Arlo’s songwriting is better than his pinball

Arlo Guthrie is one cool guy.

How could I, a nobody from nowhere, possibly know this about Arlo? Because I once played pinball with the man.

That’s right, baby, me and Arlo, mano-a-mano.

But before we begin, some explanation for our younger readers is in order: Arlo Guthrie was (and still is) a folk singer whose heyday was the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He’s best known for the song, “City of New Orleans” and the incredibly dated hippie film, “Alice’s Restaurant.” He’s also the son of folk legend Woody Guthrie, who wrote — among other things — “This Land is Your Land,” which still appears in many elementary school songbooks.

As for pinball, it’s a game people played before the invention of Pong, which is a game people played before the invention of Atari, which preceded Nintendo, which preceded … look, at some point, junior, you’re just going to have to Google this stuff for yourself.

I met Arlo in the fall of 1976 or ’77, if I’m remembering correctly, which at this point in my life is no longer a sure bet.

I knew somebody big was in town when I pulled into the Holiday Inn. At the back of the hotel’s parking lot was the sort of tour bus only rock stars rent, the legend “American Rock Tours” stenciled on its gleaming chrome side panels.

My own band’s “tour bus,” a decrepit step-van with balding tires and headlights held in place with duct tape, lumbered in beside it. Usually we slept in the van or a hotel of far less repute than Detroit’s finest Holiday Inn, but the club owner at the place we were playing that night had arranged for rooms. A Holiday Inn, for myself and my three band-mates, represented the very height of luxury.

We oohed and ah’ed over the big act’s tour bus, dreaming of the day when we, too, would be Big Stars. The fact we had almost no talent did nothing to temper our ambition. We had long hair, we had guitars. The talent, we figured, could be picked up along the way.

The counter clerk eyed us dubiously (and no doubt smelled us even more dubiously) as we checked in. Nobody offered to carry our bags to our room, but since none of us had ever stayed at a hotel where that sort of thing happens, we didn’t notice.

We lay around our two rooms for a half-hour or so, relishing the fact we had beds to sleep in, beds with clean sheets! But for me the novelty soon wore off and I went in search of something with which to kill a few hours before that evening’s gig.

I found what I was looking for in the swimming pool area — two old pinball machines, both featuring garish depictions of insanely voluptuous blondes in various stages of undress. A scruffy-looking guy in torn jeans and a concert T-shirt was playing on one; I slipped a quarter into the free machine next to it.

Amid the bings, bongs and flashing lights I began to realize the guy on the next machine looked familiar. It took me a minute, but eventually it came to me.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re Arlo Guthrie.”

“I know,” he said.

“I’ve worn the grooves off ‘Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys,’” I said, referring to his album of a few years earlier.

“Thanks, man,” he said. “Wanna play?”

Arlo supplied the quarters for the next half-hour, which I thought was particularly cool considering he was a big star and I was, well, not. I told him I liked “City of New Orleans,” but thought his best tunes were among the album cuts that never got much airplay. Arlo agreed, but admitted he was happy to cash the checks “City of New Orleans” brought in, though he hadn’t written that song himself.

Arlo was (and is) a far better musician and songwriter than I am (or will ever be), but with regard to pinball, I beat him four games out of five. He was a gracious loser. It made me glad I had purchased most of his records.

We talked music for a while, sharing stories of life on the road. Arlo asked me about my little band just as if we were equals to his world-class retinue, which we were not. Eventually, we parted ways, Arlo to headline at Pine Knob, me to play a 75-seat dive along a seedy section of Woodward Avenue.

But for that half hour, in the pool room of a Detroit Holiday Inn, we were just a couple guys talking music and playing pinball. Like I said, Arlo is cool. And if he ever wants a rematch, I’m willing to meet him at the Holiday Inn pool room of his choice, provided he brings the quarters.

More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.  Buy my book!!  Less than eight lousy bucks on Amazon, it's called "Looking at the Pint Half Full" and it's probably better than you think it's going to be.

Cockroaches are the key to my early retirement

I wonder if Americans seem as bizarre to the Chinese as they sometimes seem to us. Probably. After all, we gave the world Miley Cyrus, genetically “enhanced” crops and corporate-owned government; I guess I don’t really wonder after all.

We Americans are weird. But not as weird as the Chinese.

The Chinese have had centuries to fine-tune their weirdness. Their civilization is older by far. The Chinese developed a lunar calendar and fireworks thousands of years before our ancestors crossed the ocean, stole this country from its rightful owners, and then enacted strict immigration laws to keep everybody else out.

Change comes only slowly to China and traditions from ancient times linger, like the smell of last night’s pan-fried calamari.

