The Cheap Seats

I had an unusual experience two night ago. I actually time-traveled. No, I didn't accelerate a sleek silver Delorean up to 88 miles per hour and disappear in burst of bright light. Instead, I was driving a plain white Ford Fiesta to a bar/restaurant in Roseville, Minnesota. While the scenery didn't change the closer I got to my destination, my frame of mind sure did. And why not? I was about to gather with a group of people (many whom I hadn't seen in years) who still burn brightly in my memory. The older I've gotten, the luckier I know I've become to have met and grown close to this group of people in the fall of 1985. Yes, that long ago. After a quick review of the Cheap Seats archive, I wasn't surprised to discover that I had already written fondly of my first year of college at the University of Minnesota- Morris . Oh well, another one won't hurt, right?  The reunion was long overdue, but still planned for an entirely unwanted reason. As I men...

I remember the first time I saw Jim Bartness. He was lying casually on his side in our dormitory common area as myself and 70 other freshmen were told the rules of on-campus college life by our Blakely Hall Residential Assistants. My first impression wasn't a good one. Jim had a comment for everything, most of them at the expense of the earnest RA's who were just trying to get through a long checklist of do's and don'ts. " Who's the smart ass? " I wondered as Jim gained new friends with each playful remark. Little did I know it in the fall of '85, but that smart ass would turn out to be one of my best friends for the better part of the next, and very formative, five years.  College still stand out as a vivid island of time in my memory. Everything was new—our friends, our experiences, our struggles. And if a person is lucky enough, the right people appear to help him become more like the person he's meant to be. Jim, and a few treasured othe...

Eighty-six years ago Franklin Roosevelt addressed a frightened nation after taking the oath of office to become the 32nd President of the United States. Of the many words he uttered that cold, bleak March day, only one line has lived on in history. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He couldn't have been more wrong. Almost four years into the Great Depression, America was teetering on the brink of revolution. The economy that had seemed boundless only a few years earlier had totally collapsed. Wages had plummeted, one out of every four Americans were out of work, and the fabric of family life was badly frayed. Fear was real, its causes could be named, its justifications were well established. But thanks to FDR and his Brain Trust (not to mention a job-creating world war), the United States crawled out of its self-induced financial collapse and became the great economic engine that dominated the globe for the next seventy-five years. While that...

When I was a kid I devoured books about the Kennedy Assassination and the national trauma it kicked off. It wasn't long before my reading splintered off into the realm of conspiracy theory. How could it not? The Conspiracy Industrial Complex was practically born within hours of 12:30pm CST, November 22, 1963. Even to this day, speculation is still rife across the land that it was the CIA or LBJ or the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Mafia (capital M) or some Venn Diagram combination of all four. And I bought it hook, line, and sinker for decades. Well no more. Lee Harvey Oswald did it. That's right—pathetic, loner, loser Lee Harvey upended American History (with a capital H) all by himself. Nobodies like him aren't supposed to, but he did. Sure, the Warren Commission (tasked with investigating JFK's murder) did a pisspoor job with the evidence, didn't interview everyone they should have, and even rushed to judgment to reach a conclusion that was foregone, but ...

A few days ago a co-worker asked me if Addie Braver was entirely fictional. I said it was, but admitted that many of the themes in the book (addiction and recovery, loss and redemption) were familiar, not just to me, but to all of us. "Write what you know, I suppose?" she said. I agreed. Sooner or later, we all find our therapy. It doesn't have to be talking to a trained professional or attending weekly meetings. Therapy comes in all shapes, sizes, and intensities. Therapy is running, singing, dancing, fishing, hiking, woodworking, painting, knitting, playing an instrument, and countless other fulfilling activities. My therapy just happened to be writing. No, I didn't have a crippling addiction I needed to break. But if you're like me (and I think most of you are), you've collected a lot of baggage too. After while it gets pretty darn heavy, crushing us from time to time with the weight of expectation and disappointment. Not all of that baggage was ...