Guys, as a rule, don’t stride purposefully or move with urgent gaits. We tend to saunter, amble and mosey along, confident we’ll be able to spring into action at a moment’s notice. That’s what the male of the species has done since living in caves and being the one responsible for bringing home the bacon. Well, maybe it wasn’t bacon way back them. More like brontosaurus chops or pterodactyl wings, I suppose. Women seem to hump along (no offense intended) much faster, and it comes naturally to them. It may be that they spent so much time in the cave waiting for Oog and the boys to return from the hunt that this is some kind of genetic compensation for their prehistoric sedentary ways.

Mary, my wife, walks faster than I do. We walk together every day—at least a couple of miles—and I have to hurry my step a bit to keep up with her. That’s good, because we move along at what seems to be a rapid pace. We walk as fast as some old guys jog, but apparently our pace is inadequate for the walking women I’ve encountered out there. Our walking started with laps around the high school track, and I remember after a week or so of this exercise that I was feeling less fat and more fit. I thought I was moving at warp speed. Apparently, the only thing warped was my impressions of my own walking prowess.

One late afternoon, we were doing our laps when I heard voices behind us. They kept getting closer and a glance over my shoulder revealed someone moving up on the lanes inside. My first assumption was joggers, maybe members of the school cross-country team doing winter laps. Instead, what overtook us in the next few seconds was a pair of women, perhaps in their late thirties or early forties, walking along quite casually while engaged in an animated conversation. There seemed to be no exertion at all on their part while I was engaged in spirited breathing and premature perspiring. They pulled away from us quite easily, and had gained more than a hundred yards on us by the end of the lap.

Since then I have walked—usually with Mary but sometimes solo—on other public walkways and have noticed I am no match for women when it comes to speed. Other men, in the meantime, are more my pace and a good many of them slower.

I read recently that eight out of every 10 Americans would like to walk more for exercise, but the downside is that you need to set aside the time and you need a place to walk that is not a life-threatening experience due to traffic, unchained dogs and menacing figures who might delight in taunting you. That’s a feeble excuse, because you can really walk anywhere. Scenic walking trails are nice but certainly not a necessity.

According to the Federal Highway Administration in a fairly recent report, about 51 percent of Americans use walking as a regular mode of travel. That is walking for transportation purposes, not recreation, and that is based on a minimum of three days a week. When you live in a rural area as I do, you pretty much have to drive to where you want to go or you wouldn’t have time to get anything done. Living in a small town, I can walk to the post office and a convenience market within a matter of minutes, but the grocery store and even my bank are not quite as convenient, in terms of walking time, and would require negotiating and crossing busy highways. Carrying an armful of groceries and dodging traffic may be good exercise, but it is definitely an accident waiting to happen.

That means any serious walking I do has to be recreational or for health reasons. This type of recreation isn’t necessarily fun for a retired runner and active sports guy, but it is one of my dwindling options for getting fit. The same can be said for my various exercise endeavors, including calisthenics, heavy dumbbells and an elliptical trainer. They’ve become part of my daily routine in 2012 and walking is the most enjoyable, especially walking with my favorite person in the world. There is fresh air, a chance to talk about our lives while doing something constructive and even reacquainting ourselves with neighbors. I’m actually getting so I look forward to it, even if I can’t keep up with some of those women. It’s tough to overcome genetics.

About 27 percent of the people who walk regularly do it as exercise or for health purposes, according to a cooperative national survey funded by government agencies. Then there are the 15.3 percent who walk for recreation, which I would have included with the exercise/health bunch. That tells me 42 percent of regular walkers are doing it for themselves and not out of necessity. Most of the remaining do it because they have to or for more practical reasons like errands (17.3), going home (10.2), visiting family or friends (8.8), getting to school or work (5.1) and, of course, walking the dog (4.0).

I suppose I fit into two categories, because we usually take our dog on the first loop, drop him off back at the house and them do some serious striding for another two miles or so. I’m not sure why so many more people walk home than they do to school or work, but I guess you always have to get home.

Technology may have turned us into couch potatoes, but it may be our greatest hope for achieving fitness.

Keeping my weight down has been a life-long battle, but, through it all I have never been a calorie counter, an advocate of the energy-in, energy-out approach to losing weight. It’s not that I don’t believe in it, but I have had success with other approaches based on what you eat, supplementing it with exercise. Despite my successes in losing weight, I have had even greater success gaining it back.  I’ve gained back hundreds of pounds over three-plus decades.

I believe in moderation, even if I don’t always practice it, and there is no question that if you eat modest portions of good stuff, you’ll take off pounds. The more dramatic the change in your eating habits in terms of how much you eat, the more weight you are likely to lose. I say likely because some people can literally starve themselves and not lose weight. My mother was like that, and she always blamed it on her metabolism or some kind of supreme test by God.

