I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, but I'm going to make one this year. I hereby resolve to never, ever, ever mention a drain-cleaning product of any kind in this column again!

In fact, I intend to avoid all comments pertaining to plumbing of any sort, regardless of how innocuous those comments may seem to me at any given moment.

Why? I'll tell you why.

Because I hate controversy, or rather I hate being in the middle of a controversy. To my way of thinking, life is just too short to waste time arguing the merits of one point of view over another. I feel no need to bring others around to my way of thinking and I am rarely brought ‘round to theirs.

I am an island of indifference in a sea of - to quote W.B. Yeats - "passionate intensity." About most things, I just don't care, folks. Not enough to quarrel, anyway.

What does this have to do with plumbing? Well, a lot, as it turns out.

Several weeks back I wrote about my experience with a clogged drain and the supernaturally strong drain cleaner I eventually used to clear it out.

It seems I'm not the only person in America with a clogged drain, as the mail literally poured in, most of it requests for the name of the aforementioned drain cleaner. Most readers had clogs of their own and just wanted to get rid of them once and for all. Many of the requests were humorous. A couple were a little scary. And one was flat-out illegal. (I checked with the DNR and it is against the law to dump large quantities of acid on tree stumps, even if you don't live near a lake.)

At any rate, I received so many requests that I went ahead and mentioned the name of the stuff in a subsequent column. That's when the trouble really started.

The drain cleaner, as I reported in the first column, is terrifically powerful, essentially a nearly 100 percent solution of sulfuric acid, and it's dangerous as all get-out. From an environmental point of view, it is a nightmare, or can be if used improperly.

The day after the column in which I mentioned the product's name ran, the plumbers began reporting in. The first letter - and by far the kindest - came from Phil Liszewski of Action Plumbing and Mechanical.

Mr. Liszewski pointed out that the product should be used, even by experienced plumbers, only as a last resort, after all else has failed.

"It's a bad idea to have everyone start throwing acid down the drain," Liszewski wrote. "You do realize where the drain water ends up, don't you? Right back in your tap."

To be honest, I hadn't considered this. Mr. Liszewski also noted that acid-based drain cleaners could damage septic systems, wreak havoc on the environment and even harm the very drains they are intended to clean. He suggested a safe, environmentally friendly alternative, a bacteria-based product called "Bioclean." Bioclean works more slowly, but in the long run does a better job, and with no risk to the user or the fishies.

I mention all this now in an effort to atone for my sins and make amends with readers who are passionate about preserving the world we live in. I want to start the New Year fresh, acid-free and environmentally friendly.

And I resolve to never mention a plumbing product again! Ever!

Now then, let me tell you about this great stuff I discovered the other day for removing old paint from concrete floors...

To contact Mike Taylor with your questions, comments, or predictions of environmental calamities, e-mail mtaylor325@gmail.com or write via snail mail to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429.

Got a letter from a reader the other day - a Ms. C. Wymerotte of New York City, NY - inquiring after The Lovely Mrs. Taylor. I get a lot of mail like this; folks wanting to know if she's real (yes), how long we've been married (15 years, last July), and whether she reads my column and thinks it's funny (no, on both counts).

Ms. Wymerotte wanted to know how Mrs. T and I met.

Since Big Apple residents live life in the fast lane, and I hate to disappoint, I originally considered making something up; something interesting, romantic, exciting. But real life is rarely like that. Real life - as John Lennon put it - is what happens while we're busy making other plans.

I was making other plans the night I met The Lovely Mrs. Taylor, who at the time was still known as "Julie."

It was a Saturday night, and my little weekend band, The Guinness Brothers, was playing a gig at a roadhouse north of Grand Rapids, the kind of place that smelled of old beer, Walmart perfume and deep fried chicken. The air was redolent with cigarette smoke; from the stage, I could barely make out the other side of the room.

Good ol' boys in worn denim and girls with frosted pink lips jostled elbow-to-elbow on the dance floor, the girls dashing back to their warm Bud Lites and fuzzy navels whenever we threatened to play a slow tune.

We wrapped second set with a James Brown cover, clicked on the taped break music and worked our way through the crowd to the bar.

My buds grabbed their drinks and bee-lined to the band table, where waited bored wives and excited girlfriends.

I was solo, so I stood at the bar chatting with Danny the bartender, stirring my gin and tonic, trying to look cool, failing, and hoping against hope that some sweet young thang would mosey my way and say hello.

