Reality continues to ruin my life

I’ve always had a tough time with Reality, especially Reality with a capital R. Too often, it simply doesn’t coincide with my personal vision of how things should be. Or rather, how I would like them to be.

Snow, for instance. In the imaginary universe in which I spend most of my time, snow doesn’t exist. Here in my La-La Land the sun is always shining, the beach is always open and girls half my age feel comfortable playing volleyball in swimsuits that provide, at best, dubious coverage.

I’ve heard of faraway lands like California and Florida where this is actually the case, but around here … not so much. Not in December, anyway. 

All because of Reality.

Over the years I’ve grown used to Reality rearing its ugly, rational head over things like algebra, snow, vegetables, deep-fried food, exercise and a host of other things I either love or hate. In each case, Reality steadfastly contradicts my “vision.”

But yesterday morning, Reality laid a one-two punch on me that sent me reeling. Literally. And to add indignity to injury, I was buck naked when it all went down.

I slipped climbing into the shower. In all fairness to myself, the tub was slipperier than a wet ice skating rink, thanks to the baby oil I had spilled in there the previous day and then failed to clean up properly.

I had one foot in the tub and one out when it happened. The foot in the tub shot out from under me like a nitro-burning dragster getting the green light. As I flew backward, I grabbed the towel rack, which immediately detached itself in a shower of drywall dust.

Instinctively, my other hand clamped onto the shower rod, which was designed to hold the weight of a shower curtain, not mine. It bent in half and followed me and the towel rack toward the floor.

On the way there — seemingly all in slow motion — my back whacked soundly against the toilet, my head conked the sink and the big toe of my right foot (the one that had slipped) whumphed against the wall. The toilet lid was mercifully closed, but it still hurt like a mutha.

Lori wasn’t home at the time, so there were no witnesses to the fiery stream of profanity that exited my mouth like flame from a dragon’s gaping maw.

All of a sudden that little old lady from the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” commercial seemed a whole lot less funny than she had just seconds earlier.

The profanity eventually tapered off. I lay there, beneath the towel rack, towels, shower rod, shower curtain. The ceiling fan revolved contentedly on its circular journey as water from the shower sprayed past its usual boundaries and into my upturned face.

In La-La Land, the sun is shining, the beach is open, and I’m far too young and nimble to slip climbing into the damn shower.

But in Reality...

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

My domesticity could cost us the next Sistine Chapel

I was stuffing my face with Japanese chicken at the Chinese buffet when the lady walked past my table and told me she likes my column. 

“Mmmph, fmmll rwroolf,” I said. (Loosely translated: thanks.)

I’m insecure, so I’m always happy to hear from someone other than my girlfriend who reads this thing.

“Sounds like you’re getting pretty domesticated,” she said.

My face must have been saying, “Huh?” because she continued: “You and Lori and the cats and the new TV.”

I understood. During the past few years I’ve mentioned a few times in this column that I own no television. I’m not one of those people that demand every media outlet be as edifying as reading Plato’s “The Republic” in the original Greek, say, but I didn’t see the point in cramming a TV into my tiny apartment just so Maury Povich could parade “Single Teenage Mothers and the Fathers/Boyfriends/First Cousins Who Got Them That Way” through my living room.

When shows like that come on TV, I always start getting nervous my brain will crawl out through my ear and try to make it on its own. A strictly defensive move on the part of my brain.

I figured not having a television was the safest way to avoid accidental exposure to this Jerry Springer-ish regurgitative spew that nowadays masquerades as entertainment. (Can you tell I have strong opinions on this topic?)

But somehow, when Lori and I decided to cohabitate, buying a new TV seemed like the most natural thing in the world, just the next brick in the road to domesticity. And that’s a good thing, right?

I thought so at first, but now I’m beginning to wonder. 

For the past five years, I’ve been more or less on my own, without female supervision. I would eat when I felt like it, sleep when I felt like it, fish when I felt like it … it was very much a “when I felt like it” existence.

I was so busy doing all the things I felt like doing that I didn’t really have time for TV. 

So how come I do now?

Honestly, I don’t know. 

Lori is a fiercely independent woman with more interests than she has time for. I’m sure if I felt like fishing, or taking my bicycle on a four-day cross-country jaunt, or doing any of the million other things that used to occupy my days, she’d be totally cool with it.  In fact, she’d probably be happy to get me the heck out of the house so she could take care of her own projects.

But I haven’t been doing any of those things, not as often as I used to, at least. I’ve been just sort of hanging around the house … “puttering,” in the patois of the middle-aged. (I assume I’m middle aged because I plan to live to 120.)