I doubt God wanted my mother to be obese for most of her adult life—the birthing of multiple children transforming her from a sylph-like figure to what we might describe as rotund. I, too, have endured my share of rotundity, but I never suffered that curse of not being able to lose weight. I have lost 60 pounds or more several times over the years. On even more occasions, I have dropped 20 or 30 pounds and seemed on my way to the ultimate goal, only to falter.

As I was saying, I have changed my diet and become a calorie counter, with remarkable success, I might add, since Christmas. A Christmas gift called a Fitbit has made the difference.  It’s only about two-and-a-half inches long and I put it in my pocket. You can also hook it on your belt, but it essentially keeps track of your activity—the number of steps you take, the flights of steps you conquer and an running tally of calories expended. I have to do 10,000 steps a day for my daily goal, and I’ve become committed, if not obsessed, in its achievement. Since the start of my new diet on Dec. 27, I only came up short of that 10,000-step goal one time. I had a colonoscopy that day, by the way, and was discouraged from anything beyond light exercise.

Mary and I walk a  couple of miles at the end of every workday, which translates to about 4,500 steps. We live in a section of town that draws walkers from all over the area, along with their dogs, attracted to of a half-mile, low-traffic circuit with sufficient gradients to get the juices flowing. I also take to my elliptical and push myself for between 15 minutes and half an hour depending on how active I have been the rest of the day.  The Fitbit, which syncs wirelessly with my computer on my personal website, keeps track of all of this. It makes you very conscious of how much you are exercising and, in my case, motivates me to get in those steps when I have been fairly sedentary otherwise. You can’t really cheat. What goes on the record stays there. You can also compare your activity with selected friends as a motivational tool.

Here’s another cool part. You log in other exercise you do, based on time and intensity, and that estimates calories expended. For instance, I make it a point to work out between a half hour and 45 minutes daily, including pushups, sit-ups and exercises with dumbbells and exercise ball. This all helps me meet my daily calorie expenditure goal of about 3,300.  I can also log in the elliptical workout for the additional calories burned. If I just rely on walking alone, I’d probably have to top 12,000 steps to reach the calorie goal.

That’s not the coolest part. My Fitbit website allows me to log in the food I eat. It makes you very aware of not just calories but fat, carbohydrates, protein and fiber consumed. Many of the foods you eat, including restaurant fare, are in the archives based on servings, so you need to be accurate in how much you consume. If you eat something not in the archives, you can log in the basics off the nutritional table from the package itself. I’m on a high-fiber diet, based on doctor’s advice, and I not only have a handle on that, but as I log in the meals and snacks, there is a running tally of carbs, fat and protein by both grams and percentage.

This technology is only going to get better. You have to be honest with the food and exercise activity you log, but I’m guessing the technology will catch up soon, especially the types of exercise you do and actual calories expended.

By the way, I’ve lost 22 pounds since Dec. 27—a little over a month ago—and my energy level is better that it has been in years. It’s definitely a good start, and it could be the start of something big.

The tantalizing aroma of coffee triggers the pursuit of rewards—good and bad. It may motivate you to start the day off right or to put off doing what needs to be done.

It’s the bad stuff we do to ourselves when we should know better. That includes my weakness—eating too much —despite ample evidence on my waistline that it will shorten my life along with my breath. Then there’s all that other self-destructive stuff like spending money we don’t have, wanton consumption of alcohol, smoking, snorting, shooting up, sexual trysting outside cohabitation and unnatural preoccupation with technology.

They are all things which promise rewards—the reason we are drawn to them in the first place—but are more likely to prove unsatisfactory, even disappointing when the acts are consummated.

Yet, though our rational mind may tell us that chocolate gorging, excessive mall shopping and obsessive smart phoning never deliver the rewards they promise, we keep going back for more.  This is instant gratification, and because it doesn’t last very long, it puts an ominous slant on the old Lays Potato Chips taunt, “Bet you can’t eat just one.”  You eat one, maybe because you are genuinely hungry, and then another and another until it goes beyond what you need to what you crave.

You are craving it, not because the body needs it for nourishment, but because the brain is telling you, “Go ahead, have another and good things will happen.” We know potato chips have no nutritional value and are essentially comfort food, but we lose all reason when the dopamine kicks in.

It is the release of dopamine, a chemical neurotransmitter, in our brains that psychologists and brain scientists are saying attract us to both good and bad stuff. It may be the aroma of coffee or photo layouts in catalogues, but it triggers something in us that catapults us into shopping sprees when we are already in debt or ordering a piece of pie in a diner when we aren’t even hungry. In short, dopamine makes dopes of all of us.

