If it’s past Friday, is anyone still here to read this?

If you’re reading this any time after Friday, it means the world didn’t end on Dec. 21, like so many wise and knowledgeable experts (long-dead Mayans and my “friends” on Facebook) said it would.

For most people, that’s probably good news. But not for me. As I’ve mentioned before, my long-term financial planning relied rather heavily on Friday’s apocalypse. If the world’s still here, I’m in trouble.

Of course, it’s possible that by the time you read this, a few “mini-apocalypses” will have taken place; not-quite-extinction level events, I mean. Disasters like, oh, I dunno, a meteor strike on whatever building houses the record-keeping offices of the Internal Revenue Service. 

Or maybe a virus released by terrorists that turns every Bank of America employee into a memory-challenged zombie.

If really bad things also have happened to the electric company, my previous cell phone carrier and the bar in Detroit where a bookie named “Louie” hangs out, I’m all set.

It would also be helpful, though not essential, if small volcanoes have by Friday erupted under the homes of two of my four ex-wives. (The court order prevents me from saying which two.) I don’t owe money to either, so this isn’t critical. But if this could happen, it would definitely help me to maintain a more positive attitude in the post-apocalyptic world.

Naturally, I’m hoping to live through whatever disaster takes out (or has taken out) the rest of you. Along with a rag-tag band of fellow survivors (the Dallas Cowboys Cheer Team and a half-dozen Swedish stewardesses) we will rebuild civilization, with the possible exceptions of the IRS, cell phone companies, Bank of America and that bar in Detroit.

I figure that — depending on things like residual radiation, roving zombies (former Bank of America employees), and mutated “super-chimps” that are tired of eating bananas and demand the right to vote — we should be able to get society back on a paying basis by 2020, or “The Year 8” as we’ll be calling it in our new calendar (a calendar in which photos of cheerleaders, stewardesses and super-chimps will figure prominently).

This new society will of course need a leader, and while modesty prevents me from nominating myself, I can’t help but point out that I am the one who thought all this up in the first place. Also, I already have a crown, left over from the days when Burger King still gave them out free with kiddie meals.

At any rate, if it’s Friday and the apocalypse HAS happened, and if you’re one of the survivors, and if you’re looking for someone to lead you and the rest of the Cowboys Cheer Team into a Brave New World, I hope you’ll keep me in mind.

On the other hand, if the Mayans and my Facebook friends are right and all life as we know it on planet Earth really DID end Friday, then the remainder of this column is directed toward the space alien archaeologists who may find this essay thousands — or even millions — of years from now.

The first thing you guys need to know is this: If you look under my desk at the newspaper office, you’ll find a map to my apartment. There, crouched beneath the rusting frame of what used to be my bed, you will find whatever remains of my DNA (easily identifiable by the butterfly tattoo on my left buttocks). 

Use whatever technology you space aliens possess to clone me back to life and I’ll tell you everything you want to know about homo sapiens sapiens. I promise I won’t embellish. Just the facts, as Joe Friday used to say.

Joe Friday, by the way, was the 69th President of Planet Earth and was responsible for giving super-chimps the right to vote. 

That’s just a taste; I’ve got plenty more facts for you where that came from, just as soon as you reconstitute that DNA and bring me back to life. Remember, the map’s under my desk.

(Also, if you should happen bring back my girlfriend, Sweet Annie, don’t mention that thing about the cheerleaders and stewardesses, OK?)

Mike Taylor’s eBook, “Looking at the Pint Half Full,” is available from Amazon.com and in paperback format from Robins Book List in Greenville. Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

What I really need is to know a little less about everything and everybody

Sweet Annie and I were griping about cell phone costs the other day. She wasn’t. I was.

I wasn’t complaining about the cost of MY phone, which, after all, is a super-phone capable of performing tasks unimagined less than a decade ago. It’s faster than a speeding bullet. It can leap tall buildings with a single bound.

It can suck away hours of my life with idiotic Facebook updates about what my “friends” — half of whom I don’t know from Adam — had for dinner.

By contrast, Annie’s phone is one step up from the wall-mounted crank model Andy Taylor used to call Mount Pilot when Aunt Bee was visiting there. If there’s such a thing as a “dumb phone,” my Annie owns it.

