Clean Your Mouth

Hello and welcome to your mouth at 2:30 in the afternoon. We’d give you the tour, but you know your way around. After all, it’s your same old mouth, right?

But there’s something… different.

It’s like the nearly identical unit one floor down from yours, or the same car you drive only a year older, assuming yours wasn’t the first iteration after a major redesign. Everything is mostly where you’d expect it. And yet, an indescribable off-ness pervades the entire place.

Here’s the thing: you are neither at the zenith of freshness nor the nadir. You woke up hours ago and tended to your dental hygiene. Several hours from now, you will do the same thing, but perhaps to an even greater degree, before you lay down to sleep.

In the meantime, you’ve had your coffee, your mid-morning snack, your lunch, maybe a donut that your coworker brought in to celebrate some minor life happening or another. And while none of these things linger nastily in and around your teeth and tongue, things are definitely getting to be a bit on the stale side.

Which means it’s maybe time for a stick of gum or a mint.

The only issue with this tactic is that the texture matches the taste. There is no clumping or excessive build-up. Your teeth, however, do not possess that freshly scrubbed, pearly-smooth quality anymore. And a stick of gum or a mint? It’ll only compound this issue.

In some ways, this all adds up to something worse than your mouth first thing in the morning or after eating a particularly pungent meal. Because in each of those cases, you know you are dealing with a defcon-5 level emergency. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We live in a society. You can’t go out into the world with a mouth that stinks.

Whereas, at 2:30, it’s hard to know how much the inner staleness is projecting outwards as you talk or even just exhale.

But there is a simple solution to this conundrum: you just give your teeth a quick brush. You could keep the freebie toothbrush your dentist gave you in a baggie in your desk at work, for example, in case things start to feel too grimy. Or, better yet, you can buy this 2-pack of Oclean sonic brushes. Then, you can keep one at home and reserve one for on-the-go refresh sessions.

Or you could do neither of these things. You could go about your day just hoping the way your mouth looks and feels doesn’t bother anyone else but you. After all, that grimace your coworker made when you spoke to them, maybe it was just a charley horse or something.

Who’s to say?