And I’ve been watching too much TV; a couple hours a night. At this rate, by the time I’m 120, I’ll have watched — hold on, lemme grab a calculator — 43,800 hours of television! That’s 1,825 days, or FIVE YEARS!

Five years, man! That’s a year longer than it took Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! 

It’s unlikely I could accomplish anything so grand as the Sistine Chapel no matter how little TV I watch. But I’m sure I can do better than “Lesbian Nazis Who’ve Been Abducted by Space Aliens and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs” on Springer.

So. For sale: one gently used large-screen HDTV. It’ll be available on Craigslist. 

Right after this one last rerun of “Law & Order.”

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

Stay tuned for the remake of this column, coming … never!

I live in constant fear. It happens every year around this time.

I have theatrophobia. Well, sort of. Theatrophobia is a fear of theaters. I’m not really afraid of theaters; I’m afraid of movies.

Not all movies, just remakes of Christmas classics.

I don’t know why there even has to be such a thing. Christmas classics are “classic” for a reason — they’re perfect just the way they are. “It’s a Wonderful Life” doesn’t need Ted Turner’s colorization nonsense. And there are already too many versions of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”; we don’t need another starring Justin Bieber in the role of Tiny Tim. (In point of fact, we don’t really need Justin Bieber starring in anything at all, but that’s a rant for another time.)

My point is, the best classic holiday films are already perfect, or close enough that the odds of Hollywood coming up with new and improved versions are not good.

“Miracle on 34th Street,” for example. The original, released in 1947 — starring Edmund Gween, Maureen O’Hara and a young Natalie Wood as the precocious “Santathiest” kid who only sees the light after St. Nick finally gives her a new house — is great. I watch it every year and every year I believe, even though Santa’s never delivered anything even approaching a house to ME on Christmas morning.

On the other hand, I gravitate toward that naughty column all year long and probably should be thrilled that anything at all is waiting for me beneath the tree.

The remake of “Miracle” was filmed in 1994 and the best thing you can say about it is it stars the world’s worst grandpa from “Jurassic Park,” Richard Attenborough. Though Attenborough makes a credible Santa, every time he ho-ho-ho’s, I start worrying the noise may attract a velociraptor.

I just can’t watch it without wishing I was watching the original instead. It’s like those old K-Tel records that featured studio band remakes of pop hits; they didn’t exactly stink, but they entirely failed to satisfy. When you’re in the mood for “Play That Funky Music White Boy,” you wanna hear Wild Cherry, not Larry & the K-Tel All-Stars.

The real reason I’m yammering on about this, though, is I’ve heard rumors they’re planning a remake of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — my all-time personal hands-down favorite Christmas flick. It’s actually a sequel, which is even worse. Mercifully, the project is still up in the air. Or so I’ve heard. I’m not exactly part of the Hollywood cognoscenti.

All I can say is, this must not happen. Did Van Gogh paint “Starry Night II?” Did Alexandros of Antioch ever sculpt “Venus de Milo Redux; the Search for Two Arms?”

No, they did not. Why? Because those works weren’t going to get any better and their creators weren’t greedy sleaze-ball producers who would clone their own mothers if there was a dime to be made from it.

Every time a movie theater cash register rings, some Hollywood hack earns a buck.

It’s enough to make you theatrophobic. 

Catch Mike Taylor’s Reality Check radio program every weekday at 5:30 p.m. on WGLM, m106.3 on your FM dial.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

I refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving day ‘lite’

OK, I’m going to have to rant for a minute here. I hate ranting this close to the holidays but feel I really have no choice in the matter.

Day after tomorrow (as I write this) is Thanksgiving; I’ll be celebrating the holiday with the kids, grandkids and sundry.

In preparation for the event, last night Lori ushered me out of the house with a “last minute things we previously forgot” shopping list; white potatoes, stuffing, flour … your basic American holiday starch fest. Unhealthy, caloric and (with Lori wearing the kitchen apron this year) sublimely delicious.

But Thanksgiving comes but once a year, so caution to the wind, right?

Wrong.

It turns out the uninvited nannies who ceaselessly monitor our collective well-being are trying to insinuate themselves between me and that extra dollop of Cool Whip on my pumpkin pie. 

While shopping at the grocery, I encountered the word “lite” a grand total of 1,237 times. It was on everything! Lite stuffing! Lite (and sodium reduced) soup stock! Even Lite Cool Whip!  Cool Whip, man!

