A self-serving press release is no easier to write than a dating site profile

A couple years ago my wife left me. I liked her a lot and it was no picnic. But the most uncomfortable aspect of the entire experience took place months later when I tried to create a “profile” for an online dating site.

It didn’t take me long to figure out it’s impossible to write about oneself while sounding simultaneously A) confident, B) desirable, C) intelligent, and D) humble. It’s easy to accomplish one, maybe even two of these things at the same time. But all four? Not so easy.

I settled for B and D. Then I discovered online dating is the work of the Devil, designed to empty my wallet while introducing me to escaped mental patients.

Now I find myself in a similar situation. My book has shipped. And as a relatively unknown author (OK, completely unknown) the burden of promotion falls squarely on my delicate, birdlike shoulders. A big part of the whole “promotion” thing is writing a press release.

I sat down to do so this morning—three hours ago now—and have got no further than the headline: “Local author publishes humor collection.” Doesn’t exactly snag your attention, does it?

“Elvis dances naked at Princess Di memorial!” would garner more eyes, for sure, but that doesn’t really convey the message I’m trying to get across here, which is: “Buy my book!”

Maybe I should see what other, more successful, authors have done to promote their books. Gimme a sec to Google some stuff…

OK, I’m back. Turns out every author has his or her own approach to promotion. Stephen King, for instance, gazes spookily into the camera and says, “I have written a new book. It is about a possessed tree frog.” In Stephen King’s case, that’s all he has to do. People buy his new book if it’s about cement drying on a newly-poured sidewalk in Schenectady.

Well-known humorist David Sedaris has a web page even uglier than mine, but he’s a much better writer, in terms of both style and substance. Also, his essays appear from time to time in the New Yorker, which undoubtedly boosts book sales, at least among the sort of people who read the New Yorker (Psst: liberal Democrats and Woody Allen).

Dean Koontz has an awesome website, even better than Stephen King’s. And he suffers from none of that “false humility-itis” which seems to plague me. To read Mr. Koontz’s online press release, you’d think he had cured cancer, rather than written a bunch of mostly-scary books with remarkably similar plots (scary monster, helpless victim, 500 pages of chase scene, dead monster).

I’m pretty sure all the authors I checked out have people to write press releases for them. If my mom were still alive, I’d make her write mine; she always had good things to say about me, even if those things weren’t altogether true.

Instead, I think I’ll amend my headline to “Local author writes book about Elvis dancing naked at Princess Di memorial.” It’s a lie, but look man, I have all these books to unload.

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

Public education; maybe it’s time to suspend Socrates

Have you read about Natalie Munroe, the Philadelphia high school teacher suspended for posting unflattering blogs about her students? Ms. Munroe identifies neither herself nor her school in her blog, but a couple students recognized themselves and went whining to school administrators, who did as school administrators always do: they wilted like salt-covered garden slugs.

According to Munroe, she was only telling it like it is.

“My students are out of control,” Munroe wrote. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”

How dare Ms. Munroe say such dreadful (and undoubtedly accurate and applicable) things about the blameless angels she must contend with every day?

And how typical that the school’s administrators should penalize her for her words, rather than consider the possibility she’s right and that it is virtually impossible to actually teach in many modern classrooms, owing in large part to the fact that students really are “rude, disengaged, lazy whiners.”

It’s so much easier to simply shoot the messenger.

Besides, shooting the messenger makes parents happy, the same parents who created and coddled the rude, disengaged, lazy whiners in the first place.

If the ‘80s really were the “Me Generation,” today’s youth are the “Me Me Me Now Now Now and Nobody Else, Ever!” crowd. The chimps are in charge of the zoo.

I blame it on the death of Sister Sulpischia, about whom I’ve written before, and other teachers like her. Sister Sulpischia (known to her students and fellow faculty members as “The Moose”) was 200 pounds of black-robed, rosary-thumping fury who ruled over her fourth-grade charges with a ferocity rarely seen outside rabid wolverine attacks.

I was one of her students and like most kids my age, I was by nature a rude, disengaged, lazy whiner. But not in the Moose’s class. Sitting only two rows from the good sister’s watchful eye, I was attentive, polite, engaged and determined to live to see fifth grade.

Sure, there were some kids, even back then, who had the guts to smart off to Sister Sulpischia. We all missed them during their protracted convalescences.

