I am having the hardest fucking time focusing today. Comparable to intense writers block and/or freshman year of college. It's driving me nuts. I cannot get jack shit accomplished. I feel like I have ADD, but it's probably fatigue.

Anyway, I was hoping that saying that would make things better but it didn't. Oh well. Maybe pushups, and then back to making lists, filling out charts and writing things on calendars. Jesus. Andiamo, already.

My life is taking a turn. What it all means practically will emerge and be dutifully explored in short order, but for now I want to explain how it feels. Ready for an extended Led Zeppelin allegory?

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):
Levee Lev"ee, v. t.
   To keep within a channel by means of levees; as, to levee a
   river. [U. S.]

Yeah. Here we go.

If it keeps on raining, the levee's gonna break

I'm unemployed. "Involuntary Termination: Reducting in force/Layoff." It was bound to happen sooner or later, and to be honest it's not all that bad. I'm relishing the freedom, looking foward to having my life back, and working on unpacking the learning on bureaucratic maneuvering I should absorb out of all of this. Time to revisit the Art of War, as Peter always told me to do.

I'm a hired gun again, with which I'm pretty comfortable. Still, the whole way it went down was unpleasant and draining. This one's optimistic, but forsooth I need a little time and mouthwash before I can really dig into anything with a fair mind.

When The Levee Breaks I'll have no place to stay

Something new will come along shortly, I'm sure, but for now it's austerity time: three meals at home, sit down with Excel and make a budget, start looking for cheap ways to stay entertained and engaged, start looking for gigs. Lucky(?) for all y'all that probably means a lot more blogging (here and elsewhere), and lucky(?) for some other people out there I'm free to ramble around like a busy bee, cross polinating and making honey as I may.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home

It came down to a relationship analogy. I wanted to be in love or I wanted to break up, so we broke up. Maybe there will be some consulting. That's cool. I enjoy dating, and conversation is one of my favorite ways to pass the time. But I'm not going to be in a relationship I don't believe in, and especially not one where I feel I'm in some sense being abused.

That being said, I didn't handle any of it especially well. Others fucked up royally, but I blew it as well; lots to learn about how to try to make change from within an organization going forward. I feel especially bad as I may have cost some other people their jobs as well, though this remains to be seen. Hopefully everyone will come out a winner.

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move

Crises precipitate change. Crisis is opportunity. Mamma, you got to move. There are a lot of things I care about in this world, a lot of things I'd like to get done. I was doing some of them this past year, but a lot of the time I felt like I was fighting with one hand behind my back, in an ill-fitting suit (even though I didn't have to wear one); working against the current or something. I was cozy up next to some powerful folks for a while, and I made a lot of new connections, allies, friends even... but the way it was going wasn't really how I wanted to flow. It wasn't entirely True, which gets my dander up. Idealist and optimise me, always asking, "why not the best?"

It's messier this way, sure, but maybe it's the only way things could happen. For me, that seems to be the case. Again, my biggest regret has to do with other people who might have caught some mean wake off this move, or that the organization might capsize. The latter is unlikely -- too much value there to squander -- but I worry that my own exit has made it difficult or impossible for other people to reconcile their situations.

All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
Thinkin' about me baby and my happy home

There are tradeoffs in life; choices, decisions, two roads diverged in a yellow wood. But I've read Faust. I don't want to make that bargan. Faust got fucked, you know? His compromise was perminant, and you can't sell your soul for tomorrow's good time and expect it all to work out. Ask a crackhead, or Kenneth Lay for that matter. It's not how I operate.

In the end the repulsive force was getting stronger and the attractive force was getting weaker. We broke up, me and Music For America. We're still going to be friends, but I'm out again, looking for the right fit.

So in the mean time I get control over my life and my words back. Expect a flood of repressed confessional content. Expect plans and proclimations. Expect reorganization, ground-breaking, unfettered imagination. Expect more of the best. I'm going to be happy.

For now I'm off to welcome my main man Mark back to these United States from a lengthy stay in Chile. More later. Stand strong.

It's a hell of a thing to put your whole heart and mind and body -- I sacraficed my body: I'm fat now! -- into something like a presidential election and then have it come up tasting like ashes. Gut punch; long long looks in the mirror; the incredible sense of freedom and possibility that comes from no longer having that overrarching purpose; the incredible sense of being lost.

