Okay, look, I’ve never actually woken up with the decimated body of a mouse in my mouth. I hope I never do. But I am pretty confident I know how that would feel because, in recent weeks, my mouth has been just a pile of absolute garbage upon waking in the morning.
There is no logical explanation for such things. I brush my teeth before bed. I don’t eat greasy food before falling into a deep slumber. As far as I know, my kids are not dropping weird nuggets of death into my craw as I snore the night away.
I have a relatively clean mouth.
And yet every morning, I wake with what can only be described as the taste of horror in my mouth hole.
Here are a few possibilities of what may be going on:
My dog is drooling directly into my mouth.
I try not to allow my dog to sleep in my bed. There is one reason and one reason alone for this. My husband would divorce me if he woke up to find our 90-pound German shepherd in bed with us.
So instead, she has a neat little mattress set up on my side of the bed on the floor. More than once, I’ve awoken to her heavy breathing on my face as she stares directly into my soul.
Perhaps she is also drooling her saliva into my mouth. She has quite literally the worst breath in the world, so this would solve the mystery of my grotesque mouth upon rousing in the morn.
A small but determined civilization of miniature settlers have taken up residence on my tongue.
Hear me out. Hear me out.
Perhaps these people were shrunken by a mad scientist who refuses to return them to their original size. Now they are forced to make the most of it. They need a safe place to homestead in their new tiny life. They had tried locales such as the refrigerator fruit drawer, but that proved to be too chilly of a climate. Their preference is humid temperatures.
That’s where my mouth comes in. Warm, moist and all the foodstuffs they can hope for since I am constantly shoving pie into my pie hole.
Of course, with multiple people setting up camp in the nether regions of my tastebuds — creating fire and growing produce and whatnot — that would most certainly make for some disgusting mouth feels in the morning.
What I can’t figure out with this theory is how they survive my multiple teeth brushings per day. Is it like a daily apocalypse? Am I wiping out entire civilizations each time I scrap my tongue with my fancy dentist tongue scraper?
My husband is performing a social experiment on me, and it’s gone wildly off track.
Jamie is a train conductor by day but a super-secret scientist by night. He set out months ago on a quest to see how much disgusting mouth action one person (me) could take before opting for an entire mouth transplant.
Every night he slips garlic cloves, sour milk chunks, and “bratwurst sausages” onto my mouth for an undetermined amount of time in hopes of concocting the most horrendous breath possible and is recording my reaction.
There he is, gently dipping his meaty frankfurter between my teeth every night, waiting with bated breath for me to acknowledge the heinousness of my mouth in the morning.
What my husband was not counting on is the fact that I will go to great lengths to avoid the dentist and will live with this rotten mouth for as long as we both shall live.
A combination of numbers 2 and 3.
Jamie is the mad scientist who created the puny humans and placed them in my mouth to see if they could survive there.
He continues to record his findings.
. . .
My horrific mouth conundrum could be a mix of any of these things. It’s one of these things at least, as I cannot fathom any other reason for such repugnance. Some people tell me bad morning breath is a symptom of getting older. But I’m smarter than that.
All I know is that there is something else at work here.
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This post was previously published on it’s just foam.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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