I’m looking for new WFA members, but there is a wait list

I’m joining the WFA. In fact, I intend to elect myself club president. Those wishing to join may email me at the address listed at the end of this column; I’ll send you a membership card.

What’s the WFA? It’s a support group for husbands, boyfriends, significant others…any who—in the words of John Milton—“stand and wait.” Those who sit and wait may also apply.

Wait for what? Wives, girlfriends, significant female others.

WFA stands for Waiting for Anne. Your own acronym’s third letter may vary, depending on the name of the woman you typically find yourself waiting for. In my case it’s Anne, hence WFA.

Waiting for Anne has become a regular occurrence in my life, one experienced on a daily basis. It’s happening as I write this, in fact.

This time, I’m waiting for Anne to get ready for a stroll through a small, Northern Michigan town. We’re on vacation, staying in a charming, though tiny cabin near Cadillac.

Nobody knows us here; we could go outside wearing chicken suits and pinwheel beanies and our reputations would suffer not at all. We’d be just two more crazy flatlanders eating fudge and purchasing woolen mittens made in Peru.

But noooooo. My Sweet Annie feels she must look her best before we exit the cabin. Why? I’m not sure. She’s one of those rare women that wake up looking even more beautiful than when she lay down to sleep. The hours of “prep time” improve on that, but not so much so that they’re a necessity.

In short—she looks fine without the beautification efforts.

She sees things otherwise. And so I wait.

Back home, I have a big leather recliner to sit in as I while away the endless hours waiting for Annie to come out of the bedroom. I have a copy of the current week’s New Yorker magazine. I have the newspaper. I have cold beer.

Here at the cabin I have a National Geographic from 1972 and the rule book that came with our game of Scrabble. So I have time to develop my WFA idea.

I’m picturing the WFA as a cross between a Moose Lodge and Alcoholics Anonymous. We could hold monthly meetings where members would sit in a circle and relate their personal experiences waiting for women. The rest of the time we’d play golf, drink beer and watch football on the TV over the bar.

Maybe club members could wear funny hats, like the Shriners. Every so often we could host a fundraising dinner for whatever cause seemed especially worthy at the time.

It would give us something to do while…waiting. And waiting. And waiting…

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com. (WFA Club memberships available.)

See my beard? No? Me neither, but I wish I did

My face, for the first time in over 20 years, is utterly and completely naked. I look like a nerd, even more so than usual and that’s saying a lot.

I’m not sure what possessed me to take a razor to my decades-old beard, but I did, last Monday. The stranger who stared out at me from the mirror once the shaving soap had been rinsed away bore little resemblance to the devastatingly handsome (uh-huh) man whose mug shot appears alongside this column.

Being half-Greek, I furred up early in life. I sported a set of god-awful mutton-chop sideburns at 16 and a full beard before my 17^th birthday. Since then, my whiskerless days have been few and far between. Seeing my exposed face in the mirror, I’m savagely reminded of why this is so.

Simply put, I have one of those faces best left covered. A bag could no doubt accomplish this better than a beard, but that, I fear, would invite even more Elephant Man comparisons than I hear already.

Sweet Annie (yeah, we’re back together, doing fine, and she’s promised not to kill me in my sleep unless she’s really, really provoked) says I look handsome without my beard. This disturbs me because up until now, she’s never lied to me about anything.

Every time we sit down to dinner, she reaches across the table and rubs the previously camouflaged cleft in my chin like it’s some sort of lucky talisman. I’m not sure what that’s all about, but it kind of freaks me out. I don’t complain, however, just in case complaining should count as “provoking.”

Fortunately, beards grow back; mine has already begun to. For the next couple weeks, I’ll be looking like the last day of deer hunting season, but after that everything should be fine.

My beard, like the hair on virtually every other surface of my body, grows faster than corn in July. For once, being a fur-bearing mammal is going to work to my advantage.

It’s my half-Greek heritage coming to the rescue, though I usually associate myself more with my mother’s Irish lineage. I grew up on tales of St. Patrick, leprechauns and the Blarney Stone; it wasn’t until high school that I discovered Sophocles, the Parthenon and Zeus.

When it comes to beard-growing, though, it’s hard to beat the folks who gave us Socrates, one of the great fur-faces of all time and a worthy predecessor to ZZ Top.

Sure, the Greeks also gave us western philosophy, higher mathematics and the Acropolis. But for me, in my current naked-faced condition, those gifts run a distant second to the Homeric genetics that allow me to fur up fast.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

What a long, strange trip it was, thanks in part to Google

Late yesterday I rode into the tiny, Northern Michigan hamlet of Stony Lake, bringing to a close GeezerThon 2010, the cross-state bicycle ride I began exactly a week ago near Port Huron. Stony Lake is one of the loveliest communities on earth and the residents around these parts wouldn’t be happy if they knew I was sharing this news with the world. They prefer things as they are and are understandably under-whelmed by the notion of additional “summer people.”

