I’m afraid of what I may be doing to international relations and Boise, Idaho

 A couple weeks ago I told you about my new job, writing horoscopes for an English language newspaper in Moscow, Russia. Yes, really. Turns out the editor there liked my work so well he asked me if I’d also be willing to write horoscopes geared toward romance and business, along with a monthly “overview” horoscope. He represents several publishing concerns, apparently, all of which have readers who can’t make life decisions without a little help from the stars (not Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but Neptune, Mars and so on, though they’re not stars, but planets—even I know that much, but I digress).

After stressing to the editor yet again that I know absolutely nothing about astrology other than that there are twelve months in the year and a sign to accompany each, I agreed to take on the job.

How? you may ask. How can someone who knows nothing about astrology accurately predict the future of 10 million Muscovites? The short answer is: I make stuff up.

Are you a Pisces? Romance will blossom in August! Aquarius? Keep your eye on financial matters and expect a long trip in your near future. Leo? Too late, you will regret a recent, really, really bad decision. (My ex-girlfriend is a Leo, so I’m afraid all news is bad for the poor suckers in Moscow born under that sign, at least for a while.)

When I first started writing these things, I took it pretty lightly. I mean, I don’t believe in all this astrology hoo-hah, surely others don’t either, right?

Wrong.

Turns out some folks believe in astrology the way I believe in beer and Mexican food; it’s a religion. I discovered this fact recently after telling my favorite waitress, Crystal, about my new gig.

“You really write horoscopes?” Crystal enthused. Crystal is cute, half my age, and was obviously impressed, so I pretended it was a big deal.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, the picture of nonchalance. “For a big publishing concern in Moscow.” Now, I have no idea if any of those Moscow papers for which I’m writing has a million readers or seven. Point is, neither does Crystal.

“I’m a Virgo,” Crystal said, pushing her long, blond hair behind one ear. “What’s going to happen to me next week?”

“Um,” I said, “I dunno.”

“C’mon,” Crystal said. “You can tell me.”

“No. I mean, I really don’t know. I make it all up.”

“Ri-ight,” Crystal said. “You’re not supposed to say anything until it’s been published, is that it?”

“No, I mean I really make it up. It’s all fake.”

Crystal looked suddenly worried. “Do they all do that?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m the only astrologer I’ve ever met.”

Crystal took my order, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was thinking about the plans she’d made for the upcoming weeks; plans predicated on the alleged accuracy of whichever horoscope she peruses every night.

And so, like Crystal, I’m worried, but for a different reason. Somewhere in Moscow, there is somebody reading the nonsense I’m spewing forth each month and imbuing it with a validity and accuracy it does not in any way, shape or form possess. Someone is making life decisions based on my off the cuff BS!

Someone is leaving his wife. Someone is buying stock in K-Mart. Someone is selling everything he owns and embarking on a cross-country bicycle trip (a Sagittarius, like me. Seemed like a good idea when I was writing the prediction, but I was drinking beer and eating Mexican food at the time).

What really scares me is that somewhere, somewhere in the Russian countryside, a lone soldier, a Leo like my ex-girlfriend, is sitting in a near-defunct, Cold War era missile silo, reading a newspaper. He’s sitting on 300 megatons of radioactive death, targeted at Boise, Idaho. His horoscope reads, “Now’s the time to just go ahead and do it! Your life stinks anyway. What have you got to lose?”

I’m really hoping he’s not a true believer.

Mike Taylor’s new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com or in ebook format from Barnes and Noble, Borders and other online booksellers. Email Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

I’m gonna miss ya brother, I really am

Mache always had a fine ride. Cadillacs, Buicks, Mercedes; Mache drove ‘em all.

I have no idea how he managed to afford them. He blew saxophone and did occasional contracting jobs. That’s it.

He was a monster horn man and had performed with B.B. King, Sam Cooke and a host of other luminaries from the worlds of blues, soul and jazz. By the time he started working with my band, The Guinness Brothers, his glory days were long behind him.

Some guys might begrudge trading stadium audiences for roadhouse bars, but not Mache. He played every gig as if it were Carnegie Hall.

In addition to driving nice cars, Mache always dressed to the nines. Whether in a three-piece sharkskin suit or a silk dashiki, Mache looked like he’d stepped off the pages of Essence magazine.

