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.

Just how much safety can one small, blonde head handle?

Nobody has ever accused me of taking the safe road. In my youth, I was the rotten kid from down the block who always managed to talk your otherwise rational son into doing something a) dangerous, b) stupid, or c) mildly illegal. I wasn’t a bad kid, not really; I was just sort of...careless.

For instance, I once convinced my buddy Dale that we should, on the spur of the moment, hitchhike to Chicago. We were 17. We had no money, no parental permission and no idea what we were going to do once we arrived in the Windy City. And yet, one summer’s night we found ourselves on US 131 with our thumbs out, waiting for a ride from someone we fervently hoped would not be a serial killer.

Another time my friends and I hiked across the Anne Street Bridge; we crossed beneath the bridge, actually, by clinging precariously to the latticework of girders 50 feet above the Grand River, which at that time of year (January) was nearly frozen over. A fall would have proved fatal. But there we were, risking life and limb simply because it seemed to me a good idea at the time.

My lack of self-preservation skills followed me into adulthood. Over the years (and against the advice of experts) I frequented tanning salons, drank too much beer, ate too much salt, avoided doctors, alternately worked out too hard and not hard enough, rode motorcycles in the rain and snow, piloted a small plane in bad weather, and occasionally argued strenuously with guys who could crush my head like a paper cup.

And whenever possible, I talked my friends into doing it all with me. Craziness, like misery, loves company.

This is why I have a problem with my girlfriend Anne. My Sweet Annie has a big personality; full of life, vitality, energy and enthusiasm. But all that is tempered with a healthy dose of common sense, and it is here we part ways.

Anne warms up before exercising. She puts her headlights on at the first sign of dusk. She refuses to eat food that’s past its expiration date, even if nothing’s growing on it! I know, crazy right?

But craziest of all is her fear of direct sunlight. Next to Anne, Count Dracula is a beach bum. Sure, the sun is in fact a huge ball of constantly-erupting, highly radioactive material, but Anne acts as if it were hanging in our back yard. She wears sunscreen; not your garden-variety sun block, but some sort of zinc oxide coating applied with a roller and with a SPF factor of 200. A house has a rating of about 19, I think, by way of comparison.

She tops this off by donning a hat with a brim larger than the one Sally Field sported in The Flying Nun. In dim light this hat is easily mistaken for a low-flying UFO. In case of emergency, a family of four could set up temporary shelter beneath this hat and not feel particularly cramped.

If it is a fashion statement, as Anne sometimes claims, that statement is: I don’t care how crazy I look. She had another, smaller hat last year; still large and goofy-looking, but smaller than this one.

I’m concerned where things will lead if this trend toward ever more expansive hats continues. Anne is not a large woman. I fear she will one day be getting ready for a walk and be crushed beneath her headgear.

All in the name of safety.

Mike Taylor’s new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available at mtrealitycheck.com and in eBook format at Barnes & Noble, Border’s Books and other online book sellers. Email Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

How can feeling bad feel so good?

I’m starting to feel better. Dammit. For the past four weeks, I’ve had the mother of all colds. There were moments I was sure I was “patient zero” for some new shifting antigen super-virus engineered by the military, one that would eventually wipe out 99-percent of all life on the planet. If that’s true, those scientists better head back to the lab, because—like I said—I’m finally starting to kick this sucker.

I just wish that were a good thing.

The problem, see, is it turns out my girlfriend Annie is the best nurse since Florence Nightingale. Despite its ferocious tenacity, my cold never stood a chance against her gentle, healing ministrations.

From my first sniffle, Anne was there, orange juice in one hand, vitamin C in the other.

“You should drink plenty of fluids,” she said. “Get lots of rest.”

Now, being a manly man, and not a particularly bright one, I only drank fluids or rested when she was standing there monitoring my behavior. The moment she was out of the room, I dug out my iPad to watch hour after hour of Twilight Zone and Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Netflix.  I stayed up late. I ate too much dairy. I ignored every message my body was—in an effort to stay alive—sending me. So naturally, I got sicker.

Eventually, I got really sick. The kind of sick that not only suggests bed rest, but demands it. My first choice at times like this is to curl into a fetal ball, pull the covers over my head, and wait patiently to die.