Bit by bit I'm settling into it. Bit by bit, I reclaim the dignity of my own experience.

There's plenty of political drama going around right now -- on the national scene and within people's hearts, even within people's organizations -- but the way forward is coming clear. It's not going to be easy. It's going to be hard. Harder, in fact, than it was before. But now we know a few things about what works and what doesn't, and the people who have soulful ideas to fall back on are at an innate advantage for now. That's more than right, it's righteous.

Personally I have an enormous headache after spending four days wrestling with my future, with four more days to go it seems. There's a lot to believe in in this world, and you have to pick your battles and sift through the landscape. I wonder these days what the range is between childish, romantic, idealistic and true, but in the end I've got a philosophy to fall back on, and I believe it's as soulful as they come.

I've been busier and more beat up this week than ever I imagined, but it's all for the good.

In all the back and forth up and down, there's another state, which is the doledrum middle. Somewhere between boredom and numbness. Beclaimed, the sailors called it. Feckless and stony. Inertial time when people who try to cheer you up are the last thing you want or need.

It occurs to me that I need some down time here too; that burrowing into my bed and/or giving over hours to meditation and other kinds of un-thinking might be in order.

Anyway, I don't know how I feel about bitching about my state of mind on my blog, so I don't think I'll be posting any more pissing and moaning. It just doesn't seem right. There are better insights and inspirations and finer dark grey blue thoughts that will sooner or later lead to stringing together words and sentences into singing streaks of meaning-making language love.

For now my clinical appreciation for this rather unique experience is dwindling. Maybe something new will occur tomorrow. I'll sleep on it for a while though if I have to.

I'm encouraged by all the people who are ready to keep fighting for the future. It's the right idea, I think, because if too many of us quit and the country goes down the shitter it won't matter where you live. If the US goes down in a blaze of facistic hegimon glory, she'll take a fuckload of other nations and people with her. We'd all like to retire to the shire, but it's not a realistic option, especially if you think about having kids.

That's a dark train of thought, but it's where my head goes sometimes these days. I'm struggling. The most important thing is to stop stuggling. My campaign is over. Halfway around the world 10,000 Marines are getting ready to storm a hostile city. Life will go on for me and hopefully most of them. Ugh. It's bad.

I think "emotionally fragile" is the term for my current state of mind, body and soul. Wild mood swings; ups and downs. The other night walking the dark wooded street in Berkeley, watching airplains make their slow arcs and listening to Tom Waits sing about the Heart of Saturday Night was a moment of deep dispair, almost cosmic and transcendent sorrow. Today walking from Valencia Cycles to the bank backed by Toots and 54-46 (that's my number) I had bounce and humor. So it goes.

Art, man. Art! How fucking long has it been since I made art? Too long. Art and love, yeah... but we don't talk a lot about the latter. Been kinda keeping that on the back burner for some time now. Easier that way. I don't know whether or not to believe in sexual healing, but I sure as hell have that feeling. Not that there's a damn thing I can do about it, but there it is.

I don't know where to turn or which way to go. Politics isn't much of a crisis to be honest with you -- I see the way forward there -- but that's no longer such a big deal, no longer a central organizing principle of my existence. With more time to myself, I'm confronted with all I've neglected. So much has fallen by the wayside in the past year, I find myself now looking out over barren territory, lacking in purpose, connection, meaning.

I hit up friendster tonight and in the random gallery clickthrough I realized I already knew two of the girls who I thought were cute on the first page that came up, and then I found out I'm connected to the girl I made out with in Boston through Ben Newman and PeeWee Herman. Oh man. It's that kind of night.

So tell me, oh wise one; what does an outlandish young man do in these times, when he feels beaten, old, confused... I'm open to suggestions. I'm already headed back to NYC for a spell, so that might charge me up a little. But really; if you know any good books, movies, CDs, restaurants, vistas, or hangouts, I'm all ears.

As I was walking back from the grocery store tonight at about 10pm (just got home from work) with the makings of quesidillas and a quart of high life in my pack, I had the exhillerating little thrill: in two weeks it will be over, and my life will be my own again.

Yeah, I'll probably keep my job and I don't think you ever go back after getting this deep into the whole scene, but a little over a year ago I made a promise to the night -- the kind of promise another Josh in another time would probably have said he made to god or something -- that I would do whatever I could to try and turn this country around, to pull it off the rocks, away from the ledge and what have you...