And he didn’t just look cool; Mache was cool. He was the cat we all wanted to be when we grew up.

He wasn’t perfect. He was late to every other show and no amount of yelling, pleading, or docking of his paycheck would change that. After a few years I gave up and hired a second horn player so we’d have at least some brass on stage for the first set.

But back to the cars. Mache drove like a maniac. How he managed to be late for so many gigs when he never drove under 100 mph is a mystery. He must have been doing at least that the night he flew off the road, down a culvert and into somebody’s front yard.

I was driving home from a lakeshore show. Sleet fell from a turbulent sky turning the roads slicker than a hockey rink.

I was putzing along at 25 when Mache’s black Mercedes blew by me in a blur of chrome, his car disappearing into the gloom ahead. I arrived at the next intersection and there was Mache, slumping in the yard by his car, looking for all the world as if he was surprised by its current location.

I pulled over and got out.

“Need some help?” I asked.

“My car went off the road,” he said. “This intersection needs better lighting.”

“Or you need to stop driving like a fighter pilot on crack,” I said.

The car was thoroughly stuck in the damp earth and we were anxious to extract it before police arrived. Mache and police were not a good mix at the best of times.

Just then, three pickup trucks thundered up. Bright lights flooded the area as a dozen good ‘ol boys piled out. They were all at various stages of inebriation and hoping for a cute damsel in distress whom they could rescue and subsequently ply with warm Budweiser.

They were not happy when Mache stepped into the light. In case you didn’t get the message from the Essence and dashiki references, Mache was African American.

But it was too late. They had stopped. They had winches. And it was after all the ‘90s, and even rednecks weren’t entirely immune to the social changes of the 1960s. Grumbling good-naturedly, they hooked the Mercedes to a winch and proceeded to pull the Mercedes’ bumper off. It was at this point Mache began giving the boys holy hell in no uncertain terms.

Now, these guys were big. They were drunk. They were standing in the sleet, getting far more sober than they wanted to be. And they did not appear to be overly affectionate toward people of color, especially people of color who kept calling them impolite names. I considered slipping quietly away while they erected the burning cross on the front lawn, but knew my liberal white guilt would haunt me forever if I did.

Instead, I did my best to shut Mache up and get between him and the local chapter of the David Allan Coe fan club. Eventually, they pulled his Mercedes back onto the pavement and threw the broken bumper in his truck.

They drove off in a cloud of diesel fumes and I felt glad to be alive. Mache took it all in stride. I hopped in my own car and rolled away at a snail’s pace. A minute later the Mercedes shot past me, doing 75 and fish-tailing like mad. Mache lived life on his own terms, terms that didn’t always make sense to everybody else. I guess I can honestly say I loved him.

Mache died Sunday. He played a show in Grand Rapids Saturday night, went home and passed in his sleep. He was a good man, a good friend. I won’t see his like again in my lifetime.

Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com

I can see the future and it has me in it, making a quick buck

I found another part-time job. Since I haven’t been able to track down a full-time job, a bunch of part-time gigs is what I’m left with. But that’s OK; this particular job is actually fun.

I am now—brace yourself—an astrologer. Or astrologist? Astrologian? Since it’s turning a paycheck, I should probably at least research the topic enough that I know what I’m called.

Other than “fraud,” I mean.

Now, if you’re one of those folks who can’t get out of bed in the morning without first checking your horoscope, don’t panic; you’re never going to read my dubious astrological predictions. Not unless you go to Moscow, as in Russia. That’s where my horoscope column is running.

That’s right, I can’t find a writing gig in the United States, but I’m about to become the Next Big Thing in the former Soviet Union. And to think I was once worried these folks were going to drop atomic bombs on me!

I got the job online, by sending in a writing sample to a Russian guy with the cool name of Vladmir Aleksander. In addition to sharing a name with the infamous Balkan ruler credited with starting the Dracula myth, Vlad also publishes an English language newspaper in Moscow. And he’s decided to add an astrological forecast to the paper’s lineup.

I explained to Vlad up front that I know diddly about astrology. I don’t know if Pices is compatible with Leo or whether either does well when paired off with Taurus. The little I do know about astrology I learned from that Fifth Dimension song Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In, and they don’t really go into too much detail there.

Vlad said he didn’t care.

