The Cheap Seats

Sanity seems to take a break off this time of year. From Thanksgiving to Christmas many of us seem to lose our minds - or at least the part that is usually governed by common sense. A feeding frenzy, more often found in piranha than people, grips our collective consciousness and we throw caution, good judgment and good money to the four winds. I'm referring to that annual rite of the holiday season called "Overdoing it". Some of you are nodding your head with a wry smile on your face, aren't you? You were in the club (as I was too). You never imagined you would have been a part of this alliance, but you were once card-carrying members with all of the rights, privileges and lunacy that came with charter membership. And now that you have extracted yourself from the "fun", you can put a name to your former condition - Overdoer. Who are these Overdoers, and what sort of madness grips them this time of year? More importantly, how do we safely recognize t

If you are near my age, you grew up in an entirely different era than today's children do. An innocent childhood might have been during the Carter Administration, a much wilder youth spent in the Reagan years. Your parents were much more likely to be together than apart. Mom and Dad met most of your needs but they weren't your friends. You had secrets they didn't know about, they had lives that didn't interest you. When you got in trouble at school, your parents didn't take your side. You were resilient and learned the hard way how to survive without expecting them to always bail you out. That status quo worked just fine. Fast forward to the present - Moms and Dads are Splitsville, parents and children are "besties", everyone's lives are open books, it's the school's fault and today's children will reach adulthood by the tender age of 28. Am I exaggerating? Of course, but in too many cases only slightly. Am I as guilty as the next par

Every once in a great while a book can completely change a person's attitude. When I was a teenager I harbored the self-righteous opinion that serving one's country in the military was NOT a noble calling. A waste of time and resources, I believed. And then at the age of 18, I read Battle Cry .   Written by World War II veteran Leon Uris, Battle Cry was a chronicle of the exploits of a United States Marine regiment. The story is told through the eyes of a battle-hardened sergeant from training recruits in boot camp through the jungle fighting on Guadalcanal to the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific that culminated with the regiment's final battle on the coral atoll called Tarawa. The effect Battle Cry had on me as a teenager rippled outward across decades to the man who is now on the back nine of his 40's.   As a result of  Battle Cry , I spent the entire 90's reading nothing but non-fiction biographies and histories of the American Civil War. I vis

A presidential election year is like a hard winter - shared suffering. We are all inconvenienced, the chill is felt equally, but instead of being up to our waists in clean white snow, we are up to our necks in something of a much darker texture and smell. Mercifully, it all ends Tuesday. I made a conscious effort this election season to avoid writing about the topic of presidential politics. Now more than ever, the subject is just too polarizing. Besides, this gig doesn't pay enough (pro bono) to offend my regular readers (all five of you). Oh sure, I took swipes at both Republicans and Democrats in July, but that was due to extreme lunacy on both sides of this aisle. But, just because I haven't written about the Presidential election of 2012, doesn't mean I don't have opinions. These opinions, however, aren't what they used to be. In my younger days, these political preferences were more rabidly partisan and one-sided. Time, it seems, has either made me