At any rate, those who know me are no doubt amazed I managed to find my way from the state’s east coast to the west. I have been known to get lost going from the living room to the kitchen.

I am—to put it kindly—directionally challenged.

So how did I manage to traverse the long, rural miles between there and here without becoming hopelessly disoriented? In a word: Google. More specifically, Google Maps.

Google Maps is one of the wonders of the modern world, far as I’m concerned. BlackBerry in hand, all I had to do each morning was punch in my destination for the day, let Google Maps’ GPS thingy figure out where I was at the moment, and voila, my route appeared on-screen, planned out in full and taking into account the fact I was traveling via bicycle.

All I had to do was turn when my phone told me to turn and I would wind up where I needed to be before sunset.

That’s the theory, at least. Problem is, Google Maps for bicycles is in “beta” release at the moment. That’s Google’s way of saying, “It’ll probably get you there, but you may encounter a few surprises along the way.”

I did.

First off, I discovered that when you tell GM you’re on a bike it tries to route you to bicycle trails as often as possible. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Paved trails make for a pleasant ride, but some of the trails I encountered are meant for BMX or dirt bikes, the sort with big, knobby tires ridden by guys in their 20s who love to burst over rugged, hilly terrain while shouting “Yee-haw!” at the top of their lungs.

These trails are not meant for geezers riding skinny-tired road bikes loaded with 150-pounds of gear. Portions of my trip wound up being more mountain-climb than bicycle ride.

Worse still, GM for bikes doesn’t rate the, um, quality of the neighborhoods through which it routes you. It would be wrong to mention the town I’m thinking of by name, but there are portions of Muskegon through which an old guy of European descent should not be riding an expensive bicycle loaded with personal belongings.

While waiting there for a red light, a couple young gentlemen asked if I would be willing to share with them the contents of my wallet. There was only seven bucks cash in there, but I declined anyway. They decided it wasn’t worth their trouble to shoot me and the incident ended without further excitement.

I pedaled (quickly) away as they shared a few last minute thoughts regarding my mother.

Despite these problems I still consider Google Maps a wonder of modern technology. Next trip, though, I may follow its suggestions somewhat less faithfully.

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

My eyes are bigger than my athletic abilities

“Your eyes are bigger than your belly!” I heard my mother’s words every Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthday; any occasion that merited a table laden with holiday food.

She was right, of course. I would see her miraculous, succulent repast and fall instantly beneath its gastronomical spell. A fork lift was usually employed to move my plate around, even after I’d finished eating. I never came close to ingesting all the food I piled there.

My eyes were, indeed, bigger than my belly. This is no longer the case. My eyes have become squintier in recent years and my belly…well…let’s just say it is rarely described as smaller than anything any more.

The point is, to steal another aphorism from my mother’s—and most mothers’—lexicon, I had a habit of biting off more than I could chew.

As I write this, I’m about to begin day three of the cross-state bicycle ride I’ve dubbed GeezerThon 2010. So far, I’ve pedaled about 112 miles, all of it uphill (so it seems at this moment). Another 113 miles remain before me, for a total of 225 miles.

Should I decide to pedal the distance back home again (not gonna happen) the total distance of the trip would be 500 miles. But like I said, the odds of me deciding to pedal home are about equal to those of Paris Hilton deciding to become a nun.

When it comes to this bicycle tour, I’ve decided, my eyes were definitely bigger than my belly. I bit off more than I could chew.

This realization came to me yesterday afternoon, after spending eight straight hours peddling against a headwind the likes of which has not been seen since Dorothy made her ill-fated trip to Oz. I was pedaling, hard, just to get downhill! Level road was all but impossible for me. As far as pedaling uphill? Fuggidaboutit! I dismounted and walked.

That’s one of the reasons it took me over eight hours to travel just 57 miles. The other, like I mentioned earlier, was the wind.

For 57 miles I was buffeted with a gale like the hand of God admonishing me to give it up already, turn back toward home, find a nice pub and order a good cheeseburger instead of the dollar store trail mix and banana chips I’ve been living on since setting out from home three days ago. By the seventh hour, I was starting to listen.

Shortly after that, my legs gave out. I ran cross country back in school and thought I had experienced every sort of leg pain known to man, but this was something new. Both my calves seized up with Charlie Horses the size of baseballs.

I sat by the roadside, pounding and massaging the lumps of over-flexed muscle, but it still took a half-hour to assuage the pain. After that, every time I attempted to pedal, the pain returned.

So I walked the last five miles, pushing my bike which, fully loaded with all my stuff, weighs ten pounds more than a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle.

After hobbling into my campsite as black dots swam before my eyes, I erected my tent, unrolled my sleeping bag and just lay there, unmoving.

As the clouds whipped past overhead, I thought about giving it up, about calling one of the many nice folks who offered to “rescue me” should it come to that. I thought about throwing my bike into the lake. So thinking, I fell asleep.