“But comrade,” I responded, trying to get into the spirit of international relations but coming off like an extra in an old James Bond movie. “How will I be able to write horoscope predictions when I know nothing about astrology?”

“Make something up,” Vlad said. “Pretend you’re writing for Pravda.” (Pravda was the “official” newspaper of the Soviet Union and according to Vladmir, was almost wholly fictional during that time.)

So I made something up. I warned Sagittarians to avoid fried foods, told Capricorns that romance was in store for the evening, admonished Leos to stop being selfish and manipulative (my ex-girlfriend is a Leo and I’m still bitter!), and suggested to Cancers that this might be a good time to quit smoking. (I mean, just consider the name of their astrological sign! Duh!)

Oh, I plan to bone up on astrology, if for no other reason than that my columns will seem more plausible to people who buy into this hooey. But at best, it’s like hiring an atheist to write for the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.

Still, a paycheck is a paycheck. And if my Russian brethren are willing to fork over the rubles, I’ll don a turban once a week and predict the future.

Don’t blame me. As a Sagittarian, my sense of ethics is somewhat underdeveloped.

Mike Taylor’s book, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com or in eBook format from Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon, and other online booksellers.

If this keeps up, I'll know everything or work construction

This is a weird time to be a writer. For one thing, there are only seven people left in the world who remember how to read (if you're reading this you're one of ‘em). Because of this sad fact, most print media from newspapers to books to magazines are being forced to make painful cuts, and by painful cuts, I mean the jobs of schmucks like me.

Granted, this is really only painful to schmucks like me, but still...have a little empathy, man! Do you have any idea how hard it is to find work on a construction crew when your job skills are fast typing and good spelling? These are abilities not necessarily held in high regard by the sort of guys who pound nails for a living.

And those are the guys who are making a living. Some of them, at least.  This is the era of the manly man, the man who is good with his hands, the man who can turn a pile of logs into beautiful kitchen cabinets, then break for lunch before putting up the pole barn.

This economy simply won't support guys like me--artsy fartsy types accustomed to putting in their “hard day's work” from the confines of a cushy, air-conditioned office while complaining about things like ergonomically incorrect office chairs and the horrors of carpal tunnel syndrome. We're useful when everyone has a pocketful of disposable income and time on their hands. People (despite what I said about the seven folks in paragraph one) like to read and be entertained. But let’s be real; when times get hard we’re easy enough to live without.

Now, I know there are unemployed construction workers out there who are just about ready to crush my skull like a Faberge egg (in part, because I'm a man who knows what a Faberge egg is). My buddy Calvin works construction and is pretty good at it, from what I've heard. Even he has been forced to take work that is, for lack of a better term, beneath his skill set.

In other words, things are tough all over. I know this. But I'm a writer, so if it's all the same to you, I'll whine about what I know.

Not that I'm really whining this week. Really. Because I've discovered an untapped market for writers. Really, again. My daughter turned me on to it; it's an online clearing house for writers and people who need writers. Mostly, they need writers to put together lame-o fake blog entries on teen angst and positive reviews of movies nobody would ever want to see. Even I am not desperate enough to take part in that debacle. Unless the money was really good, which it is not.

But I did manage to land an ongoing gig writing 500-word essays on a variety of topics. It ain’t tough. They must be well-written, accurate and—here’s the part I have trouble with--well-researched. However, since my “boss” is in Sri Lanka somewhere and by all indications speaks English only haltingly, I figure the occasional error (like saying a town in Idaho has 4,000 residents instead of 400,000) may go unnoticed. That's my hope anyway, because frankly, research is a drag and takes a lot of time away from my X-Files marathon on Netflix.

In the past week I've written essays on globalization, vacationing in Hawaii, kung-fu, Peruvian exports (more than flute bands and llama wool mittens, as it turns out), the differences between adjectives and adverbs, the Republican Party, technology used in WWII communications, and a piece titled “Whatever Happened to Annette Funicello?”

If this keeps up, in a couple years I'll possess more useless information than Wikipedia. This I plan to parley into a fortune on the game show Jeopardy. If that doesn't work out, maybe I can land a job doing construction with my buddy Calvin.

Mike's new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available online at mtrealitycheck.com. The ebook version is available at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon and other online booksellers. Email Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Don't be afraid to stand up to insulting forms!

Filling out forms has become increasingly difficult these past few years. Difficult, and insulting.