Technically, I’m not sure Cool Whip even qualifies as food. I always thought it was created from long chain polymers at a factory in New Jersey or maybe as the by-product of the Spandex manufacturing process. I’ve never cared, because it tastes good.

I never asked it to be lite. If I want lite, I’ll eat celery. When it comes to Thanksgiving, I want yummy, not lite.

But I had to dig through an entire pile of lite Cool Whip to get to the real stuff. Why? Why why why why why?

Can’t I just, for one lousy day a year, enjoy gastronomical excess without being reminded I’m stuffing my body with the dietary equivalent of cyanide? All year long I eat healthy. I have salads for lunch and add “superfoods” like cranberries, walnuts, avocados and salmon to most every meal. I try to avoid the deep fryer. I drink lots of water. 

I eat oatmeal, for cryin’ out loud! Oatmeal! That’s, like, cattle feed! But apparently, it’ll keep me alive long enough to be a burden to my children. So I eat it.

On Thanksgiving, however, I want to forget all that. I want sugar, fat, grease, sauces, starches, and I want them all in quantities that would embarrass attendees of the John Candy/Mama Cass joint family reunion.

I want a food orgy that would make Caligula blush.

Once it’s all over, once the final piece of apple pie has been eaten, once that last turkey drumstick has been stripped to the marrow and simmered into soup, then … and only then … will I start worrying about my diet again.

But until that day (probably Monday, based on past performance) I don’t want to see the word “lite” again.

Catch Mike Taylor’s Reality Check radio program every weekday at 5:30 p.m. on WGLM, m106.3 on your FM dial.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

Norse gods and meteorologists don’t scare me

Well, somehow I managed to survive this winter’s first “Snowpacalypse.” (The first of many, if TV meteorologists have anything to say about it.)

Despite what the talking heads on the morning news were yammering on about, I didn’t freeze to death beneath the permafrost, timber wolves did not appear in the yard to devour my cats, and Snærr, the Norse god of lousy weather, didn’t pop in for a second coming and plunge the world into 100 years of icy darkness.

I did what Michiganders have been doing since we stole the state from its original owners: I dug out the driveway and got on with my life.

The tires on the Toyota were not what they were a few years ago, though, and I did manage to drive off the road at one point. Judging by the length of time it took the tow truck to arrive, I wasn’t the only one.

I now have the new tires I’ve been meaning to get since July, so bring it on, Snærr, I’m ready.

That said, I will admit I’m learning there are two winters every year — city winter and country winter. 

Having grown up in big cities, I’m familiar with city winter. The soot-smuged snow, slush-filled potholes, frequent low speed fender-benders. It’s all well-travelled territory.

What I’m not used to is country winter.

I moved to Lori’s little house on the prairie back in June, so this is my first winter here. We live on land that only a decade ago was somebody’s corn field. Then developers came, excavated a rutted path they laughingly called a “road,” and built a handful of ranch style homes along either side.

The middle of nowhere looks like Manhattan by comparison. This past summer, I felt like a character in a Zane Grey western, a feeling reinforced by the horses living next door. And the tumbleweeds. 

Yes, there are tumbleweeds out here! I have no idea where they come from, but if I leave the garage door open they fill the place in a matter of hours. Crazy.

At any rate, based on what I’ve seen of winter so far, it’s going to be tough to survive out here on the rim of the state’s rugged hinterland. Just this first dusting has piled drifts up to the windows on the northwest side of the house. The tractor, which I was planning to store in the shed, will now instead spend the winter beneath a tarp out back. The shed is snowed shut and it’s just getting deeper. 

Worst of all, the satellite TV and internet — our tenuous link with civilization — has all but shut down. It didn’t work all that well even during the halcyon days of summer, but with the coming of the snow … let’s just say the Amish have better technology.

Still, I am descended from hardy pioneer stock. I’ll survive my first country winter somehow; no matter what Norse gods and TV weather people send my way.

Catch Mike Taylor’s Reality Check radio program every weekday at 5:30 p.m. on WGLM, m106.3 on your FM dial.

mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 548-8273

There may be a few snags in my new business idea

I need a kid. Were I not older than most Mayan temples, I’d just have another one of my own. That’s assuming I could find a willing (and biologically viable) partner to join me in the endeavor.

I have three kids already, or rather, I used to. These days they’re adults with jobs and lives of their own. 

I see them often enough, my sons at least. My daughter lives in Detroit, runs a business and has four munchkins of her own. She’s busy.

And even when I do see them, it’s not the same as when they were children. Because they’re not kids anymore. They’re old, like me.