Do I really wish teachers were still allowed to clobber students? Well, no, I guess not. I mean, I do still remember the perve-o gym teacher I had in ninth grade who should have been in A) therapy, B) prison, or C) the Ninth Circle of Hell.

But I do wish there were at least a few administrators willing to back their teachers, stand up to the sort of parents who think their innocent babies can do no wrong, and insist that students who prevent other kids from learning be sent packing.

One of the greatest teachers of all time, Socrates, is credited with saying, “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”

Good thing he didn’t post this on his blog; he’d have been suspended.

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

Lousy parents (like me) can scare their kids to death

Just when I thought I couldn’t feel any more guilty about the lousy job I did raising my kids, along comes the news that children can actually be startled to death. I don’t know whether this is really true; I read it in someone else’s column and columnists are notorious liars.

But even if it might be true, this news is going to put a big crimp in millions of games of peek-a-boo.

If it is true, well, all I can say is it’s a miracle my son lived into adulthood.

I didn’t really do a “lousy job” of raising my kids, but I was for the most part a young, single parent and I made my share of mistakes. The worst of these was teasing Jordan—the most “believing” kid who ever lived—whenever the opportunity presented itself.

By the time he was seven years old, Jordan believed the following things: 1) round bales of hay lying in fields are actually giant rabbit pellets, left there for the benefit of giant rabbits residing in nearby woods; 2) a fierce gorilla lived in a locked garage near the restaurant where we dined every Friday evening; 3) fried chicken was made in a factory and definitely not in any way related to the cute, little birds; 4) Care Bears were real and watched over us daily from their vantage points on fluffy, cumulous clouds.

He believed all these things because his father (me) told him so. For all I know, he believes them still. Jordan was a smart kid, but he definitely put the “bull” in gullible.

Anyway, as a natural born prankster, I delighted in playing little tricks on my trusting son.

The best (or worst) of these took place one night at my dad’s restaurant, an older building requiring a lot of after-hours cleanup. Jordan often accompanied me to do the floors; he liked racing donuts with his remote-controlled car on the just-washed tiles.

The old furnace there made creepy ticking sounds for a couple minutes prior to firing up. During the day these were barely noticeable, but at night, echoing around the big, empty dining room, they were scary-sounding, even to me.

While Jordan happily raced his RC hotrod between table legs, I set a loud kitchen timer for three minutes.

“I’ll be back in the office for a sec,” I told Jordan. “If you hear an alarm, come get me right away, because that means the furnace is about to blow. The whole place could go!”

Jordan responded as he always did: “Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It should be OK, though, so long as you tell me as soon as you hear the alarm go off.”

I retreated to the office and watched through the one-way glass looking out over the dining room. Jordan continued to pilot his car, but now kept glancing nervously at the heating vent, from which the ticking sound ominously emanated. This went on for a few minutes, with Jordan becoming increasingly uneasy.

The timer went off with a loud beep. Jordan jumped and began edging backward toward the office door, his eyes never leaving the heating vent.

Four feet, three feet, two…just as he reached the door I leapt out, yelling KAPOW! at full volume.

My seven-year-old son burst into tears.

We stopped at the ice cream shop on the way home and Jordan was allowed to order whatever he wanted, up to and including the entire store and the vehicles of each and every employee. This did nothing to assuage my much-deserved guilt, but it did help slow Jordan’s quivering lower lip.

OK, maybe I was a lousy parent after all. I’m just glad I didn’t kill the kid.

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

‘Snowzilla’ failed to crush the Midwest, dammit!

Well, it’s the day after the snowstorm that was supposed to herald the end of life as we know it, at least for those residing in the Midwest and most of the rest of the country.

The frothing, manic meteorologists predicted we would be buried beneath acres of frozen precipitation the likes of which haven’t been seen since the dinosaurs were wiped out, virtually overnight! The frozen bodies of those too weak to turn up their thermostats would provide food for the few ragtag survivors remaining when the storm finally passed. If it passed.

Polar bears would roam downtown streets, picking off any survivors crazy enough to venture out in search of chicken and waffles.

Madness! Chaos! Anarchy!

I was really hopeful.

As I mentioned last week, the only thing that’s going to save me financially at this point is the complete and utter dissolution of anything resembling civilization. The “storm of the century” seemed as good a way as any to bring about society’s downfall. And snow has the added benefit of not leaving behind A) radioactivity, B) exotic pathogens, or C) zombies, the way so many other apocalyptic scenarios do.