Once I had a girl on rockey top
Half bear the other half cat
Wild as a mynx but sweeter than soda pop
I still dream about that

Rocky top, you'll always be
Home sweet home to me
Good ol' Rocky top
Rocky top Tennessee

Freedom, baby. It's coming soon. The Reading Rainbow song running strong through my blood: I... can do... anything...

Confession. I have become terribly uptight. I just now attempted a little light yogic stretching as learned back in my days at the Experimental Theater Wing, and found it more difficult than I ever remeber: harder than when I first started (kinda understandible as I've got more muscle to stretch now than in those early twiggy days) and vastly moreso than the last time I remember really trying to stretch, which had to be around the beginning of the summer. I've also noticed that I've gained quite a little bit of weight (gut flab, mostly) in the past few months.

Things seem to have taken a turn. The life is taking its toll, I suppose. But I've decided that all this "I can't wait until the election is over" fatalism has got to end. That's right; I can't wait until the election is over.

For starters, that's not the end of the road for me. It's hardly even a break. I can't sleep for a year, or even a month. Things will need doing the week after, so saddle up and be ready.

And moreover, a lot of this stuff shouldn't be postponed. I'm not going to go clothes shopping any time soon, but getting my physical life in order is an endeavor that's going to take a while, and there's no compelling reason not to start right now. The actual daily investments of time and energy are modest. It just takes discipline, and discipline is something I could use more of at the moment anyway. So there. Reasons abound.

I'm pretty convinced also that overcoming this physical tightness, as well as working off the flab, will help me continue in improving my mental and emotional state. I'm a confirmed believer in the mind-body connection. It ebbs and flows, but it's always present. Your body and brain are all one connected system, so none of this should be at all surprising. Still, some people still think that there's a hoky new-age smell to believing that having a rich physical life is a critical component to a good mental and emotional experience.

I don't bother to question it or to be sanctimonious about it; I'm more concerned with what it means for me and my life pragmatically. To put it another way, I'm not one of those people who frets over food or obsesses over exercise. I'm one of those people who thinks, "damn, I'm bummed out. I should take a giant bike ride up some really tall hills and then go get sushi, maybe start stretching more and eating veggies again."

And anyway, for any of this shit to really work, it's gotta be sustainable. Terriby uptight is not sustainable because it's not an optimal condition for production, and high production is going to be a must for the next ten to twenty years or so at least. I don't think I'll really be able to slow down for a while, nor do I want to. But to live up to that date with velocity, I've got to get my engine running cleaner and smoother.

Matt shot back "And we who despair march on…" in a comment in my last post, presumably in response to my concluding line, "I think we cut loose."

I just wanted to make sure he (and you, reader) didn't misconstrue the last sentence of my last blog entry re: cutting loose. What I'm suggesting isn't anything opposed to soldering on. I ain't dropping out of this thing (though I do need to find a better way to make it work for me), and I'm not suggesting anyone else drop out either.

What I'm suggesting is that the blogosphere's adherence to the mainstream political dialogue does not serve the presumably laudable goal of maximizing its political impact. Yes, there is an enormous gravity to be resisted, which is really hard especially now, and even then it's not as though we can ignore what the chattering classes discuss. However, the increasing narrowness of coverage -- the tightening in the blogs -- is a bad trend for the future.

Where Are We/Where Do We Want To Be?
Blogs are an order of magnitude away from challenging Big Media on politics in terms of viewership -- it'll take a bunch more good writers and about four years of steady growth to do that -- but the great hope is that we'll create communities which involve vast numbers of new people in the process, thereby providing the best medicine for our sick-ass democracy: more democracy. From a slightly cynical (but pragmatic) point of view this boils down to new money, new voters, and new candidates, though the idealistic holy grails of new conversations and new ideas are tantilizingly near on the horizon.

But whatever. Everyone knows we've got fundraising down. The real proof of that, by the way, is Kucinich, who used net-driven donations and community fundraising to keep his campaign rolling to the last. Expect more of that type of thing -- seemingly hopeless candidates who refuse to die -- in the future. The first elements of proof for new voters is in next month's turnout pudding, but those numbers will be a tangled pile to unravel. And for the rest, well... we'll see.