But when I woke this morning my legs felt fine; a little wobbly, but otherwise OK. And the wind has died down a bit. It’s cold, and it looks like rain, but I can handle that.

Besides, all this riding is making my belly smaller. Maybe I can chew more than I think.

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

GeezerThon 2010 Update

As if I needed further proof that God, Nature and Fate are out to get me...15 seconds after my daughter, Aubreii, dropped me off at the start point of GeezerThon 2010 - my solo bicycle ride across the Great State of Michigan - the rain started. Day One and three minutes into the ride and I was soaked to the skin.

Then came the wind, with gusts nearly lifting me from the seat of my bike. If I rode north, the wind blew from the south; if I turned east the wind came from the west. It's been in my face for about 25 miles so far, but it can't find me here in Starbuck's! I may ask them if I can set my tent up in here, rather than brave the next 20 miles to Seven Lakes State Park, where I plan to spend the night.

At the moment, I'm charging my phone, laptop and self (thank you Jesus, for inventing caffeine!).

I'm hoping there's a decent eatery or general store near the campground; I'm already tired of granola bars and trail mix, the only food I packed for the trip.

Speaking of packing, I'm beginning to think bringing absolutely everything I own with me might not have been such a hot idea after all. My bike weighs about 600 pounds, and that's without me on it. Every hill feels like the north face of Kilimanjaro. And am I really going to need my entire video collection and barbell set?

Still, I'm not complaining; so far, I'm having the time of my life (knock on wood). I'm looking out the window now and it seems the rain may be slowing down. I'm sure the rest of the trip will be a piece of cake. Yup, no doubt about it.

I just wish those buzzards would stop circling overhead.

Best to get the disasters out of the way before the trip

By the time this column comes out in the papers, Geezer-thon 2010 will be under way. That’s the name I’ve given the bicycle ride I’m planning from Lake Huron to Lake Michigan, and possibly back again, assuming I don’t keel over somewhere along the way.

I’ve received a lot of mail about my upcoming tour, much of it from readers worried after my safety. Considering my penchant for encountering small-to-medium sized disasters, their concern is not, I think, entirely misplaced.

Not to worry, though, I’ve already gotten my disaster de jour out of the way. I’m working here under the assumption that fate spreads disaster around evenly, and that—having experienced one so recently—it’ll be a few weeks before the next arrives. Time enough for me to finish my ride.

It happened last week.

I was riding along 14 Mile Road enjoying the sun on my back, the wind in my hair, and the heady aroma of auto exhaust that permeates every aspect of life here in beautiful Detroit.

The wind was in my hair because I wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Now, there are folks out there with whom I’ve had long helmet issue debates; I generally come down on the side of “let the rider decide” and I’m sticking with that here. But I have, in fact, finally purchased one, even though I look like a nerd while wearing it.

I was not wearing it this particular day, in part because I was only riding a mile or two, down to the coffee shop that doubles as my office. Also, I had just taken a shower and my hair was just too damn pretty to hide beneath a helmet.

My laptop case slung over my back, I pedaled along at a good clip as the pavement vanished beneath my tires. I was thinking about the work I had to finish, about how nice the day was, about old girlfriends and amusing things the kids had done when they were little.

What I wasn’t thinking is that a Cadillac Escalade would suddenly materialize in front of me. But there it was.

I reached for my brakes, far too slowly. Plowing directly into the vehicle’s passenger-side door, my bike recoiled from beneath me. I executed a half-somersault and landed—on my un-helmeted head—on the Escalade’s hood. The dent I left there was about the size of a dinner plate, maybe three inches deep.

For a couple moments, that was all I knew. I’ve never been knocked unconscious in my life and now that I have, I’ll say this—it’s an experience you won’t enjoy, believe me. When I came to, I felt light-headed and nauseous.

The Escalade’s driver—a young guy in his thirties—was standing over me muttering, “Ohgodohgodohmygod!” or something to that affect.

It took me a few minutes to convince him I was not dead or even badly injured. Once the dizziness passed, I felt fine, in fact. What I didn’t realize at the time was this: I was in shock.

The driver offered to call an ambulance, offered to buy me dinner, offered me fifty bucks in cash. He was really, really shaken up over the whole thing. He genuinely felt terrible about pulling in front of me.

I declined his offers of recompense and wrote it off as a bygones thing. My bike was a bit battered, but ride-able. His Escalade, on the other hand, would need a good two grand’s worth of body work. (My head, even without a helmet, is apparently quite hard. Hard enough to seriously damage a Cadillac, at least.)

Shaking hands, we parted ways. It wasn’t until I was at the coffee shop that the shock started to wear off. When it did, I realized I hurt everywhere! I could barely move.

But a couple of days of taking it easy and I was good as new, so no harm done. And now that I have my biking disaster out of the way, my ride across the state will be problem free. Right? Right?

You can follow daily updates of Geezer-thon 2010 at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com beginning Sept. 6.