So I'm watching a re-run of Saturday Night Live, and it's pretty terrible. None of the caricatures/impersonations are funny or incisive at all. This re-run is from a season which I remember happening, but I do not remember the names of any of the actors.

I'm letting water run in the kitchen sink, so it can heat up and I can wash the dishes. One particular dish, the frying pan, is what I need to wash, so I can heat up the evening's 4^th pork chop, and be FILLED with FOOD.

I am sure the water is hot enough, but I'm here and the water is over there and I feel like being here instead of there, and this is unusual because I usually would much prefer to be wherever "there" is, not wherever here happens to be. I thrive on distraction, you see, and find that I most enjoy myself when there is a lot of superfluous activity going on around me.

I feel like setting the typesize to real huge, just in case I say something and don't catch it -- it'll be real easy to look up and see it. I'm only getting like 10 lines to a page, and feel like I'm shouting, but I'm not. Nothing worth shouting about at the moment.

Now it's C-Span on the telliebision. They're showing the residual politicking that happens after a presidential candidate has dispensed his rousing speech and the major networks have left the building.

Without the networks on hand, political rallies tend to get confused, it seems.

It's Bob Dole trying to act like he remembers all these people coming up to him saying "I was the one who remembered the name of your ranch..." He doesn't seem like a very nice guy, but more importantly I remember a front-page story from the Wall Street Journal that said he was Satan, and that a Kansas woman named Butt was having visitations from St. Peter, and St. Peter took her away body and soul into his flying machine, where he imparted to her his predictions of the imminent demise of the United States, whereby Dole would be "the last and greatest president of the United States." Dole would rise to power, St. Peter told Ms. Butt, after the assassination of George Bush and the brief presidency of Dan Quayle. Quayle himself would be quickly assassinated. Having named Dole to be his VP, the Kansas Senator would succeed Quayle as president, and he would oversee the dissolution of our current form of government into some kind of one-world plutocracy based in Eastern Europe.

It was right there in the Journal. I heard it on the radio. It's one of the first radio programs I remember hearing after moving to New York, when all the company I had was my clock radio.

Dole is saying that college kids and people my age should vote for him if we "want to have a future like the one your parents had when they were your age."

I wonder what that means.

On to Iowa City, and the Soy Bean Corn Growers Forum!

I wonder if I'll ever run for office. I'd like to, because I'd like to help people, and think I could represent them well. But not as a senator or a congressman. I'd want a position of integrity which did not demand utter and complete sanctity of character and action. Leadership should not fear learning something from the things they and their predecessors have fucked up.

But I could never get elected, and no one would ever listen to me anyway. I'm not perfect enough. I've smoked pot, broken laws, been late to work, gotten drunk, had sex within the last 30 days, played wrong notes, and today I slept too late and sat on my ass too much to be someone any community would vote for or be proud of. I'm a disgrace.

And whether I really am or not, it takes only a tiny chink in the ethical character of a public person to prompt those sullen frowns of disappointment and sharp disapproval which follow the exposure of someone's less-than-honorable characteristics. Look at me, I'm not voting for Dole because I heard he was Satan.

One thing I know I couldn't take would be the scrutiny of all those feckless news reporters with Watergate-on-the-brain who, on slow news days, rev up their $10,000 video cameras and drop in on poor people and people who've been screwed by big companies (like U.P.S.), then market this "experience" of "exposing" the things any person can see by then exploiting their exposé for no discernible reason and dubbing themselves spokespeople for a generation, or for the community of people who happened to be tuned in that night and who found some nebulous sense of identity in the self-important triumphs of investigative journalism.

Man, what the hell am I talking about...