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. 

It’s true; I was once among the ‘Children of the Corn’

A while back I wrote a column detailing the nefarious criminal activities of my youth; namely, the theft from Cook’s Five and Dime of a penlight and two Spiderman comics. I was in fourth grade.

Apprehended by store security, I was turned over to the tender mercies of my old man. He didn’t ask me why I did it, didn’t make an appointment for me to see a counselor, didn’t ask a pediatrician to prescribe Ritalin. He did not wail and gnash his teeth, wondering where he and my mother had gone wrong.

He dragged me home and walloped the portions of my body usually associated with sitting until I no longer could. I did not steal again.

Except once.

It was the August following my foiled “flashlight caper.” I was as old as a kid is in fifth grade—a kid who flunked fourth grade the first time around, I mean.

My family, the whole troupe, was visiting my Grandma Seeley’s house, what we at the time called “the farmhouse,” despite the lack of an attached farm. Grandma’s house was sort of out in the country—what we city kids thought of as the country, anyway.

The visit followed the usual Sunday afternoon custom: mom and grandma in the kitchen putting up a big picnic lunch; dad, grandpa and Uncle Ray sitting around the back yard drinking tea, beer or whiskey; sisters and cousins pulling weeds from grandmother’s garden while my brothers foraged for nubbly toads beneath the rhubarb plants crowding thick along the side of the house.

I spent the afternoon as I often did, tramping through the nearby woods, carrying an old pillowcase in which to stash interesting pine cones, sparrow skulls or caterpillars. I was only ten minutes into my hike when the woods petered out and something I had never before imagined unfolded like a green and gold curtain before my eyes: an entire field full of corn, just growing wild!

I had always assumed corn was manufactured pretty much like everything else—in a Newark factory or possibly somewhere in Japan. To find it—and in such abundance, just growing out of the ground—well...I immediately set about filling the pillowcase with ear after ear of the free corn.

The scant biceps on my skinny arms stood out as I lugged the pillowcase back to the house.

There, to my surprise and dismay, I was chastised mightily for perpetrating such a heinous transgression and lectured on the dangers inherent in stealing from farmers. (It turns out farmers grow corn on purpose with the intent of selling it.) I was warned about the horrific afterlife awaiting those who break the Seventh Commandment. I was confined to the backyard for the rest of the day, lest I be tempted to appropriate any other “free” stuff I might find lying about.

But my grandmother, ever the pragmatist and not particularly concerned about what the Pope might have to say on the subject, stripped and boiled the corn anyway. The entire family partook of the delectable fruits of my misdemeanor, thereby sending a mixed message and confusing me unto this very day.

I still can’t pass a supermarket bin full of corn without wishing I had a pillowcase.

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