Oh, the insult is subtle and easily deniable should anyone call the form-makers to task on the matter, but make no mistake, the insult is there.

Most folks encounter their first form in elementary school. These forms are simple: name, age, names of parents, maybe address and phone number. At age eight or nine, that's all you're expected to know.

Forms don't start getting really ugly until your freshman year of high school. That's when they start asking questions about your hopes, dreams, goals and aspirations. They still want your parents' names and phone numbers, but they're digging deeper now, trying to get to the "real you." They do this so the school's guidance counselor can help you choose the right classes, career, girlfriend and so on.

College forms are worse still, especially those pertaining to financial aid.  Mine were, at least. They were so complex I never realized I could have purchased a nice home in Beverly Hills for less money than I borrowed on my student loans. This fact became apparent about six months after graduation, when the student loan people showed up at my front door wearing brass knuckles and carrying a bucket full of wet cement.

Fortunately, my brilliant academic career landed me a job as a janitor, so I was able to pay off those loans in no time...about two months before my youngest child graduated high school.

The forms I filled out in the Air Force also were confusing, especially the one I filled out at the recruitment office. Turns out they can fit quite a bit of stuff in that small print at the end of the 20-page document, stuff they would really rather you not read.

But I'm digressing here, as I usually do. The point I was trying to make somewhere six or seven paragraphs back is this: the forms I filled out in the past, though sometimes arcane and complicated, were at least not insulting. The forms I've filled out lately, all online now, are. Insulting, I mean.

How are the insulting? Well, like I said, it's subtle. The questions they're asking, I no longer like to answer. For instance, when I was 26, back during the Renaissance, I didn't mind listing my age. These days I do.

I'm not ashamed of my geriatric predilection, but online forms always use those pull-down menus. A lot of time can pass between the instant I click on the "year" box and the moment it scrolls down to my birth year. Along the way, the font generally changes from a clean sans serif to Olde English; a font the form-makers think will be more familiar to folks of a certain age. The typeface also gets larger, ostensibly to make it easier for geezers to see.

See? Insulting, right?

I recently filled out a form on which they asked not only if I was divorced, but how many times I had been married. Since the form offered room for only a single digit, I was forced to fudge the facts a bit here.

Now I'm flying solo (yes, again), so I recently filled out a couple forms at social networking sites in a half-hearted attempt to find Miss Right. These sites require information I usually don't share with a woman until after our fifth anniversary. The form-makers think I should spill my guts before the first date.

I didn't. Sometimes a blank space is infinitely preferable to anything one might fill it with. I refuse to be bossed around by an insulting form.

Mike Taylor's new book Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com and in eReader format at Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other online booksellers. Email Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

There has always been a 'Facebook'

I read another article yesterday about how the world is going to h-e-double-toothpicks because of Facebook. Facebook, the writer implied, is slowly sapping today's youth of the ability to think critically, maintain a modicum of decorum, and tell the difference between good writing and terrible.

It's doing the same thing to old people, but at a slower pace and we're a lost cause anyway; best to focus on the youth. They're the ones who must finish the job we started, that of mucking up the planet and getting aged Hollywood actors elected to high governmental office.

At any rate, aside from all that other stuff, the writer's main concern was privacy, or rather the lack of it. Facebook, he said, is filled with posts containing information most people should probably keep to themselves; everything from personal banking information to the addresses of teenage daughters.

He also complained briefly about the sort of people who leave posts like, "Just had roast beef for supper! Yum, yum!" but we all complain about that. Well, everybody but the roast beef posters. You know who you are.

The point is (I'm sure there was one here somewhere) every article I read comes at the issue as if this is a new phenomenon, something intrinsically tied to the 21st Century, high-speed wifi and computerized data collection techniques. It's not. The problem is as old as communication itself.

From the moment a caveman first slapped two rocks together to warn his buddy on the other side of the valley about the presence of a nearby sabertooth tiger, somebody has been listening in.

When I was a kid, just shortly after the above-mentioned Paleolithic epoch, the most modern device in any American home, aside from the television, was the telephone. It was big, black, rotary-dialed, built like a tank and almost as attractive. Not everyone in the neighborhood had one; they were still considered by some to be a pricey luxury.

The neighbors who didn't have a phone would frequently borrow the phone of a neighbor who did; in these cases, privacy was neither expected nor granted.