The point is that we raised all the money in the world and nothing changed. For the net to substantively effect the mainstream political dialogue and system, we've got to start delivering candidates, or at a minimum deliver a significant number of voters to existing candidates who cannot be delivered through other forms.

That requires us to abandon this monolithic conventional wisdom. Why? Because it sucks. It's not the truth, and it's not even interesting most of the time. To be blunt, it's so damn bad that not enough people are willing to pay attention to it to serve our purposes. Politics as it stands today only appeals to 50% of the population, though really it's more more like "appealing" to 15% who then "drag" the other 35 along with them. The political utility of blogs (and other emerging forms of communication) comes down to augmenting those numbers. We'll never do that if we're just another vector for the same old shit.

How Can We Make It Different
Dean was able to rise high in the polls, if not the results, by abandoning the conventional wisdom. He put his campaign on the map by breaking out of a spectacularly constricted moment of groupthink with "what I wanna know," and surged his way to the top of the pack by allowing his message and campaign to become decentralized and networked with "you have the power." What spurred Dean's rise wasn't the media coverage. Though media exposure helped him gain name recognition -- the proverbial foot in the door -- he never looked great on TV and his ads were pretty weak. What sold Dean was two things: he behaved as if he didn't give a flying fuck about the conventional wisdom, and he was asking people to do more than just vote for him.

The trick was he really didn't care about mainstream media coverage. He didn't pay respect and he gave them plenty of ammo, and the gang of 500 burned him down. But the theory is still sound. You let people out there re-tool your central ideas and themes -- the message hardware, if you will -- and use their own language, images and social capital -- the software -- to sell your candidacy. I have the graph of how this works visualized in my head. It's a network. A good 21st century campaign message (just like a good 21st century field operation) is a network, and in order to build that kind of network, in order to widen that circle of participation and take advantage of Reed's law and all that good shit, you have to release yourself from the chains of old media groupthink.

To me -- and I have this freedom because of who I work for, yes -- the time to jump ship is now. I'm fighting for participation because I believe if we outsiders grit our teeth and demand a place at the table, that will get more accomplished than walking away from a fucked up situation. But playing along with the 24-hour-cable bullshit isn't going to help me motivate my peers to vote. I look at my job as creating political message and the tools to disseminate that message which will inspire my generation to get involved and vote in spite of Kerry and all his long-faced somnambulance. Fuck the polls and fuck the conventional wisdom; cut to the heart of what matters and make your own case for doing what you're going to do regardless of what the party or candidate's message is.

We've got to keep it real, homie. If we fake the funk we're going to end up flunkies of the same broken system we set out to fix. Communities of inquiry dig? That's the John Dewey dream. The time is ripe to start making it a reality.

We've Nothing To Lose But Our Chains
Look at it this way: if you're a blogger, what's at stake in the next 30 days if you break out of the conventional wisdom? Perhaps some portion of your readership should you take off in a direction they find displeasing. But if you're good and you write well and the direction you head is honest, you won't lose them. And there's everything to be gained if you break out and stike gold.

There's value in rapid response, and there's value in topical commentary, but those things need not make us slaves to the mainstream. My reasons for participating and my reasons for voting are somewhat different -- and I'll express them very differently -- than the appeals that any present-day campaign or party will make for itself. And you know what? Not surprisingly, I think my reasons are probably much more persuasive to my audience than the campaign's or party's.

I probably have 500 people who will listen to what I post here, and at most 10x that number if I push an idea through Music for America. The value-add is what I'm going to push in the next month is going to be my own brand of politics, and this brand is known and liked by a community of people who don't dig the conventional wisdom. Some of the people who read my stuff might decide to get involved because I said it in a way that no one else did. That's proof this can work.

The system still comes down to people, to votes, and we still own it like that. That we've been conned into playing along with the equivalent of sock-puppet theater as a national debate is an unfortunate accident of history, and one that I believe we can correct.

Matt shot back "And we who despair march on…" in a comment in my last post, presumably in response to my concluding line, "I think we cut loose."

I just wanted to make sure he (and you, reader) didn't misconstrue the last sentence of my last blog entry re: cutting loose. What I'm suggesting isn't anything opposed to soldering on. I ain't dropping out of this thing (though I do need to find a better way to make it work for me), and I'm not suggesting anyone else drop out either.

