Mike Matson

When I go out to eat, I don’t walk into the restaurant and holler out my culinary preferences. I wait to be seated, enter into a social contract of sorts with the system and select from a range of choices presented via a menu. They bring my dinner, I eat, pay up and leave.   I expect to be served a meal. They expect me to pay for it.      When I get up in the morning, brew a pot of strong enough to walk and pull up my favorite newspapers online, I have an expectation that the

This column was published December 13, 2025 in the Manhattan Mercury . When my wife and I made the decision to get married in December 1998, I was living and working in Topeka, she was doing the same in Manhattan. The logical question arose. Where will we live?   We thought about it for three entire seconds, looked at each other and said in unison, “Manhattan.”   When I first left Manhattan, I was two years old and 40 when I returned. Born here while my father earned an agron

This column was published November 29, 2025 in the Manhattan Mercury . I remember a journalistic colleague once asking Topeka gay-bashing Baptist minister Fred Phelps on camera how it felt to live, work and operate in the lunatic fringe.   This was in the early ‘90s, pre-Internet, before social media.   Phelps grew red in the face and thundered forth with pure venom. In his mind, he was right, the rest of us were wrong.   Lunatic fringe? How dare you?    In his unwavering cer