Psst…ya wanna know my secrets? All my secrets?

I’ve lost my entire life. Everything from my gym locker combination to my credit card numbers to my Facebook password; it’s all gone, and I have no one to blame but myself.

Also gone: my banking info, the access code to my home wireless Internet connection, the weekly tally of people who have visited my blog, the correct meanings of the words “affect” and “effect,” the complete manuscript of my recent book, all my newspaper columns from the past 15 years, the birth dates of my children, my entire iTunes catalog, my Paypal, Amazon and Gmail account numbers and passwords, and a personal journal I’ve kept since 1989 containing entries that—if read by anyone else—would undoubtedly lead to my compulsory institutionalization followed by a lengthy regimen of shock therapy.

And it’s all just laying somewhere, clinging magnetically to a tiny USB “thumb drive.” A thumb drive which used to be attached securely to my key chain, where it safely (and I use the word loosely) backed up all the important data located on my laptop’s hard drive.

I noticed it was missing last Thursday as I was gassing up the car on the first leg of a trip from Detroit to Grand Rapids. How can I describe the feeling? It was similar to strolling through a crowded shopping mall and suddenly realizing you’re buck naked. I felt exposed, vulnerable.

My laptop is password protected, meaning it would take a clever third-grader with a half-hour’s spare time to get to my personal information. My USB drive has no such password. Anyone who picks that thing up and plugs it into a computer is going to know more about me than does my girlfriend, my kids or my priest.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t confess to any murders in my journal, but I might have. I’m almost certain I didn’t save the Google Map showing where the bodies are hidden, but man, it has been so long…I just can’t sure.

Anyone finding that USB drive could easily steal my identity, though at this particular point in my life, the thief would undoubtedly be willing to pay good money to get me to take it back.

Suddenly, I can understand how Nixon felt when prosecutors started rooting trough those White House tapes.

The drive may have fallen off my keychain and gone straight down a sewer grate, lost for ages like the One Ring to Rule Them All. Or it may be laying beneath a table at the public library, just waiting to be discovered by a kid who would consider it the height of hilarity to post the drive’s entire contents on the Internet.

Worst case scenario: see previous paragraph. Best case: the damn thing remains lost for 100 years or more, only to be discovered by future archaeologists who plug it in and say, “Mike Taylor? Oh my stars! Do you know what this means? We have in our possession previously unpublished works by the brilliant author who outsold Stephen King ten-to-one and single-handedly saved the publishing industry from extinction!”

Yeah, I think I’ll hope for that one. Meanwhile, I have about a hundred passwords to change.

Mike Taylor’s new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.