I'd had my eye on a cute redhead who had spent most of the previous set dancing in front of the stage, always a good sign. The redhead, however, now seemed to have her eye (and most of the rest of her) on a pumped-up dude in a cowboy hat and wife-beater T-shirt. I had to admit the shirt, hat and redhead all looked good on him.

I was turning back to the bar when a tall, willowy girl appeared at my side. It might have been the first time in my life I noticed the color of a woman's eyes. Pale blue fading to grey, a November sky. Wavy chestnut hair spilled over her shoulders like water running downhill.

"Hi," she said.

"Hey," I said, stirring my drink, shooting for nonchalance, resolutely ignoring the sudden weakness in my knees.

"You guys are good," she said.

On this particular night, we were not, but I said "Thanks" anyway.

"Do you know any AC/DC?" she asked.

We didn't. Nobody in the band could sing the high notes. But I figured a girl this young and naïve wouldn't know squat about AC/DC; she was just trying to make conversation a guy my age might be able to relate to.

"Now, how could we do any AC/DC?" I said, as if explaining one-digit addition to a third-grader. "We don't even have a keyboard player."

Neither does AC/DC, but I figured she wouldn't know that.

She did. She looked at me as if she'd found me stuck to the bottom of her shoe upon leaving the restroom. Then without a word, she turned and walked back to her table. She was sitting with her older sister. She leaned over and said something to her sister and they both laughed.

Years later, I learned what that "something" was: "That guy is the biggest (expletive deleted) I've ever met."

What can I say? Mrs. Taylor was an excellent judge of character even then.

For my part, I thought she was an effete, stuck-up little princess. But that didn't make my knees any less weak or her eyes any less blue.

A week later, we were dating. Opposites and all that. It took a long time to get past our initial impressions of each other, which were partly right, mostly wrong.

And as the years passed, our rough edges wore away, like two pieces of cracked marble colliding in a rock tumbler, until at last nothing much remains but smooth, beautiful stone.

Oh, we're still opposites, I suppose, but lordy, how we do attract.

That's my "how we met" story. Now, you tell me yours. Send your tales of courtship to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429 or via e-mail to mtaylor325@gmail.com. I'll include the best of them in a future column!

I'd like to state now, up front and for the record, that I do not, under any circumstances, recommend the drain cleaning product mentioned in my column of two weeks ago. It is unsafe, an environmental nightmare, a health hazard to rival avian flu, bubonic plague, and Republicans. Whatever you do, for the love of all that's holy, don't use it!

Especially don't use it if you're one of the literally hundreds of readers who sent me letters and e-mails requesting the name of the aforementioned product. It is, I repeat, too dangerous!

OK, that's out of the way. Hopefully, it's enough to keep me safe from the sort of people who sue McDonald's because their coffee's hot.

That said, the name of the drain cleaner is - drum roll please! - "Clobber" and it works great!

Since writing the "Hair in the Drain" column, I've done a little research and found out a bit more about the product. It turns out Clobber is manufactured by a company called Hercules, using the same basic ingredient found in the blood of those aliens in the Sigourney Weaver movies.

Clobber is 93 percent "virgin sulfuric acid," which means it's not safe to put in your coffee, even if it is the stuff served at McDonald's. According to one plumber's Web site, it "disintegrates paper, rags, food scraps and all organic matter. It melts ice, liquefies grease" and will completely dissolve that body you've been storing in your freezer and can't figure out what to do with. (OK, so I made that last bit up. Sue me. No wait, that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid!)

Anyway, the stuff is strong. Unfortunately, it's so strong that it will also dissolve drains made from stainless steel, aluminum, chrome and galvanized steel. If your pipes are plastic, well, they might as well be made of warm Play-Doh, as far as Clobber is concerned.

I should point out that most of the Web sites I visited while researching Clobber refuse to sell it to non-plumbers. I'm not sure if there's an actual law preventing them from doing so, but there might be. Maybe they're just afraid of what regular folks like you and me might do with the stuff. (Like taking care of that body in the freezer.)

At any rate, if you can find a hardware store that will sell it to you, that's cool. Just don't mention my name. I don't have much, but what little I do have I can't afford to lose in a lawsuit to some lady who added Clobber to her McDonald's coffee because she misunderstood what I said in paragraph six.

I know there's at least one hardware store that sells Clobber to the general public. They sent a letter saying that next time I mention a plumbing-related product in my column, I should give them a call first and let them know, so they can stock extra of it. Apparently, they had a run on Clobber the day after the original column was published.