Did you know that if you do something good, it provides the rationalization for doing something bad? Think about it.  It creates a sense of entitlement, according to Dr. Kelly McGonigal in her book, The Willpower Instinct, and now you have an excuse for being bad next time. Good behavior gives you license for some balancing bad behavior. You can moralize anything, even positive things you plan to do but have not yet got around to doing. You went to the home improvement store and bought the paint and caulk you’ll need for that long delayed weatherization project. Seems like a good excuse for an evening of fine dining or a weekend excursion that would be better spent getting that job done.

Studies show that people overindulge at a meal or take comfort in sweets because they plan to exercise the next morning or start on a strict diet the next week. Usually the intention never materializes, but the willpower lapse has done its damage.

There is a difference between pursuing and achieving happiness, as McGonigal explains in her book (subtitled “How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What you Can do to Get More of It”) and dopamine is purely about the former. It is a very primitive response, reverting back to fight-or-flight, but a calorie-laden cheese cake has replaced the saber tooth tiger. The reward for the latter is living to face another day—a primal form of happiness— and the latter is what your brain is beckoning as a more immediate and attainable pursuit of happiness.

This is all very complex stuff, and the reason we lose so many willpower battles is because our reaction to surrendering to our baser desires is feeling guilty or getting mad at ourselves. You would think these reactions would be the motivation we need to bolster willpower, but quite the opposite applies. Failing does not make us stronger. It makes us weaker, more apt to fail again.

Stress also makes us weaker, according to this school of self-control scholarship, and we need to reward ourselves in order to survive times of stress—or so this part of our brain would have us believe. If you get behind on a project, you are more likely to find ways of putting it off—and that often means seeking some kind of reward like watching that football game on TV or a mall trip triggering more dopamine.

Of course, for most of us, we get it done when our job or reputation is on the line, but at a very stressful price. That means, with this accomplishment, we are entitled to an even greater reward. Whatever that reward may be, you may be assured it will never be enough. It doesn’t matter. You will continue the cycle of the mindless seeking of rewards as stepping stones to happiness.

The answer is more about thinking rationally about what you are doing and what the consequences for your reward will be. It’s not necessarily about abstinence or self-denial, which are seen as tests of character. I personally think that character does play a role in what we choose to do or not to do, but it also makes sense that lack of willpower is not so much a weakness as it is failing to understand the immediate rewards that entice us.

Sports on television has become a real bore—with the exception of the National Football League and, most notably, its postseason.

Take college basketball. I don’t pay much attention to it until March Madness arrives and, even then, only a handful of games interest me. My limited attention span includes the Sweet 16 through the championship game. Winners and losers pass with little notice. By May I couldn’t tell you two of the Final Four teams.

Then there is professional basketball, the NBA. I used to watch it a lot during the regular season, and I followed the playoffs closely. Whether it was the Knicks with Willis Reed and Walt “Clyde” Frasier, the Lakers going against the Celtics—through the Magic-versus-Bird years— and even, to a lesser extent, the Michael Jordan era. Now I seldom watch an NBA game—not even the playoffs—and I paid only nominal attention to the championship clash between the Mavs and Heat last year. I only remember who played because of all the negative stuff about LeBron and Dwyane. By the way, I think too many pro basketball players were named by parents who couldn’t spell. Dwyane for Duane? Shades of Isiah (Just Call Him Isaiah) Thomas.

Forget about the NHL. I‘m not into hockey at all, and if I want to see punching, missing teeth and bloodied faces, there is boxing. Come to think of it, I don’t watch boxing anymore either. I think I stopped paying attention to that sometime around the downfall of Mike Tyson.

Oh, yes, I do pay occasional attention to college football, but I don’t really pledge allegiance to any particular team. The closest would be Penn State, which is only a couple of hours’ drive from me, but there are so many rabid Nittany Lions fans in these parts that the bright side of losing is the pleasure of them shutting up. Recent events and transgressions have turned the once rosy image of Happy Valley into a sober, if not menacing, one. It has made rooting for Penn State akin to confessing you were once a Hitler Youth.

As for the rest of the collegiate football scene, I can’t get all that excited about the modern day college powers from places like Baton Rouge, Birmingham and Tulsa.  It’s like rooting for the pro-slavery side in the Civil War.

Baseball gets mired in an interminably long season that doesn’t mean anything. In fact, the more dominant you are, the less likely you’ll even get to the World Series, let alone win it. It’s those teams that clinch a playoff berth in the last few innings of the season who seem to excel in the postseason. Witness St. Louis— barely good enough to qualify as a wild card but the ultimate World Series champion. Watching major league baseball in the spring and summer? Forget about it.

The only baseball I follow any more is Little League—as in the championship playoff tourney in Williamsport. Like most American boys, I grew up playing both sand lot and organized baseball, savoring the unique rhythms and skills of the game, imagining myself in the major leagues. Kids playing baseball is an iconic American image, and Little League is the only place where playing with joyful abandon is still part of baseball.

