when you expect answers… and instead, God hands you a plot twist worthy of a daytime soap opera written by Celtic monks and narrated by Morgan Freeman. For me, that moment began with a tube. A simple little DNA kit. Spit here. Seal carefully. Mail away. Wait patiently while science unpacks generations of family secrets your relatives politely avoided discussing at Thanksgiving dinner. What I expected was confirmation. What I got was bonus siblings.  Fiv...

This past weekend, we took the grandkids to Busch Stadium III for the 4H Appreciation Game. Unfortunately for us, our Kansas City Royals took a good, old-fashioned, Midwestern beating from the hometown Redbirds. Somewhere in Missouri, I’m certain George Brett sighed heavily and reached for a comforting plate of burnt ends. Still, you couldn’t ask for a better day at the ballpark. The weather was pristine, the kids were buzzing on pure excitement, the crowd was electric, and I only had to refinance my mortgage *once* to cover the cost of a round of hot dogs and sodas.  Somewhere between the seventh-inning stretch and my overpriced soft pretzel, America changed right before my eyes.  Enter the "human ceiling fans"! Down the left-field line sat a squadron of rambunctious young men from Stephen F. Austin University who had apparently declared an all-out war on shirts.  Tarps off. Shirts spinning overhead like makeshift helicopters. Pure college-aged enthusiasm bouncing throug...

  Somewhere between corsages, cap-and-gown photos, tiny graduation gowns held together by Velcro and prayer, and the annual appearance of wobbly-legged Bambi in the backyard, May quietly turns adults into emotional hostages. For educators, especially, this month is emotional whiplash season. One minute, you’re applauding a pre-K graduate who just learned how to zip their own coat and sing three verses of a song about friendship. The next minute, you’re watching seniors walk across a stage, wondering how the little kid who used to forget homework, lunchboxes, and occasionally their own shoes is suddenly moving into a dorm room three states away. Time, apparently, does not ask permission. For high schoolers, May means Prom Season. For me, my mind always drifts back to my own prom in 1980. Awkward, memorable, and operating under universal law that no teenager has ever fully known what they were doing in formalwear. Before When Harry Met Sally... there were awkward prom photos,...