Panic.

I woke up at the crack of Dawn.

Fortunately for me, Dawn stayed asleep.

I hate waking Dawn.

But I digress.

It's my last day in the office for 2014.

I head out tonight for Southern climes.

Where all the drinks are blue and all the women look like Dorothy Lamour.

Because I am busy at this year's end, I arrived in the office at 7 this morning. It was me and a bunch of unshaven custodians. They were playing ping-pong at one of the tables here. I was jamming on some copy someone had deemed a crisis.

I got briefed on it yesterday.

You would think it was the copy equivalent of the Nazis rolling into Poland.

It took me an hour to figure out what they were asking for. (They had given me about 20 background documents which only served to confuse me.)

Finally I sat down with it for an hour and scribbled the outline you see here.

Then I got it.

I wrote half last night, and now that I knew what I had to do, I was able to walk away from it till this morning when from 7-8:15, I finished the rest.

99% of crises aren't really crises. They're equivalent, really, to trying to drive with a blindfold. Dangerous, ill-advised, illogical.

My job, at times, is to remove the blindfold.

Provide vision.

Clarity.

A level-head.

It's a crazy world we live in. As a society we seem to have shiny-object syndrome. On Sunday it was all about cop-killing. Yesterday, Joe Cocker's death. Today? Who knows.

We need some distance. Some measured thought. Some dispassionate response.

But instead we panic.

Good for a freelancer.