That leaves the NFL, and I do watch at least one game most weekends. My favorite time of the year is right now, with the AFC and NFC playoffs. It is fast moving and combative, lurching forward in spurts of military precision and superb athleticism, separated by pockets of dormancy, not to mention commercials and timeouts. You can email, text, pay your bills, write a letter to Aunt Gracie, fill out your tax forms, do some light calisthenics and run back and forth to the refrigerator a lot and still savor every play of the game. It’s perfect for partying, offering a minute of action for every two minutes you can cheer, place bets and make inane observations that are generally forgotten because they are, well, so inane and everyone’s pretty drunk anyway.

There is no more fun place to be than a sports bar during any of the NFL playoff games right through the Super Bowl. In fact, the Super Bowl itself is probably the least fun of them all.  People who don’t even like football host Super Bowl parties and invite people who are more into the commercials and halftime show. If you are really interested in watching the game and all its nuances and intricacies, don’t go to one of these parties. Everybody’s talking and laughing during the game and paying rapt attention to the commercials and the mini-concert at halftime. People expect you to hold up your end of a conversation, and you’re trying not to appear rude as you check out via peripheral vision whether they convert that critical third-and-two.

It’s the finality of each contest that is so compelling. We’re down to four teams and two games—make that three games—and that’s a shame. The worst thing about one-and-done playoffs is that is always comes down to two teams putting it all on the line in one game—and one game only. It’s also the best thing.

There is something to be said for willpower, and that is, to be succinct, none of us thinks we have enough of it. People who are overweight, smoke, drink too much and, yes, commit heinous criminal acts believe they didn’t get their fair share. Is it something you are born with, like athletic ability or brainpower, or a virtue you have adopted like piety or selflessness.

Patience may be a virtue, but the power to wield it may rely on a small part of your brain.

If you have failed to succeed professionally or to have earned enough money to plop yourself in the lap of luxury, you may feel cursed with a shortfall of willpower.  This is generally regarded as a weakness and those severely lacking are deemed losers.

If a wealth of willpower is seen as a virtue, its dearth, contrarily, is viewed as a horrendous failing or frailty requiring tremendous self-control to overcome. Actually, self-control is pretty much the same thing as willpower. You kick it in when you want to resist something that is bad for you or when you really should be doing something you don’t want to do. As important as willpower has become to most of us, few of our great writers, philosophers, artists and musicians have addressed it in memorable prose or verse

In music, I recall a schmaltzy song by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap called “Lady Willpower,” which was less about willpower than some guy stalking a girl who wants no part of him: “… and I would gladly teach you if I could only reach you and get your lovin’ in return…” Hey, would you want to spend your adult life as Mrs. Puckett? That’s the real willpower.

My life has been a continuous testing of willpower. I didn’t want to be born, but somehow I exited the womb, only to find myself bawling like a baby, which I was, and despising myself for not being able to stop. I don’t remember any of this, of course, but, judging by my devastating losses to willpower the rest of my life, it must have happened that way. There was nothing in my childhood that should have alerted me to the willpower deficit I would discover as an adult. I was a decent student, but I didn’t have to study to be one, though I endured several lectures between the ages of 12 and 18 about how I needed to apply myself and how I was an underachiever.

I was a decent athlete, but I was generally regarded as someone who could have been the proverbial contender and stumbled short of the finish line because I didn’t work or try hard enough.

I didn’t realize then that this was about willpower, or the lack of it, until I went off to college, another stumbling start; into the Army to beat the inevitable draft; back to college, this time with more success, and into several decades as a newspaper reporter and editor.

I lost a lot of battles to willpower, including the battle of the bulge; too much spending and not enough saving, and your basic, every day lapses and poor choices. You tend to downplay the triumphs as stuff you should have done and dwell on the failures.

Why would I not see myself as lacking the virtue of willpower after losing so many internal battles? I was up to most external challenges, but I kept losing battles to myself.  Every new year my self doubts are reawakened by this compulsion for resolutions that generally fail, and a constant chattering of advice in the media about how to bolster your willpower.

My self-esteem has taken a battering, but modern science brings hope. Imagine the joy of discovering that willpower has little to do with virtue or character. It is more about physiology than psychology, and it is right there in my brain in a place called the prefrontal cortex.  A number of studies have confirmed this, and it is best explained in a recently published book, The Willpower Instinct, by Dr. Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and professor at Stanford University. I say best explained because you do not require much of an attention span to keep reading, which is good news for all of us who are willpower challenged.