I’ve been trying to get her to update to a smart phone, or at least a less dumb phone, for months. She won’t. She doesn’t want to text, Yelp, Google, email, Bing, Yahoo or play Angry Birds. She’s perfectly content with her flip phone; a battered, plastic eyesore that looks like something left behind by the prop department after the cancellation of the original “Star Trek” series.

It was while elucidating on the deep, abiding need all modern people have to remain in constant audio, visual and textual contact with everyone they know 24/7 that I experienced an epiphany.

I was wrong.

This was an entirely new concept for me, since — to the best of my knowledge — I’ve never been wrong before. Just ask Annie; she’ll tell you, more than you want to know, probably.

I realized I was wrong when Anne pointed out that generations of phone users, ours included, had gotten along just fine communicating via large, black bricks of steel and plastic with rotary dials and handsets that weighed more than most televisions do now. Those phones were built like tanks and were almost as stylish.

But they got the job done.

Granted, a long-distance call was viewed with an awe usually reserved for pillars of fire or partings of the Red Sea. 

A call to Great-Grandma Kelly in Indianapolis involved lining up all the children, oldest to youngest, dialing the phone (only after 9 p.m., when the rates dropped) and then passing the handset down the line so everyone could blurt, “Hi Gramma” while my old man looked at his watch, made twirling “c’mon c’mon” motions with his right hand, and thought about all the money he was flushing down the drain just so a little old lady could tell her bridge group she’d spoken with her grandchildren.

I spent most of my teen years backpacking in one wilderness or another. Nobody had ever heard of a cell tower and weeks would go by in which I spoke with nobody, long-or-short distance. If someone wanted to reach me, they had to wait for me to come home.

I was such a neophyte that I didn’t even know what I was missing. There were people eating spaghetti for dinner and I didn’t know. Someone thought a picture of a puppy with the words “Wuv You” superimposed over it was cute, and I didn’t know. A political activist thought Eskimos should “go back to where they came from” and — you guessed it — I didn’t know!

It was barbaric, I tell ya!

So, thank Heaven for my smart phone. I can’t wait for the implantable version — the one they’ll wire directly into my cerebral cortex. Because those few moments every day when I’m not getting an email, text, phone call, Facebook update or voice mail message just seem so … empty.

Hmm … maybe I’ll see if Annie wants to trade phones with me.

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I may be a jerk, but I love Christmas music

I’m a sucker for Christmas music, I’ll admit it. I’m one of those fools who point my Pandora account to Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole long before the Halloween candy bowl has even begun to empty.

I like the old stuff, tunes recorded when my parents were dating. Far as I’m concerned, every holiday song cut to vinyl after “Blue Christmas” should be viewed with grave suspicion.

Each year I attend as many live Christmas concerts as I have time for and can afford. From the little freebie performances put on by junior college music departments to the Grand Rapids Symphony’s big seasonal fête, if it’s Christmas music, I’m there. 

My love for Christmas music takes me each December to Grand Rapids Christian High School’s Devos Center for Arts and Worship, a spaceship-like venue that, for a few days each year, hosts the finest musicians and vocalists the area has to offer.

The Hark Up Christmas Program boasts a horn section larger than the North Korean Army and a choir with more singers than there are confused voters in Florida. There are dancers dancing; classical, swing, urban, Celtic. There are drummers drumming, bass players bassing, pianists p-ing … hmm … that last one can’t be right.

The point is — in the words of the late Ed Sullivan — it’s a Really Big Shew. It is the quintessence of my annual holiday music appreciation schedule and, for me at least, the highlight of the entire Christmas season.

That’s why I feel kinda bad about the letter I wrote following last year’s show.

The letter was not kind. It was not complimentary. Juvenile sarcasm and poorly-concealed rage oozed like malevolent poison from each and every sentence. Anyone reading that letter would know one thing for certain: The guy who wrote it is a jerk.

But last year’s Hark Up show blew chunks and I was really upset. OK, it didn’t exactly blow chunks. In fact, there were parts of it that were pretty good. But — and this is just my opinion — parts of it were not. And I’m accustomed to it being flat-out awesome from start to finish.

So I was mad. Mad that I’d dropped forty bucks on two tickets. Mad that I’d had to sit through a bunch of mediocre acting just to get to the few good musical parts. Mad that nobody had printed something on the tickets like, “Sorry, but parts of this year’s show are going to feature bad acting instead of great music.” (I believe in honesty in advertising.)