Anne would have none of that. She pushed the fluids, she made repeated trips to and from the kitchen, taking away empty bowls and glasses, returning with steaming bouillon and chicken soup. She trekked to the store for orange juice, cranberry juice, cold medicine, cough drops...anything she could think of that might, in my time of great distress, afford some small relief.

She laid cool washcloths across my fevered brow. She oohed. She awwed. In short, she babied me in ways I’ve not been babied since the days when I still wore diapers and became nervous if my “binky” was out of sight for more than a few seconds. (And no, this has not been recently.)

At first, I railed against Anne’s efforts, assuring her I would eventually get well, or that nature would take its course, I’d die, and Darwinists would be have one more talking point. But Anne kept at it anyway.

And in a surpassingly short time, I got used to the babying, grew to like it, even. I lay in bed, hour after hour, reading, watching TV, dorking around on Facebook, as all the while a beautiful blonde woman waited on me hand and foot. I’m guessing my male readers will have no problem understanding how this could become addictive in a hurry.

Now I’m feeling better. At first, I tried to hide this fact from Anne. I didn’t want the party to end. But she figured it out. Some elusive, insincere quality in my manufactured moans and groans gave me away, I guess. The orange juice dried up, the leftover chicken soup was packed away in the fridge. I was encouraged to bathe, dress myself, return to the land of the living.

It’s good to feel better, I suppose. But I have to admit, I’m kind of looking forward to flu season.

Mike Taylor’s new paperback, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available at mtrealitycheck.com and in eReader format at Border’s, Barnes & Noble, and other online book sellers. Email the author at mtaylore325@gmail.com.

Will ‘Big Mother’ ever just leave well enough alone?

I can’t stand it. I’m sorry, I just can’t. The government won’t stop trying to fill in for my mom.

First legislators wanted us to know, beyond all question, that smoking is not healthy. There were, apparently, smokers somewhere who still believed they were doing their bodies a favor by lighting up 30 or 40 times a day. OK. Then they wanted us to wear seat belts. Most of us did anyway, because most folks aren’t idiots and have no desire to spend their last few seconds on Earth sailing over the hood of a Buick while thinking, “What the s...?”

But Big Mother couldn’t trust us to do the smart thing. So she passed a seat belt law, then a stricter law. I have little doubt that, ten years from now, driving without a seat belt, smoking indoors, drinking more than two beers in a single week, or saying unkind things about the sort of people who create these laws will be punishable by public stoning.  (Sadly, you’ll need a permit and special headgear to be among those throwing the rocks.)

My girlfriend Anne says I tend to talk in extremes, but honestly, if Thomas “That government is best that governs least” Jefferson could see the current state of this Republic, he would hop the next boat back to England carrying a sincere letter of apology to the King.

OK, I’m ranting here. I know, I know. Sorry.

It’s just that this morning I read an article saying the FDA is pushing for legislation that would force restaurants to list the calorie count of each entree on their menus next to the price.  Why? Because we’re too stupid to know a Quadruple Bypass Two-Pounder Burger at McDoofles has more calories than, say, a thin slice of watercress.

According to the head FDA mucky-muck, Americans eat more healthy foods if they have the caloric information right there in front of them. All I can say in response to this piece of unadulterated insight is, well, d-uh!

High school kids tend to spend less time on lover’s lanes if their pastor is in the backseat of the car, too, but that doesn’t mean the kids want him there! Hell, no! They want him back at the church where he belongs, passing out collection envelopes and planning the following Sunday’s sermon.

In like manner, if I plan to eat three pounds of greasy ground beef stuffed between two slices of white, pasty bread slathered with mayonnaise, I under no circumstances want the FDA leaning over the Formica table whispering in my ear that I’m committing suicide by cheeseburger. I know that and I’m doing it anyway!

I also sometimes drive too fast, I never get enough sleep, I sit really close to the TV, I listen to loud music without the aid of earplugs, I only wear my bicycle helmet when riding in heavy traffic, I rarely get a flu shot, I tend to argue with guys bigger than me in bars, I put salt on everything, I sometimes tackle household electrical problems on my own, I smoke five, even six cigarettes in a year’s time, I run with scissors, and­—though I should have had three by this age—I’ve only experienced one colonoscopy.

I am the FDA’s worst nightmare. What are they gonna do about it?!

Oh, yeah, pass another law.

I’m guessing that at this point, some legislator in Washington has donned his headgear and begun to gather stones.

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