The prefrontal cortex is a post-primitive adjunct to the brain—pretty much front and center—that more or less modulates, and when necessary overrides, that fight-or-flight response that kept cavemen from becoming dinosaur munchies. We don’t need the old fight-or-flight mechanism all that much any more, but we sure need to be saved from our inner selves. Modern-day foibles, such as overeating and not planning for the future, originate from the prehistoric necessity to live for the moment. The primitive part of the brain is still there beckoning us to eat as much as we can to store fat to endure a long winter in the cave. That urge covers most human desires, and the prefrontal cortex is the modulator.

“Evolution doesn’t replace our more primitive instincts,” McGonigal writes, concluding that the only thing between me and no willpower at all is the prefrontal cortex.

So, take heart, there is something on which we can blame our lack of self-control. It’s right there in our brain, and, yes, there is stuff we can do to hone our willpower—if we have the self-control to do it. More on that later.

Why so grim, Mr. Reaper? If people weren't dying to meet you, you wouldn't have a job.

We prefer to laugh at death, keeping it at a distance for fear it rubs against us. Diminishing the last cold grasp we will ever feel before shuffling off this mortal coil is accomplished through dark humor and euphemisms. You may have noticed I have already used a number of those cushioned words and phrases that have become substitutes for death and dying—passed on, departed and shuffling off this mortal coil.

There is no word more euphemized than death. Make that euthanized, because we are striving to put that word, signifying stark finality, out of its misery. As a community newspaper editor I scratched my head at the outrageous avoidances of the word in obituaries. It’s as if by not saying death, died and dead that we have somehow defeated it. If I bother to leave my own obituary behind, I shall say I died on such and such a date and hope that whatever else is mentioned is brief and to the point. Maybe by that time I will have accomplished something deserving of a paragraph before launching into my survivors and funeral arrangements.

But I am getting ahead of myself here—way ahead of myself, I’d like to think—because I wanted to tell you some things I hope won’t be stated in my obituary to describe my passing:

—Don’t say I went to my final resting place, because I like to think the soul will live on forever and mine will be immersed in an active lifestyle, er, deathstyle, for time immemorial.  Perhaps it will even come back a few times to partake of other lives, though I can only suspect such things will happen. Forever is far too long to rest.

—I don’t want to go to the sweet bye-and-bye, because when you get to some place bye-and-bye it’s a rather circuitous route. Let’s get there and do what has to be done—unless it’s a final resting place and then I wouldn’t mind dawdling a bit.

—I don’t want to buy the farm, kick the bucket or cash in my chips, but I prefer it to something sanctimonious like being embraced in God’s bosom, singing with the angels or tending the garden of tender mercies. Not that wouldn’t mind being embraced by God, but it seems a little presumptuous to predict in an obit. I’m not much of a gardener, so count the tender mercies out. I can sing a bit, so I wouldn’t mind a gig with an angelic band, assuming classic rock is acceptable.

If I become deceased, joining the legions of the dearly departed, I pray my expiration date allows me to turn mellow like fine wine instead of souring like old milk. If my plug is pulled and I go offline for good, I may find myself in the Elysian Fields listening to the fat lady sing. Then I will know it is time to pay the piper—or whoever is accompanying the fat lady—and will gracefully lay down my life and join the mortally challenged in eternal rest. There I expect to make new friends, perhaps meeting the reaper himself or hitching a ride with the grim ferryman. Maybe I can even cheer him up before we get to the other side?

I suppose, after I answer the last call and awaken to life immortal, I may pay a visit to Davey Jones’s Locker, though I’ve never been big on ocean excursions. My number may be up and I may be tapped out, but I’ll only be down for the count as a mortal, for my soul—or so I have been promised—will live on. I will be giving up the ghost, freeing the spirit, after St. Peter answers my knock on Heaven’s Door, but a new beginning is not a bad thing, even if it is redundant. I shall then be on permanent vacation, as they say, having breathed my last and entered the big sleep. (Apparently breathing is not required while awake or asleep in Heaven. If it is, it could be Hell.)

Some might say that when we have answered the call, it is like pushing up daisies, becoming worm’s meat or shitting the bed, but that is only if you don’t believe in the immortality of the soul and are convinced your ultimate destination is toes up six feet under, returning to dust, snuffed for good and stone cold in a dreamless sleep.

Should the day come when the curtain falls and you cease to exist, joining the ranks of ex-persons, remember you have arrived at that last refuge and have finally reached the proverbial journey’s end. Wherever you are, take a good look around, if you are able, and I will make this one guarantee. It is not going to be like anything you’ve ever imagined.

For all of the living, I bid you a happy, healthy and prosperous new year. For those who have embarked into that good night, I wish you a glorious eternity.

Jolly Old Saint Nicholas Rocks as a Gift Giver.