So off went the angry email. What can I say? I’m a writer. When I’m angry, I write. Just ask Sweet Annie; she has several letters she would just love to show SOMEBODY, if she weren’t such a lady and above that sort of vengeful behavior. (Right, baby?)

Chris R. Hansen, who organizes the show and serves as conductor and musical arranger (and is beyond brilliant at both jobs, lemme tell ya) intercepted the email. He shared it with some of the Hark Up board members, who shared it with some of the musicians, who shared it with Heaven knows who else.

I’m sure mine wasn’t the only disgruntled letter that year, but I’ll bet it was the snarkiest. The Hark Up concert, after all, is intended primarily for nice church folk, and nice church folk do not use the kind of language I used in that letter.

Long story short (too late!) they got rid of the mediocre acting, added even MORE great music than in previous years (which I would have thought impossible given the show’s two-hour run-time), and put on what was arguably the single best concert I have ever seen in my life. (And I have seen Aerosmith, B.B. King and AC/DC.)

There were moments so good during this year’s performance that I forgot to breathe. Really. Sweet Annie felt the same, so I know it wasn’t just me.

The downside is, I’m guessing at least a few of those actors from last year’s show got hold of my nasty letter. I hope there weren’t any hurt feelings, but I’ll bet there were. How could there not be?

So. I’m a jerk. But I’m a jerk that got to hear a really, REALLY good Christmas concert this year. If somewhere down the road I get beat up by a few mediocre actors, well, it was worth it.

Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com, or (616) 548-8273.  BUY MY BOOK!! Click on the link on the left to throw your hard earned money away on more of the same stuff you can get here for free!

You’re only as old as it says you are on your driver’s license

I’m basically a non-violent guy; a child of the sixties who grew up in the age of Aquarius with the smug assurance that peace, love and understanding would eventually prevail over mankind’s baser instincts.

But as God is my witness, I intend to smack silly the next person who makes any of the following statements:

• Age is just a number.

• Sixty is the new 40.

• You’re only as old as you feel.

• Happy birthday.

That’s right. Today is my birthday (or it was when I wrote this on Nov. 26). I’m not 60 yet, but I will be in three years. Three years from today, in fact.

As a soon-to-be geezer, I can tell you one thing for certain: Age is not “just a number.” Age is a series of numbers, strung relentlessly end-to-end over the course of years, 57 in my case, each number 365 days larger than the one preceding it. 

The bigger the number, the older you are. That’s the way it works and nobody’s fooling anybody by pretending things are any different.

Fortunately (!!!blatant sexist remark alert!!!), I’m a man. Because I’m a man, it matters less that I’m older than dirt. Don’t ask me why; I did not make up the rules, but I refuse to pretend they don’t exist.

Women are expected to stay young and beautiful forever. Men, on the other hand, are allowed to get wrinkly, bald, grey … hell, they can even start smelling bad, yet still be considered attractive and desirable.

It isn’t fair, not by a long shot. But since I’m a man, and a selfish, narcissistic one at that, I will not complain about it here.

Even with the gender advantage, however, getting older is not something I would do were I given another option. An option other than death, I mean.

If I could buy a pill that would keep me forever young, I’d be at the pharmacy right now picking up my prescription rather than here at the office writing this column.

Oh, I don’t mind aging; at least not so far. I can still ride my bicycle 50 miles without breaking a sweat, I take stairs two at a time, I even have as much hair now as I did on my 18th birthday; more, if you count the carpet growing on my back.

So things could be worse.

I don’t FEEL old. I don’t even LOOK particularly old, at least I don’t think I do. It’s impossible to be objective about stuff like that. If I DO look old, nobody tell me, please. I’m perfectly happy living in my little delusional bubble and no infusion of pesky reality is going to make me any happier.

Still, it’s only a matter of time. Time’s inexorable march will eventually catch up with me. In due course, I’ll be not only older, but old. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

I could jog, I suppose, or eat salads instead of triple bacon burgers, but even then I’d only be postponing the inevitable. And at the end of it all, I still die.

It hardly seems worth the bother.

Even with all the medical and technological breakthroughs that continually come our way, it’s still likely my life is at least half over. But if the second half turns out to be anywhere near as wonderful as the first has been, I got nothin’ to complain about.

Besides, you’re only as old as you feel, and I hear 60 is the new 40.

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