So it’s little wonder the Chinese — at least some of them — believe cockroaches slow down the aging process. Keep in mind, these are the same folks who believe powdered rhino horn makes them irresistible to the fairer sex and produces Spiderman-like powers in the sack.

I’m not trying to make fun of Chinese culture here; we Americans have our own cultural crosses to bear (see Miley Cyrus, above). I’m just pointing out they are at least as weird as we are.

And the cockroach thing … I mean, really? Sure, after the next Big Nuclear War, only cockroaches and personal injury attorneys (kind of redundant, really) will still be here. But will eating one (a cockroach, not an attorney) prolong life? And even if it will, are those extra few years worth dining regularly on filet of bug?

The Chinese think so. In China, roaches are big business.

“Prepared” cockroaches in China sell for $89 per pound. By prepared, I mean crushed into cockroach powder. I don’t know if the Chinese sprinkle this on breakfast cereal, snort it, or toss it into the air like fairy dust at birthday parties; regardless, it’s yucky.

Cockroaches are, after all … well … cockroaches! Eek! Ick! Like that. They’re worse than “American Idol,” worse than Miley Cyrus. Not worse than personal injury attorneys, but still, pretty bad.

Yet in China, actual farms have been constructed — cockroach farms! They’re breeding cockroaches on purpose!

It would probably be cheaper to import them from New Jersey or Detroit, where free-roaming cockroaches may be found in abundance, but the Chinese like doing things themselves. So they have formed the Sichuan Treasure Cockroach Farming Cooperative, and no, I am not making this up. Cockroach. Farm. Two words I never thought I would see together.

I suspect the “science” behind cockroach ingestion and its alleged affects on human longevity is much like the science behind astrology, racism and Fox news; it’s just something people too lazy to think for themselves accept as true.

Seems silly to me, but who am I to judge? And it has me wondering: Is the downtown Detroit apartment I lived in back in my college days still available? If so, I could rent it, set up a few roach traps and — selling to the Chinese at $89 per pound — I could retire comfortably within a few years.

It’s all about understanding the global market, folks, and being willing to squish a few bugs.

More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

This one may not make you lol, but you could at least :)

A year or two back I wrote a column detailing the myriad ways in which I hate all the smileys, acronyms, abbreviations and sophomoric nomenclature that accompanies texting.

I thought, at the time, that terms like “lol” and “omg” were sounding the death knell for the English language. 

Look, I’m not a member of the language police and have zero tolerance for the Grammar Gestapo-types who can’t see beyond the basic rules of punctuation they learned in eighth grade. Sometimes, being ungrammatical is just the right thing to do. Ask anyone who does it for a living.

But even my lackadaisical attitude toward the language was put to the test when texting first became a “thing.” I’ll admit I was a little horrified when texting shortcuts started finding their way into emails, newspaper advertising and even the seven or eight actual paper and ink letters still written and mailed in the U.S. each year.

Since then, “textease” has wormed its way into virtually every avenue of communication. But I no longer mind. Writing “lol” really is a lot easier than typing, “My goodness! Your astute comment was so amusing that I simply cannot help but laugh out loud!”

I like easy.

Any of my ex-wives will be happy to tell you: I am the poster child for doing things the easy way. In fact, if a thing cannot be done easily, chances are I will not do it. I lack ambition, direction, discipline and a few other things my father undoubtedly pointed out after I had stopped listening sometime around my 14th birthday.

The point is, once I realized textease is easier than boring old English, I was more than happy to jump on board. What little regard I still had for good grammar went right out the window.

Before I knew it, I was peppering my communiques with things like :), lol, rotfl, omg and @. The first time I appended a :) to a text to my daughter (who, as far as I know, has completely lost the ability to hold a pen or speak aloud into a telephone) she responded with, “OMG dad! I can’t believe YOU used a smiley!!! LOL!!!” I’d never seen her so excited. Based on her response, you would think I had just demonstrated the ability to fluently converse in Sanskrit. 

From that point on, I was a convert. In fact, the only problem I still have with textease is that there simply isn’t enough of it. LOL, for instance. I see that one used all the time, but almost never in circumstances where someone would actually be laughing out loud. “I forgot to buy milk today! LOL!” Baloney! Nobody laughs out loud because he forgot to buy milk, not unless he’s an idiot.

Obviously, we need “shades” of lol. CQ, maybe, for Chuckling Quietly. SW, for Smiling Wryly. OPTLAYSJ, for Only Pretending To Laugh At Your Stupid Joke. Stuff like that.

Because of my aforementioned laziness, I won’t be the one compiling this textease dictionary, but someone should.