Frankly, I had no idea my little essays could have that sort of influence on the reading public. But now that I do know, I'm doing what any red-blooded American would do - trying to come up with ways to scam a few bucks out of it.

I figure that maybe I could set myself up as the plumbing version of Oprah and her "book club." However, unlike Oprah, I'd be basing my recommendations not on the actual worth of the product in question, but rather how much the manufacturer is willing to give me in kickbacks.

Or maybe I could land an actual endorsement deal. That's right, Clobber execs, for a reasonable rate, I will be to Clobber what Suzanne Summers is to the ThighMaster! Send me a juicy check and I'll find a way to work your product name into every single Reality Check column from here on out!

Would that make me a sellout? Heck, yeah! But I'm 52 years old, man, and broke. If I don't sell out soon, I'm never going to get to retire. And somebody already used that spilled coffee scam.

(Also, that "Republican" comment in paragraph one was just a joke, folks, to make my old man happy.)

To contact Mike Taylor with your questions, comments, or product endorsement deals, e-mail mtaylor325@gmail.com or write via snail mail to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429.

I've mentioned previously in this column that I suffer from acrophobia, a fear of heights. I can't step onto a high curb without little, black spots swimming before my eyes.

As a kid, I would force myself to spend hours at a time in my tree house, located about 20 feet up in a backyard chestnut tree. 

I built the thing myself with scrap lumber scrounged from around the neighborhood. No one familiar with my construction skills will be surprised to hear that tree house was dangerously unstable. Every time the wind blew, parts of it worked loose and dropped to the ground.

Still, I sat up there every day, all summer long, reading Superman and Magnus the Robot Fighter comics, my knees knocking, my breath rasping in and out in short, desperate gasps. 

It didn't help me overcome my fear of heights.

Decades later, the phobia is still with me. To this day, I can actually make myself dizzy even while standing on level ground; all I have to do is look up and pretend I'm elevated. The mere illusion of height is enough to give me a serious case of the heebee-jeebees (from the Latin, heebus-jeebus, aka "the willies").

So is it any wonder the idea of hanging Christmas lights fills me with such dread?

Each October I start thinking about it, about rooflines and ladders and staple-guns and tangled strings of twinkle lights and strong, November winds. And how they all conspire to send me to an early grave. By the time The Lovely Mrs. Taylor actually brings the decoration-filled boxes up from the basement, I've worked myself into a tizzy not unlike the one experienced by Jimmy Stewart in "Vertigo."

But I'm the man, and it is the man's sacred duty to brave November winds, ladders and so on to get those lights hung before the kids arrive for the holidays.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that most of the roofline of my house - at least the parts to which we attach Christmas lights - is only about eight feet off the ground. I can hang lights in these places while standing on the ladder's second rung. Even that small elevation makes me a little queasy, but if I don't think about it too much, I can cope.

The peak over the front porch, however ... that is high. I'm not sure how high, because I'm lousy at estimating distances, but it's high enough that a fall from that height would probably land me in the hospital, if I was lucky enough to survive at all.

Nevertheless, there I was last weekend, working my way around the front of the house, ever closer to that peak. Every time I hung a light and moved the ladder one spot to the left, I was forced to step onto the next highest rung in order to reach the roofline. 

Three, four, five, six ... my ladder has only nine rungs, which is more than enough for my tastes, lemme tell ya.

Nearing the peak, I had to place both feet on step number seven, the one that has printed on it in police-tape-yellow the legend: DO NOT STAND ABOVE THIS STEP! Swaying precariously in the frigid, late-November gusts, I stapled the string of lights to the roof and shakily descended.

I moved the ladder three feet to the left, directly beneath the peak. I glanced up. The peak was already slightly obscured by the black dots dancing before my eyes. Before I could chicken out, I grabbed the end of the string of lights and scurried back up.

Step five, six, seven ... then step number eight. I was above the DO NOT STAND ABOVE THIS STEP rung. The only place to go from here was the flat top platform where the two halves of the ladder come together.

The police-tape-yellow printing on the platform read: DO NOT STAND HERE! ARE YOU NUTS? DIDN'T YOU READ THE MESSAGE ON STEP NUMBER SEVEN?!

Reaching up, I grasped the roofline and eased onto the platform. I slowly moved the light-string into place, positioned the staple gun and - thwap - fired home a staple.

The ladder trembled. I trembled. I discovered, to my surprise, that I still know all the words to the Rosary. I was on my fifth Hail Mary when my feet again made contact with the ground.