What I'm suggesting is that the blogosphere's adherence to the mainstream political dialogue does not serve the presumably laudable goal of maximizing its political impact. Yes, there is an enormous gravity to be resisted, which is really hard especially now, and even then it's not as though we can ignore what the chattering classes discuss. However, the increasing narrowness of coverage -- the tightening in the blogs -- is a bad trend for the future.

Where Are We/Where Do We Want To Be?
Blogs are an order of magnitude away from challenging Big Media on politics in terms of viewership -- it'll take a bunch more good writers and about four years of steady growth to do that -- but the great hope is that we'll create communities which involve vast numbers of new people in the process, thereby providing the best medicine for our sick-ass democracy: more democracy. From a slightly cynical (but pragmatic) point of view this boils down to new money, new voters, and new candidates, though the idealistic holy grails of new conversations and new ideas are tantilizingly near on the horizon.

But whatever. Everyone knows we've got fundraising down. The real proof of that, by the way, is Kucinich, who used net-driven donations and community fundraising to keep his campaign rolling to the last. Expect more of that type of thing -- seemingly hopeless candidates who refuse to die -- in the future. The first elements of proof for new voters is in next month's turnout pudding, but those numbers will be a tangled pile to unravel. And for the rest, well... we'll see.

The point is that we raised all the money in the world and nothing changed. For the net to substantively effect the mainstream political dialogue and system, we've got to start delivering candidates, or at a minimum deliver a significant number of voters to existing candidates who cannot be delivered through other forms.

That requires us to abandon this monolithic conventional wisdom. Why? Because it sucks. It's not the truth, and it's not even interesting most of the time. To be blunt, it's so damn bad that not enough people are willing to pay attention to it to serve our purposes. Politics as it stands today only appeals to 50% of the population, though really it's more more like "appealing" to 15% who then "drag" the other 35 along with them. The political utility of blogs (and other emerging forms of communication) comes down to augmenting those numbers. We'll never do that if we're just another vector for the same old shit.

How Can We Make It Different
Dean was able to rise high in the polls, if not the results, by abandoning the conventional wisdom. He put his campaign on the map by breaking out of a spectacularly constricted moment of groupthink with "what I wanna know," and surged his way to the top of the pack by allowing his message and campaign to become decentralized and networked with "you have the power." What spurred Dean's rise wasn't the media coverage. Though media exposure helped him gain name recognition -- the proverbial foot in the door -- he never looked great on TV and his ads were pretty weak. What sold Dean was two things: he behaved as if he didn't give a flying fuck about the conventional wisdom, and he was asking people to do more than just vote for him.

The trick was he really didn't care about mainstream media coverage. He didn't pay respect and he gave them plenty of ammo, and the gang of 500 burned him down. But the theory is still sound. You let people out there re-tool your central ideas and themes -- the message hardware, if you will -- and use their own language, images and social capital -- the software -- to sell your candidacy. I have the graph of how this works visualized in my head. It's a network. A good 21st century campaign message (just like a good 21st century field operation) is a network, and in order to build that kind of network, in order to widen that circle of participation and take advantage of Reed's law and all that good shit, you have to release yourself from the chains of old media groupthink.

To me -- and I have this freedom because of who I work for, yes -- the time to jump ship is now. I'm fighting for participation because I believe if we outsiders grit our teeth and demand a place at the table, that will get more accomplished than walking away from a fucked up situation. But playing along with the 24-hour-cable bullshit isn't going to help me motivate my peers to vote. I look at my job as creating political message and the tools to disseminate that message which will inspire my generation to get involved and vote in spite of Kerry and all his long-faced somnambulance. Fuck the polls and fuck the conventional wisdom; cut to the heart of what matters and make your own case for doing what you're going to do regardless of what the party or candidate's message is.

We've got to keep it real, homie. If we fake the funk we're going to end up flunkies of the same broken system we set out to fix. Communities of inquiry dig? That's the John Dewey dream. The time is ripe to start making it a reality.

We've Nothing To Lose But Our Chains
Look at it this way: if you're a blogger, what's at stake in the next 30 days if you break out of the conventional wisdom? Perhaps some portion of your readership should you take off in a direction they find displeasing. But if you're good and you write well and the direction you head is honest, you won't lose them. And there's everything to be gained if you break out and stike gold.