And you can forget about the 12 days of Christmas. With Christmas shopping officially launched on Black Friday, we’re talking a good 30 days of Christmas in ye olde contemporary times. Let’s see: “…29 halfbacks running, 30 nuns a nunning and a partridge in a pear tree.” As for those 12 days, as stated in the Christmas carol, it would appear there was a great affinity for birds in those days, what with the partridge and assorted swans, geese, turtle doves, calling birds and French hens. I might be able to put up with a parakeet as a present, but no way am I going to be cleaning up after such a fowl menagerie, true love or not. Having a troupe of leaping lords might be tolerated for a few days. After all it is a gift, but I draw the line at a dozen drummers drumming, even if for only one day.

Many Christmas carols and songs place a great reliance on snow. For some reason we all want snow falling on Christmas Eve and into Christmas morning. Then, of course, we want it gone—am-scray— with highways and biways magically clear of slippery obstruction so we can all get back home for the bowl games. We all fall under the spell of dreaming for a white Christmas, but beware of what you wish for with bold demands like “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…” That would lead to the obvious response from your nearest Triple A garage: Let us tow, let us tow, let us tow…

I’ll be candid here and tell you that, as much as I enjoy Christmas, I am not a big fan of all the songs of the season. Those 12 days of Christmas do tend to go on a bit long. Furthermore, I will confess that the Little Drummer Boy gets on my nerves. It’s depressing and way too repetitive with it all of its pa rum pum pum pums. And why would a percussionist— an underaged one at that— be showing up at the manger scene? I suppose it would be a lot quieter than 12 drummers drumming, but you’d be hard pressed to hear yourself think, let alone the cattle lowing.

I’m not even sure what a wassail is, let alone wassailing, but I’m a fan of Good King Wenceslas and the example he sets at being charitable to the poor and unfortunate. We may only assume that he had to raise the taxes on the rest of the citizenry to afford this generosity. They, in turn, would have likely rebelled behind a no-tax movement and suggested instead that the government should not be in the business of ensuring the public welfare. But, hark, said Harold, the singing angel, this is Christmas and we must not forget the good king’s true message: “Therefore, Christian men, be sure/ wealth and rank possessing,/ Ye who now will bless the poor/ shall yourselves find blessing.”

Ah, but I suppose I have been jaded by our modern politics, even as  I give voice to these songs of the season. We know the true Christmas carols tend to be about the birth of Jesus in humble surroundings, but this night in Bethlehem brought us our most joyful holiday and the tradition of buying lots of cool stuff for each other. We somehow rationalized this with the gold, frankincense and myrrh—the so-called gifts of the Magi who were able to find the Bethlehem address with an ancient predecessor of Garmin, a moving star. By the way, I’m seeing nothing there for a little child to play with. As for the myrrh, a bitter perfume symbolic of doom, I’m thinking that’s not a real fun thing to keep in the nursery.

So we got the gifts, and a bunch of good songs to sing, but we really needed Santa Claus to make this thing work and to bring untold bounty to the merchants who are the lifeblood of the economy. The holy and the secular seem to reside side by side during the Christmas season because they both have come to signify the spirit of giving. With this our children have come to learn a valuable lesson about how important it is for their parents and grandparents to give. All too soon, with the passing of childhood, they, too, will learn about giving.

“Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” set the tone for the long lists of gift requests that some might see as the antithesis of giving. The old song, which goes back a good hundred years, has the children asking Santa for skates, story books and dolls, which were apparently the hot toys of the time. Upon closer examination of the song’s lyrics, I noted a compelling stanza that had faded from my memory: “As for me, my little brain isn’t very bright./ Choose for me, old Santa Claus, what you think is right.”

My kids, who are adults themselves now, didn’t get everything they wanted in Christmases past. Most kids don’t. But I never once heard one say, “Just get me what you think is right.”

Merry Christmas and may you and yours recognize the gifts that are truly right.

How's retirement? Let's just say it's nothing like this.

I see myself as among the generation of young retirees who have bowed out of one career and moved on to another venture that has transformed me into a small business. I am the CEO of this business, as well as its board of directors. I am the gopher for myself when I need a cup of coffee. I work at home, with only my dog as  company weekdays. I am his gopher, too, feeding him and letting him out to take care of his business. I am in charge of supper, because my wife, Mary, spends her days teaching learning disabled kids and I’m closer to the kitchen.

I would like to say I am my own boss, but the truth is that I have more bosses now than I ever did as a newspaper editor and reporter. I am juggling a handful of copywriting clients, including several businesses and a public agency. Additionally, I am in the process of researching and writing a book about a young man who destroyed 40 percent of his brain in a fall about 18 years ago. I have relegated about one day a week to working on this project. I am also editing a manuscript for a children’s book, a lovingly crafted story, yet to be published, written some 60 years ago by a mother for her daughter, who is a grandmother herself now.