The lights look great, which is a good thing, since they're going to be up there until the wind knocks ‘em down in April.

To contact Mike Taylor with your questions, comments, or offers of free psychological counseling, e-mail mtaylor325@gmail.com or write via snail mail to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429.

I'm crazy about The Lovely Mrs. Taylor, don't get me wrong. But, well ... she sheds like a collie in August. Mrs. T has long, beautiful, wavy, Julia-Roberts-in-"Pretty-Woman" hair. It looks great, I think. However, it clogs the drain in the shower faster than I can clean it out.

I'll admit I also contribute to the problem. I don't want to offend any readers with particularly delicate sensibilities, but ... how to put this? ... Have you ever seen that famous, though blurry footage of Bigfoot trundling through the woods? That's me. I have more body hair than Robin Williams bathing in Rogaine. I'm like some sort of mythical woodland creature from a Tolkien story. One from a cold climate.

At any rate, that drain runs slow four days out of five and until recently, no amount of plunging, drain cleaning or supplications to the gods of plumbing could do a thing to alter that fact.

So a while back, I presented this problem to my father-in-law, who makes his living as a plumber. (Having a plumber in the family is, by the way, the Best Thing in the World.)

My father-in-law has seen me in action with a chain saw and various other power tools, so his first recommendation was, "Try some Liquid Plunger*." He figured I couldn't do too much damage with an over-the-counter drain cleaner.

Following his advice, I purchased the Liquid Plunger and - blatantly disregarding the directions on the bottle - poured fully 100-percent of its contents into the shower basin. Where it sat like an inert, gelatinous blob for 30 minutes before slooooooooowly descending into the drain. I went back to the store, purchased a second bottle of Liquid Plunger, and repeated the procedure. This time, the gelatinous blob went down the drain after only 20 minutes.

Liquid Plunger, I discovered, is no match for Mrs. T's silken tresses.

Figuring the old ways are perhaps best, I climbed into the shower with plunger (not the liquid kind) in hand. I plunged. And plunged. And plunged. And plunged. After about a half-hour of this, the drain was running only slightly slower than it had before I started.

Sweat poured from my brow and dripped into the shower, where it collected at the drain, joining the rest of the standing water there.

As I always do when I have a home repair problem I can't handle myself, I called my father-in-law again.

"Liquid Plunger didn't work?" he said.

"Liquid Plunger didn't work," I affirmed.

"Hmm..." he said.

I waited.

"Did you try plunging it with a plunger?" he said.

"I did," I said.

"Hmm..." he said.

I waited.

Finally, with obvious reluctance and in hushed, reverential tones, my father-in-law told me The Secret. There is, he said, a substance known to only a few, which will clear any drain, and fast. It is to Liquid Plunger what the A-Bomb is to a peashooter, he said.

Like a drug dealer sharing the secret of an especially potent batch of crystal meth, he told me where I could buy this magical drain elixir, told me its name.

I went to the small, out-of-the-way hardware store as instructed, gave the manager there the secret plumber's handshake, and whispered the password, "Big John sent me. The crow flies at midnight."

Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, the store manager signaled me to follow him into a back room. There, from a lead-lined case, he removed a two-quart, white bottle. The bottle sported no cutesy pictures of scrubbing bubbles or a slogan claiming it was the "fastest-acting." It was covered instead with red, block letters warning against everything from accidental poisoning to possible radioactivity-related side effects.

The manager placed the bottle in a heavy, plastic bag and handed it to me.

"Wear gloves," he said.

Back home, wearing heavy gloves, safety goggles and a painter's facemask (really!), I removed the bottle's lid and - following the directions very carefully - dispensed a small amount of the contents into the hopelessly clogged drain. It immediately began bubbling furiously. In 30 seconds, the drain was clear and running freely.

Hours later, somewhere in Lake Michigan, thousands of fish undoubtedly met with an untimely end. But my drain was clear.

Though the bottle was still mostly full, I went back to the hardware store and purchased two more. Anything that works this good is sure to be banned any day by the FDA, EPA, DNR or FBI. When that happens, I'll be the guy standing in the shadows outside your neighborhood hardware store, saying, "Psst. Hey, bud. I hear ya got a clogged drain..."

* The product's name has been changed to protect me from lawsuits.

To contact Mike Taylor with your questions, comments, or to obtain the name of the drain cleaner mentioned in this column (after verifying you are not a representative of the EPA), e-mail mtaylor325@gmail.com or write via snail mail to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429.