My grandkids are great, but again, I only get to see them a half-dozen times a year, usually during family events when everyone’s trying to horn in on the grandkid action.

What I need is a kid of my own. Why? Well, put simply, I miss having a playmate.

I miss having someone handy to take fishing, hunting, jogging, bicycling, out to dinner. Speaking of dinner, I even miss the lunatic asylum that is Chuck E. Cheese. I haven’t eaten there in years.

If you’re a middle-aged man you cannot go by yourself to Chuck E. Cheese without attracting a lot of unfriendly stares. Thank you, media, for painting every American white guy over the age of 35 as a potential pedophile.

Not that it matters; Chuck E. Cheese is no fun without a couple toddlers of your own in tow anyway.

I was a single parent during most of my own kids’ childhoods and much of what I miss is the little stuff; frying up Mickey-shaped pancakes in the morning, checking homework, braiding my daughter’s hair at bedtime … dumb stuff like that.

Yeah, I know I’m seeing all this through time’s rose-colored granny glasses. I haven’t entirely forgotten the bouts of flu, the temper tantrums, the shock of a Hot Wheels car crunching beneath my bare feet in the middle of the night.

But the good far outweighed the bad. I thought so even at the time.

I was a dad and I was pretty good at it. Then, just about the time I was really getting the hang of the job, everybody grew up and moved out. I was forced into parental retirement! With no severance package!

I can’t believe I’m the only empty nester to feel this way.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with a great new business idea (yes, yet another of my get rich without working plans).

I call it Rent-a-Kid. 

That’s right, for a small fee — thirty bucks, maybe — a kid between the ages of five and nine will accompanying you on hayrides at the apple orchard in the fall, or drop by your house to open presents Christmas morning, or maybe play in the lake while you sit on shore hollering at him or her not to wade out too far.

Or maybe not. Now that I actually put the idea down on paper, I gotta admit it sounds a little creepy. That’s not how it was in my head. 

I blame the media for sending me back to the drawing board.

Catch Mike Taylor’s Reality Check radio program every weekday at 5:30 p.m. on WGLM, m106.3 on your FM dial.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

I’ll soon be the wallflower on the radio

My life keeps serving up dishes I’m not sure I want to eat. 

Despite my gregarious personality, I am at heart an introvert. I know, I know … those who know me personally are rolling their eyes right now.

I have a big mouth and I know how to use it. But honestly, I’m a lot more comfortable sitting in a dark corner somewhere, a wallflower watching the party from a safe distance.

I’m happiest in a small fishing boat on a quiet lake, an ultra-lite rod in one hand and a cold Bud in the other.

I know the trend in this country is to seek out fame (or at least notoriety) at all costs. We’re constantly bombarded with the message that you’re nobody unless you’re famous. The timid among us get their fame fix by posting endless selfies on Facebook. The more desperate climb water towers and take potshots at student nurses.

It all comes down to the same thing: being the little kid on the playground jungle gym yelling, “Hey! Look at me!”

At any rate, the itch to be well known is a condition I’ve never really developed. But I am, at least a little bit. 

I’ve been writing this column for decades. It appears in a lot of different newspapers and online outlets. So every once in a while, someone will walk up to me at the grocery and say, “Hey, aren’t you that guy that writes that column?” 

Now, I like people and it’s nice to know someone’s reading my work. But while I like people, I like them best in small numbers; preferably in groups of one. 

Crowds freak me out. Even “virtual” crowds. Writing this column for a relatively large audience is easy, mostly because I pretend I’m not. I pretend I’m writing for my girlfriend, my kids or sometimes, for myself. I try not to think about all the eyes that’ll be looking once it comes out in print.

Fooling myself like this is going to be harder with my radio show. Yup, radio show. Beginning Nov. 10, I’m going to be on the radio. It wasn’t my idea, but when Jim at WGLM 106.3 made the offer, it sounded too fun to turn down.

It’s not live, thank Heaven. But it’s still me; my dorky-sounding voice (and it does sound dorky, make no mistake). My inane comments and observations. My big mouth yammering away.

Every time I record an episode, I feel like a fool and a fraud. I’m hoping this doesn’t come out in the broadcasts (which will air weekdays at 5:30 p.m., by the way) but I’m afraid it might.

Ah, if I bomb, I bomb. It won’t be the end of the world and I will have at least tried. But I’d really rather be in that dark corner or out on a fishing boat.

Instead, here I am again, stepping up to the jungle gym and yelling, “Hey! Look at me!”

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273