The latter two projects are more creative than most of my copywriting, which is mostly website content. I get paid more than twice as much for doing this stuff as I did writing and editing on my last newspaper job, which claimed almost 25 years of my life. I wrote some good stuff as a newspaper guy and collected a dozen state awards from the Associated Press and Pennsylvania Newspaper Association for news articles, features and commentary. They garnered some plaques and meals which I or my employer had to pay for to claim my prizes and smatterings of applause in various hotel banquet rooms.

You don’t get paid a lot for writing and reporting if you work for community newspapers as I did. If you are really good, you or your employer foot the bill for your kudos— hotel rooms, educational seminars and banquet fare once a year. If the budget is tight, you pay your own expenses for the honor of picking up your hardware. If you can’t afford to go to the awards, they’ll send them to you, along with the bill for the mailing. The greatest reward was positive feedback from readers and being something of a minor celebrity— the proverbial big fish in the small pond.

As  a copywriter, you are anonymous and you don’t have to be an award winner, as long as your clients are happy with the words you provide. Usually they are, because it is amazing how few people can produce a few paragraphs of readable, compelling words. That includes educated, successful people smarter than most of us. I learned, as a newspaper editor, to convert crappy copy into intelligible stuff that keeps people reading for a sentence or two or three.

Copywriting is about pulling people into those first few sentences and, like a sled gaining momentum down a snowy slope, propelling them to the bottom of your message. It ain’t great literature, but it is great marketing. Direct marketing is especially lucrative, and there are six-figure earnings to be had for 25-30 hours a week of work on your own schedule if you establish yourself there. I am just starting to stick my toe in to test the waters of direct marketing, and I’m not sure if I want to get in too deep. These elite are known as the “wealthy web writers,” and their gift is selling things to people, ranging from multiplying your income through investments  to heightening your sexual potency.

As a journalist for almost four decades, I’m not sure I want to be hawking the modern equivalent of snake oil, even as an anonymous author. As alluring as the “wealthy” part is, it would have to be stuff I believe in, especially when tinkering with peoples’ health and the money they have to live on.

I’ve been on my own for about eight months now, and when I venture from my laptop, escaping the inner sanctum, people ask me how I’m enjoying retirement. I gave up telling them I am a freelance copywriter now, because it elicits blank looks. I don’t have time to explain what a copywriter is, other than writing stuff and getting paid for it, so I have resigned myself to the following answer:

“It takes some getting used to.”

Weight watching becomes spectator sport.

One person’s exploitation is another’s path to success. Nothing exemplifies this dichotomy more than competitive ventures whose prizes range from wooing eligible bachelors to landing recording contracts.

Where I may see fat people being shamed into losing weight for the entertainment of the masses, the shows’ producers see themselves as educating the public on the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. It just happens that they make a lot of money doing it. True public service requires sacrifice, and I see no sacrifice here on the part of the purveyors of this kind of reality fare. The sacrifice comes from the lab rats who submit themselves to public humiliation for a shot at their 15 minutes of fame.

Let me back off here and note that some people are so obese it is life threatening, which means that losing large amounts of weight via diet and exercise is a positive lifesaving experience. I recognize that. Yet I’m a little wary of the trainers and hosts patting themselves on their backs with the unveiling of the sculpted bodies amid the shedding of joyful tears. I’m sure that emotion is real, but at the same time there is something commercially manipulative about it all.

What if the late Mother Teresa had taken a million-dollar salary for ministering to the poverty stricken in India? Of course, she would have taken all she could get to help the poor, through her Missionaries of Charity and the requisite website, but there would be outrage if we learned she had been living in a suite of rooms atop the Calcutta Hilton.

Good deeds seem tainted if the deed doer is being materially rewarded. What we prefer is a suffering victim, and the reaffirmation of the human spirit that comes when others respond by giving of themselves with no expectation of reward. These reality shows—the ones that uplift the fallen—are morality plays that make us feel better about life’s unfairness. So what if they are scripted productions putting a lot of money in the pockets of people adept at plucking our heartstrings.

That type of stuff has reaped advertising dollars since “Queen for a Day” back in the forties and fifties on both radio and television. The program capitalized on someone’s misery before burying them in an avalanche of gifts and blessings as viewers collectively wiped away their tears. Is it bad to do good, even if you are making a lot of money doing it? Is it bad to bring excess to some—new houses, clothing, slimmer bodies and cash—when so many others could escape misery for just a portion of what the anointed sufferers are bequeathed?

Part of the formula, as evidenced in the extreme makeover shows, is that the beneficiary is someone likeable, even lovable, and a bonus is they have a history of being kind and generous to others. That makes them deserving of an excess of kindnesses after we get to wallow in their misery for a while. That’s not the case for the prickly old hermit who lives in the cardboard box along the river. Improving the lot of such an unsympathetic character is not likely to make us feel warm and fuzzy.