But nope. Snowzilla didn’t come close to wreaking the sort of havoc I’ll need in order to start over with a clean slate and assumed name (I’m thinking Demitri Papageorgio).

Oh, sure, it snowed, and pretty hard, too. The wind howled, the flakes piled up. But by noon of “the morning after” most of the main streets were clear and it was back to business as usual.

The sort of folks who tape black plastic over their windows every time Homeland Security raises the government’s National Threat Level (remember that?) from green to blue came up from their cellars and began phoning friends and family to make sure nobody had resorted to cannibalism.

 In short, no Armageddon. Again.

It really ticks me off, being teased this way by meteorologists. I’ve been preparing for the end of the world for decades and these near misses are getting frustrating!

When I say “preparing for the end,” I don’t mean I run around the woods wearing camouflage clothing and carrying a paintball gun with a bunch of like-minded nuts. My preparation is of a slightly more passive variety; namely, watching all three Mad Max movies (none of which cover snow-related disasters, by the way).

Actually, I’m kind of glad the world didn’t end, even though it’s darn inconvenient for yours truly. When it does happen (any day now, I’m sure), I’m hoping for the sort of end that leaves behind some zombies.

Maybe I’ll be able to train ‘em to shovel all this snow.

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

The end of the world figures prominently in my financial planning

I watch the History Channel a lot, a sure sign I’m getting old. When the past starts to seem more interesting than the future, you know you’ve entered that slippery slide into geezer-hood.

In recent months I’ve become an expert on World War II, the Great Depression, the Nixon administration and the theory that ancient astronauts visited Earth thousands of years ago to give us astronomy, math, the electric light bulb (nope, I’m not kidding), and reruns of Law & Order.

Much of the stuff on the history channel is of the Could this mean? variety—as in, Could this circle, carved into the pyramid of Giza, be the Mayan representation of an interstellar space ship? Well, sure it could be that, but it probably ain’t.

At any rate, I was watching a show of this latter type earlier this week and got a bit of good news: The world is going to end next year.

I know this theory’s been floating around in cyberspace for months now, but seeing it on broadcast television somehow made it more real. It goes like this: The Mayan calendar, developed thousands of years ago, comes to an abrupt halt on Dec. 21, 2012. Nobody seems to know why. But when taken in tandem with a prophecy by Nostradamus (the John Edwards of his day), it seems to forecast the End of Days.

That prophecy reads, in part, Yeah, and in those times, the snow shall fall from the sky and the seas will be filled with liquid, maybe water. A great commotion shall be heard in the east and many birds of a feather will fly south for the winter. Other vague things that could be interpreted pretty much any way you want also will come to pass, verily and forsooth!

Throw in a few scary quotes from the books of Daniel and Revelations, add an Internet rumor concerning the possibility of an approaching comet, and voila, it’s the end of the world as we know it.

Now, I know that for some of you, this is going to be a real inconvenience, especially for those who had family coming for the holidays. It’s disconcerting to know the world’s going to end just four days before Christmas. Even if the relatives arrive before the A) comet, B) poison rain, C) nuclear attack, D) spaceships, E) angry deities or F) Betty White Clone Army, the knowledge that we all have only a few days to live is sure to put a damper on the festivities.

So, why do I think the end of the world is such a good thing? Well, it just so happens that—as I was watching the History Channel special—I was also planning my finances for the upcoming year. These days, this is mostly a hypothetical exercise; I do it from force of habit, a throwback to the days when I had a “real” job, money, and the hope—remote though it may have been—that I would someday enjoy a comfortable retirement.

According to my figures, at this point in my estate planning, the best I can hope for is a catastrophic, extinction level event. How lucky for me that one is coming in just under two years. I think I may have enough stashed away to last that long.

Sure, I feel bad for those of you doing well; if you’ve just won the lottery, landed a big promotion, stuff like that. But it’s not my fault. I just read the signs and accept the inevitable.

All I know for sure is, if we’re all still here the morning of Dec. 22, 2012, I’m in big trouble.

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

Zombies make for one strange book signing

I had the dream again last night. The one where I’m standing in front of a roomful of people, 30 or so, all of them gazing at me with the silvery, shimmering eyes of corn worshippers in a Stephen King novel. They’re expecting me to say something; something funny.

I open my mouth to speak, but my throat is stuffed with cotton; I can barely breathe, much less articulate.

“Mpfhhhh,” I say. “Mumpfhh itthit wuhmpah.”

