Going back to school for a doctorate is my favorite wet dream. And then I read this: The Big Lie About the Life of the Mind. It's like a bucket of cold water dumped in my lap.

For someone who prides himself on being a student (and occasional teacher and borer-of-students) of rhetoric, I've paid scant attention to the debates. In fact, the only one I watched start to finish was the vice presidential one, and I gotta tell you, What's the friggin' point? If all they're going to do is tout their running mates, that's not a debate. That's a couple of kids nosing up each other on the playground, arguing, "My dad could kick the crap out of your dad!" Entertaining, yes. Statesmanship? Give me a break.

In fact, I'm more soured about this election than I was the last one. I'm a pessimist. I'm not proud of it, but it's how I came out. My first birthday that I can remember, I thought to myself, How many more of these do I have to look forward to? Seventy if I'm lucky. At my senior prom, I was the one shoving Enya and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to the d.j. And just the other week, I told a class of giggling girls to study their Nietzsche, to realize why they shouldn't be so giggly. For me, the glass isn't even half empty; it's also breakable, with water that will soon evaporate and is all-too-briefly enjoyed. So when Bush said, "Bring it on, Kerry," I thought, Well shit. The Lone Wolf is saddling up. Who can withstand that kind of persuasion?

But at least the last election afforded me the luxury of hatred. I hated Bush then. I hate him even more now. And now that he's on his way out of the office, I feel much like the CIA must have after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I've lost my scapegoat. My focus of contempt for the Republican Party. The anathema to conservatism touting conservatism. The boogeyman. And who do we have to replace him?

A smoov-talker and a war hero.

That's really all it's going to boil down to once the "filter" is cut through. McCain is selling a tax plan that every economist I've seen interviewed acknowledges is sticking it to the very middle class he purports to support. And Obama, as near as I can tell, wants to open the windows of luxury limousines and throw cash by the handful out the door to the starving masses. Pardon me while I vomit ebullience.

The debates (the scant portions I've seen) have told me nothing. When the moderators reprimand both candidates for dodging the question, you have to wonder how they'll stack up against Congress, or their national addresses to the nation.

The SCLM has told me little except that both candidates are prone to misrepresentations, and that they don't like each other. Also that Sarah Palin is entertaining, but possibly vapid. Hats off, folks.

And the polls? Don't get me started. If you polled every American on the face of the earth about the economy and the staggering and frightening dips the market is taking, make one of the questions, "How stupid are you with the economy" and watch the numbers rise. Vox populi my ass.

So my plan is simple: I'm going to find a hole, crawl into it, and come out in twenty years. By then, if history is any guide, we'll be through this recession-in-name-only, and well on our way to another major war, at which point we can focus on a new bad guy, let corruption run rampant and turn a blind eye to the financial sleight-of-hand that gave us prosperity in the short run yet stuck us in this cesspool of a situation at the moment.

And maybe by then, my pal Bush will be doing the lecture circuit or running for Congress. Now there's a fight I can win.

Good-bye Dell. Hello debt.

Forty-five minutes of my life on the phone with Dell Customer Care today. Why: My computer won't turn on. Why is this: I don't know.

I first bought this machine back in 2004. It was a rough transition, but eventually, just like my dishwasher and garbage disposal, it quickly became something without which I could not live. Oh sure, the virus control software is a pain, makes the system slow to a snail's crawl, and the fan is always running, and if you actually have it on your lap, which isn't, I don't think, unreasonable, given the fact that it's a laptop, you suffer third-degree burns after ten lousy minutes. But it was mine. Not bought on credit, after all, but on love. And a school financing program.

Still, it's not much use to me if it sits there like a damn log. I probably should have known better, but I dialed the customer service number, prepared for any catastrophe they could throw my way.

The guy on the phone's first question: "If the computer isn't working, how did you get the e-mail for our tech support?"

I answered that there was another laptop in the house. "Then why not just use that one?"

(I know. I didn't believe my ears either.)

Anyway, the tech guy had me do everything but make the machine a damn cup of coffee. I took out the hard drive. The memory card. The optical drive. The vas deferens. Piles of electronic guts were surrounding me, and still, nothing.

I unscrewed. I rescrewed. I lost screws and then I found them. I swore like a sailor. I breathed heavily while on hold, just to register my displeasure when the guy got back on (showed him). I pushed buttons and prayed to heathen gods, all to naught. The Inspiron 5160, which I've hailed as a life-changing purpose all these years, sat smugly, like a seventh-hour senior waiting his date with the prom queen.