Once the language is fully developed, it could replace English altogether, save everyone a great deal of time and sound more modern in the process. Take the following example: “Yr 0oo0 have _ @ [] wood, @#$!! grn P* (_). M(o) are _@ n2 {} mud.”

That sounds SO much better than Yeats’ clumsy attempt at poetry: “Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing, My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”

Or maybe it doesn’t sound better. With all the lol I’ve been doing lately, it’s possible I’ve lost my objectivity. Oh, well, I’m sure it’ll all work out gr8! ;)

Mike Taylor’s ebook, “Looking at the Pint Half Full,” is available at Amazon.com. More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

Sometimes, life gives us more than we can bear

Every year around this time I remember how glad I am to be alive. Even with the grim knowledge that winter is on its way, I’m happy to simply be drawing breath.

Because 39 years ago a bear almost ate me.

Believe me, when you’ve been almost eaten by a bear, every day after seems a blessing.

I was just a kid, 17 and therefore fairly bursting with the assurance of my own immortality. I was young and strong; death — or even serious injury — was a faint shadow lurking at the periphery of my awareness, something that happened to other people, those whose lives were less charmed than my own, those who had not been charged with my unique manifest destiny.

 Armed with this mindless (and baseless) confidence, I ventured into the woods. Like Robert Frost, I took the road less travelled by. In fact, in late October, 1976, the road I took was travelled not at all.

I picked up the Bruce Trail near Tobermory, Ontario and — carrying only what would fit in my battered Kelty backpack — I headed south along the trail with the intent of going as far I could go in seven days, and then hiking back.

I don’t know what it’s like now, but at the time, the Bruce Trail wended it’s through nearly 900 kilometers of Canada’s most beautiful, uncompromising terrain, from north of Tobermory to the southern edge of Lake Ontario. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, but it was, make no mistake, what even hardcore backpackers think of as “the wild.” 

I had heard that during the summer months, the trail is heavily travelled by hikers and nature lovers of all stripes, but in October, I was pretty much it.

On my fourth day out as the sun was setting, I made camp. I was an experienced hiker and knew enough to hang my backpack from a tree branch to keep the critters away from my food and clean underwear. (I’m kidding; I was 17; I didn’t own any clean underwear.)

But after pegging out my tiny “bug” tent, I hung my pack from a nearby branch anyway. I built a small campfire and boiled up more Cup-a-Soup. These were the days before every grocery carried a full line of freeze-dried, gourmet “camping food.” Cup-a-Soup came in small, lightweight envelopes and could be reconstituted with water straight out of Nottawasaga Bay, as long as you boiled it first. Sure, it tasted like something that had been sweat off the back of a dyspeptic gorilla, but it was edible and easy to carry.

Maybe it was the smell of the soup cooking that attracted the bears, a mama and at least two cubs; I’ll never know for sure.

After washing up, I snuggled into my goose down mummy bag, zipped closed the tent and curled up with my machete. I had never used the machete for anything but cutting firewood, but having it beside me was somehow comforting. I dozed. 

The snuffling sound woke me. Outside, a full moon bathed the forest in a flaxen haze. Shadows traversed the semi-transparent, orange nylon surface of my tent. One of those shadows was big. Real big.

My machete suddenly felt about as formidable as a moist Q-tip.

Other shadows passed, smaller than the first, though still big enough to intimidate by the light of this Hunter’s Moon.

The shadows were accompanied by a good deal of snuffling, growling and noises that were, to my city-bred ears, all but unidentifiable. I did, however, recognize the sound of my backpack being torn from the tree limb and shredded like so much wet newspaper.

Bears, it turns out, can climb trees.

I considered exiting the tent, machete in hand with the intent of making a lot of noise and scaring the bears away from my small store of foodstuffs. Then I thought about how nice it would be to live until my 18th birthday and huddled further into my bag instead. I was not, I decided, going to offer myself as the main course to the bear’s Cup-a-Soup appetizer.

An hour or so later, having eaten my Cup-a-Soup, envelopes and all, the Three Bears padded back into the forest. It was at least another hour before I screwed up my courage to the point I dared leave the tent.

My pack lay in tatters; even the aluminum frame had been bent until it was virtually useless. My soup, the little bit of jerky and the crackers I had been carrying were now inside the bears. I, thankfully, was not.

I was camped between Wiarton and Owen Sound, a day’s hike in either direction. I had no food. And unlike the present, back then I did not have large fat reserves to call upon in times of famine.

Eventually, I hobbled into Owen Sound, the broken remains of my pack, sleeping bag and tent bungeed together like something one might find tied to the end of a hobo’s stick.

But then, like now, I was simply glad to be alive.

More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com. Email Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.