Thirty sets of silvery eyes continue to stare. No one smiles. No one laughs. One man in a grey business suit glances impatiently at his watch. In the crazy clarity that dreams sometimes bring, I see it’s a Rolex, with a blue face and ostentatious diamond marking the 12 o’clock hour.

Great pools of sweat accumulate beneath my armpits. I realize I’m sporting a tan sports coat and slacks, a great improvement over the buck naked I usually wear to this dream. Both items of clothing are soaked through, the jacket from perspiration, the pants…well, I don’t want to think about why the pants are wet.

I am scared.

I take a sip of water from the plastic cup that magically materializes on the podium, which also has just appeared before me. The cotton inches down my throat like a sandpaper-coated slug, until finally I can speak.

“Um, I’m sorry,” I gasp. “This may have been a mistake.”

As one, the silvery-eyed group stands and, zombie-like, arms outstretched, shambles toward me.

I wake up screaming. Or dreaming of screaming.

And that’s why it has taken me so long to get my book finished. Because once you write a book (which is fun) and get the book published (which is cool) and see your first copy (which, I’m sure, will be exciting)…after all that, you have to promote your book.

You have to talk to real, live people. You have to make them believe you have something on which they should spend their $7.95. You have to do readings, and signings, and tap dance recitals for all I know.

I’ve been told by people who should know, people who’ve been there done that.

I don’t wanna. I want people to just buy my book without any encouragement from me. It’s a pretty good book; not James Thurber, but better than some stuff I’ve read, and there are very few typos. That should count for something.

Oh, OK, OK. I’ll talk to the book clubs. I’ll address elementary school classrooms and tell ‘em to not do drugs. I’ll shamelessly hawk my book at any store willing to give me 60 minutes and a card table. I’ll get out of bed at 5 a.m. to chat with the host of a local access AM radio program.

I will do whatever it takes.

But I swear, if I see just one pair of silvery eyes, the whole deal’s off!

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

Memories, may seem beautiful…if they’re not televised

Saw myself on television the other night. Or rather; saw the me that existed 25 years ago. In grey leather pants and a shirt that had been lifted (apparently) from Michael Jackson’s back, I looked like a reject from the “Thriller” video auditions.

My carefully-feathered haircut, reminiscent of a CHiPs-era Erik Astrada, only made matters worse. Watching my younger self onscreen I thanked the gods of video that the camera never panned down; I’m almost sure I was wearing white snakeskin platform shoes.

I was lying in a hotel room following a recent live performance with my weekend band when my historically accurate but altogether ridiculous self came on TV. I couldn’t believe they were airing the footage, a half-hour musical “special” that ran for the first time on Christmas Eve, 1985.

It was filmed back in the days when public television was so frantic for original programming they’d let anyone with the ability to point a camera produce a show. My buddy Bob was one such camera-pointer, and he talked me into bringing my band down to the TV studio to “star” in two live performances.

Bob was a better camera-pointer than most of them and the production values for the show were actually pretty good. My band, sadly, was not. Oh, I’ve been in worse, but I’ve been in better, too. The point is, Bob did his best, but there’s only so much you can do to make a coyote caught in barbed wire sound like Freddie Mercury.

And there’s absolutely nothing you can do to make me—even a young me—look good in leather pants and a Michael Jackson shirt.

It was surreal, old me watching young me singing on TV.

Why the public TV station was airing a lame-o half-hour music show from 25 years earlier is anyone’s guess. I’m sure it had nothing to do with “popular demand.” I can only assume they’re still desperate for programming; a test pattern would have been more entertaining, aside from the possible (no, make that probable) comedic value.

At any rate, watching that old footage served as a harsh reminder of just how much time has passed. I sing better these days. But I look older. And if anything, my guitar playing has actually gotten worse, which is difficult to understand, but I can’t deny the evidence of my own eyes and ears. On the plus side, I now have enough sense to not try to cover my expansive rear-end in gray leather.

Not that it matters much; I have as much in common with that skinny kid on the television as I have with Michael Jackson (which, other than the shirt, is nothing).

But I’m not embarrassed by the tape; I’ve lived long enough to know that everybody was a nerd once upon a time. We all have memories best left unexamined. I just wish mine weren’t captured on a piece of videotape sitting in a TV studio storage locker somewhere.

I’d like to get my hands on that tape, to save for, um, posterity. And by “save for posterity” I mean “bury in the back yard.”

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