My family's phone was serviced by something called a "party line," the Facebook of its day. The phrase party line was entirely appropriate because as soon as you picked up the phone, you could be sure Mrs. Kowalski, the little old lady from down the street who shared the same party line, would quietly lift her receiver and join the party, albeit surreptitiously.

If you discussed anything remotely personal, like, say, the fact you had roast beef for supper and it was yum yum, you could be certain Mrs. Kowalski would gleefully spread the news to the whole neighborhood before sundown.

During my rare phone calls, I would confess to friends regarding gruesome murders I had not committed just to add a little spice to Mrs. Kowalski's otherwise humdrum life. I sometimes claimed to have buried the bodies next to the begonias in her garden.

I'm not singling Mrs. Kowalski out here; both my sisters also listened in on our neighbor's conversations. There were four or five families on our party line and none of us had secrets from any of the others. Just like with Facebook, everybody knew everybody else's business.

So do I worry when I post marginally personal stuff on Facebook? Not really. I grew up without privacy and have learned to get along without it.

I'm just sorry Mrs. Kowalski passed years before the first Commodore 64 rolled off the assembly line and decades before anyone had heard of a social network. She would have loved this stuff. She was a woman who cared deeply about your roast beef supper.

Mike Taylor's new paperback, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available at mtrealitycheck.com and in eBook format at Barnes & Noble, Borders Books and most major online booksellers. Email the author at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Say it loud, I play tennis and I’m proud

It drove me crazy all last summer that James Brown, the Godfather of Soul and one of my personal heroes, is playing tennis on the side of my optometrist’s office.  Even in his younger days, when he could dance rings around Baryshnikov while screaming “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!” in a voice that could startle Helen Keller, I never imagined James on a tennis court.  He did not seem the sort of man who would be comfortable saying, “That’s love-16 Muffy!”

Not my hero.

But there he was, larger than life, featured prominently in the House of Optical mural, right between Elvis and Elton.  John Belushi, Larry King, Buddy Holly and several other glasses-wearing celebrities also are pictured there.

Elvis and Elton are both holding microphones, John Belushi a case containing (presumably) Elwood’s harmonicas, Benny Goodman sports his clarinet and George Burns a cigar.  Everybody, everybody except my hero, is shown doing the thing they do, or did, best; the thing most people think of first when considering the aforementioned celebrities.

But not James.  James is depicted playing tennis. They might as well have painted him with a spatula in one hand and a copy of “A Brief History of Time” in the other.  It made less sense than a Dali painting.  And like I said, it made me crazy all last summer.

Part of the reason it got on my nerves is that I rode past there on my bicycle three, sometimes four times a day.  I had a lot of time to kill and I spent much of it riding bike.  The terrain is mostly flat around Clawson so a four-hour ride isn’t especially taxing and it kept me from thinking about how brutally unkind fate had been to me during the previous year.  (Yes, I am a whiner of epic, and often dramatic, proportions.)

At any rate, in addition to losing my wife, house and job, I was slowly losing my mind, in large part because of that damnable mural!  I did a little research (five minutes online), checking to see if James had ever made a name for himself on the tennis court, but could find nothing.

The mystery haunted me.  James would appear in my dreams hoisting a tennis racket and drinking a glass of carrot juice at an expensive country club.  When he spoke he sounded like Dick Cavett and I would wake up screaming.

Then summer faded to fall and winter, bike season ended and the problem slowly faded from my mind.  It wasn’t until mid-winter, while being examined for new contact lenses at House of Optical, that I thought to ask about it.

“James Brown’s not in that mural,” the doctor said.

“Yes he is,” I said.  “But he’s holding a tennis racket, so most people probably don’t recognize him.”

 At this point the doctor gave me a look indicating poor eyesight was likely the least of my problems.  “That’s Billie Jean King,” he said.

I checked the mural again before driving away.  The doctor was right, it is Billie Jean King, though to be fair, she is sporting a tan that would make George Hamilton jealous.  And she does look a little like James Brown!  Google it, or check out the photos on my blog, then tell me I’m wrong.

Say it loud! It’s love-16 and I’m proud.

Mike Taylor’s new paperback, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com. The eBook version can be found online at Barnes & Noble, Border’s, and other major booksellers. More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.