There's value in rapid response, and there's value in topical commentary, but those things need not make us slaves to the mainstream. My reasons for participating and my reasons for voting are somewhat different -- and I'll express them very differently -- than the appeals that any present-day campaign or party will make for itself. And you know what? Not surprisingly, I think my reasons are probably much more persuasive to my audience than the campaign's or party's.

I probably have 500 people who will listen to what I post here, and at most 10x that number if I push an idea through Music for America. The value-add is what I'm going to push in the next month is going to be my own brand of politics, and this brand is known and liked by a community of people who don't dig the conventional wisdom. Some of the people who read my stuff might decide to get involved because I said it in a way that no one else did. That's proof this can work.

The system still comes down to people, to votes, and we still own it like that. That we've been conned into playing along with the equivalent of sock-puppet theater as a national debate is an unfortunate accident of history, and one that I believe we can correct.

Billmon was one of the great pioneers of the form we call blogging, and now he's gone on perminant(?) hiatus. He left behind an editorial in the LA Times which takes the blogosphere to task in essance for selling out.

On the one hand I don't think quitting because the revolution seems to be on hold is really top form. I understand that the pressure is at an all time high, but one would think the syndrome Billmon decries would be all the more reason for him to get his voice out there. On the other hand I do from time to time feel like I've lost some of my authenticity. Hence this series of confessions.

The beautiful parts of the past year and a half, my great adventure in politics and blogging, have mostly been human. It's been about the relationships and the personalities and seeing through them to a better future.

The web is crisscrossed many times over, and though it's complecated like that, I wouldn't have it any other way. Back when I had time for things that made me feel good, I used to run a little performance art variety party called axiom with my friends in NYC. On the last performance night, just before I took off to California for the Summer of the Hassle and then to work for MfA, Frank and I did a piece that incorporated work by Billmon. He was in town, so he showed up for it. It was a great night:

The atmosphere was friendly, but also had moments verging on the revolutionary. Frank and I set a tone early with our quasi-political pomo comedy routine which incorporated a little scene by Wonk Web Celeb Billmon. We were basically talking about our own amateur wonkishness vis-a-vis that of a true warrior, and we included a scene Billmon wrote that we thought was kind of fun. Billmon took video, so maybe some of that will surface. We were experimenting with getting into political territory without making anyone uncomfortable, making it something that people can then talk about, pioneering.

Over on BopNews my pal Matt is wondering what it all means. Noting that "the blogosphere has not produced its Hunter Thompson, its unique and compelling voice, its own sense of difference, its own politics." This echoes thoughts I've had.

Matt, if I told you when we were up there in the echoing upper decks, watching Kerry give his acceptance speech I was squirming in my little blogger-ally bench seat under the sharp press of clean Tennesee LSD -- which is true -- would that make any difference? It wouldn't, I think, because I kept the experience to my self. For fear of embarassment, job security, or something along those lines, I held something back because I internally judged it improper. Without all the professional relationships I'd built in the past year, I would never have been able to sneak my way into the Fleet Center, and the desire to protect and retain those relationships kept my trap, for the most part, shut.

In Augusto-Boal terms, I let the cop into my head.

I haven't the gusto to get into it now, but I will say that my trip -- the whole 18-months as well as the psychadelic flashes -- has been a full and rich tapestry that some day I will meticulously and brutally document. It might perhaps have an outside chance at claiming redheaded stepchild status vis-a-vis Fear and Loathing, but I don't know. There's plenty of grist for the mill, but I'm just not that good a writer yet, and in spite of my declared allegance with the truth, stepping into the naked lunch in the way I'd need to to do it right is a frightening prospect after a year of career.

But it's got to be done. I need to get out front or else the odds are I'll just wind up another cog in the machine. That would be like death. It's a hard thing when you realize the right path for you is not going to make you financially secure or roundly well-liked. I flashback to Baadasssss at this moment. After the 2nd I will need to go to the desert.

Blogging for me is an extension of an old aphorism that I've been living with since childhood. Don't get a job, get a life. Matt notes that we all need to get paid, but wouldn't it be great if you could collect a paycheck just for being yourself? That was the promise, and there was an idea that this promise would marry with next-generation politics and something really beautiful would be born. Instead we've got what we've got, which is anything but pretty. It's hardly even fun anymore, this election-time blogging.

The question before us is this: what do we do in these last five weeks. I think we cut loose.