We also find entertainment in antisocial pursuits like hoarding, where supposedly intelligent people live in horrid environments of their own making. In the case of the hoarders, we first get to see how low they have fallen. That’s the wallowing part. Then comes introspection, realization and, at last, seeing the light that will lead them out of the darkness of addiction. Every human failing can be blamed on an addiction or disorder, by the way. Then comes the reward, which we celebrate as just desserts for the long-suffering victim.

I suppose I could be dismissed as jaded and cynical, but I’m tired of victimhood being celebrated by people trying to manipulate our feelings. You might argue that the same could be said about feel-good movies and novels, but we know they are fiction and I, for one, am willing to suspend belief for a few sparks of enlightenment.

Who are the geniuses behind those great jingles and slogans?

I have run into at least two other people of my generation who remember the Crest narrative due to the bombardment of toothpaste commercials when we were kids. I’m guessing there are thousands of us who can still recite it all these years later. That’s why ad slogans and jingles are so powerful. Whether it is “You Deserve a Break Today,” “Have it your way” or “Just Do It,” these pithy commercial appeals are taking up brain space that might have accommodated great poetry or the capacity to name the nations of the former U.S.S.R.

If you look more closely at some of these slogans, you can see they often seem incomplete. For example, a Hallmark slogan was “When you care enough to send the very best…” I would add “…  or you don’t have the time to think up your own words.” Another example? There’s the classic from De Beers, which should have gone like this: “A diamond is forever… and so are the payments.”

You get the picture. I can give you a few more examples, thanks to my amazing retention of crass commercial crap. I’ll rephrase that because crass and commercial is where it’s at. Following are some products, their slogans or jingles and my suggested completion in the parentheses:

Philips— “Let’s Make Things Better (and then we can raise the price even higher).”

Johnny Walker— “Keep Walking (if you didn’t bring a designated driver).”

Reebok— “I Am What I Am (I’m Popeye the Sailor Man).”

Maytag Appliances— “Our repairmen are the loneliest guys in town (because most of them are on Megan’s List).”

Nike— “Just Do It (and then get the hell out of here).”

State Farm Insurance— “Like a Good Neighbor (who charges a $300 premium every three months).”

Philip Morris— “Call for Philip Morris (He died of lung cancer but I’ll give you his voice mail).”

Sara Lee — “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee. (She was voted least unpopular.)”

Jell-O—“There’s always room for Jell-O (except when I clean out my refrigerator.)”

Budweiser— “When you say Budweiser, you’ve said it all, (So enough said.)”

McDonald’s—“Did somebody say McDonald’s? (We tried, but we already said it all with Budweiser.)”

Coca-Cola—“I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony (so put the damn soda down).”

Target— “Expect more. Pay less. (Expect too much. Pay nothing.)”

Smith Barney— “We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it. (Or we get absorbed by another merger).”

Nissan— “Life’s a journey. Enjoy the ride. (Just make sure you bring a gas can and jumper cables).”

U.S. Army—“Be all that you can be (as long as you don’t need veterans’ benefits).”

Verizon Wireless—“Can You Hear Me Now? (Yes. Now shut up!)”

Smucker’s— “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good. (And with a name like Hoover’s, it has to suck.)” Apologies to Electrolux, which actually used the slogan, “Nothing Sucks Like an Electrolux.”

Pepsi— “For those who think young (because obesity and diabetes will keep them from getting old.)”

Radio Shack— “You’ve got questions. We’ve got answers. (Oh, and we also sell electronics.)”

Old Spice—“The mark of a man. (It’s that yellow spot in the snow).”

U.S. Marines—“We’re looking for a few good men (not that there’s anything wrong with that).”

UPS— “What can Brown do for you? (Send you to the store for new underwear?)”

U.S. Forest Service— “Only you can prevent forest fires. (Kill an arsonist today.)”

Tylenol— “It’s hospital recommended (and so are those expensive tests your insurance won’t cover).”

New York Times— “All the news that’s fit to print (… plus a whole lot more).”

Michelin— “Because so much is riding on your tires (you should really lose weight).”

Lending Tree— “When banks compete, you win. (When they can’t, you pay for the bailout).”

Kay Jewelers— “Every kiss begins with Kay. (Every piss begins with pee).” Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Exxon (formerly Esso)— “Put a tiger in your tank (but don’t tell the SPCA.).”

FOX News— “Fair and balanced (for all our friends on the far right).”

Calvin Klein— “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins (which explains the bad rash).”

Avis— “We try harder (but we’re just not good enough).”

American Dairy Council— “Behold the power of cheese (but you may need the power of a laxative).”

Revlon— “Feel like a woman (unless you want to be one of those few good men).”

Lexus— “The relentless pursuit of perfection (but it’s going to take a very long time).”

Looney Tunes—Th-th-th-th-tha-tha-that’s all, folks!