The verdict: One new motherboard, priced at about $560.

"What does a motherboard even do?" I asked skeptically. "Do I absolutely need one to run this thing?

I didn't pay much attention to the answer. Something about it being the metaphoric transmission to the computer's so-called engine or something. But hell, I once kept my fanbelt running with a pair of nylons. Don't tell me that in the 21st century, we can't juryrig a soup can and a rubber band to do the job for us.

Apparently not. My order, while not placed, is sitting on account, ready for my authorization.

So I'm sitting here in my kitchen, feeling dehydrated and strung out, like I'd crawled through the attic to fix the wiring in 100-degree heat instead of simply sitting in my chair, bent over a recalcitrant computer. And I'm figuring, $560 for a damn motherboard that might buy me another year, but will ultimately crap out as well? It might be time to go the Mac route.

I hate even saying that. It's like a surrender of sorts: the revolution I led against Apple Computers back in the 1990s is finally over. Buying my Ipod was bad enough; buying a Mac notebook is the final step. I've no idea what my aversion is to the Apple: you can still use Windows, you can work on just about any network you want, it's a total revolution, it's got enough memory and power to run a nuclear sattelite, blah blah blah. Maybe I've got an unfair ethos built in my head concerning Mac users--they're yuppified, latte-swillers, electronic namby-pambys who know nothing about the joys of awaiting your downloads over a slow, clunky internet connection. That's not good enough for them. They want their music now. They're not content to wait another ten minutes for illegal downloads. God forbid they have to lift a ten-pound machine hot enough to fry an egg on, oh no. The kids might get hurt.

It's probably time to ditch such thinking. Even if it's true, it doesn't do me any good. I love lattes.

So, in addition to home renovations and whatever else has to be done at the new place, I apparently have to scrape up enough dough to buy a new computer. And then join the revolution. Weeping.

Currently stuck in an alley, during the Chicago book fair, waiting for the rain to abate. This is what city rain looks like:



No, it's not the Midwestern flood damage that's been all over the news. But there's a reeking dumpster next to me, and my underwear is riding up into the unknown. So I've had better Sundays.

The Truth Table of Weeknight Taverns

Today I stopped in a bar on the way home to Have a Beer.

I know. I know. "When doesn't he?" the sage asks. Good question. Lest I should seem an urbane bastard, let me remind you: I live in the burbs. Starbucks are easy to find; comfortable bars, not so much. If your schtick is a crowded, neon-glared watering hole filled with balding has-beens shouting at whatever game is on (and it's got to be HDTV, no less for these bastards with their pushbroom mustaches and missing teeth), my neck of the woods is quite delectable; but if, like me, you long for the old days of pubs and a veritable drinking culture, you might as well be living in Salt Lake City.

Not so Joe's Place, which is a mere skip down the road from my humble home. We started hitting it mornings during my holiday break, and I have to admit, there's something to be said for guzzling Heineken while staring out the window at people headed for work. Every morning I pass the place, and I never fail to glance inside longingly: the morose bartender mopping up last night's mess; the overworked crew just getting off the night shift; the hard core alcoholics; and the hung over, nursing headaches over tomatoe juice and Budweiser. Roll of booze, hear my cry, I call to them. I am one of you! Now save my seat, or I'll kick your asses.

It was a crappy Monday today, one of those days where you leave wondering, had you been born in the 19th century, would you lumber home on a morning like this, head full of existential angst over your place in life, your career path, your overall health and karma...or would you be too busy trying to survive while doctors fed you opium and sawed off your limbs?

Ah yes, simpler times.

So, completely independent of my own conscious thought, I found myself wheeling into the parking lot of Joe's for a $1.75 Heineken. I'd decided to Have a Beer.

Having a Beer calls for a certain approach. I've not had much practice in Having a Beer. I've Gone Out for a Beer, true: there, the objective is to celebrate the end of a day or week by consuming as much as possible, without stepping over the line and screwing your short-term sobriety too badly. If Going Out for a Beer is a journey with a tangible end (drunkenness), Having a Beer is a meditative, introspective act, and it demands a certain sense of dignity, one I'm not likely to find in myself as I pound the bar furiously while calling Tso a buffoon for subscribing to Libertarianism.

Actually, I've only recently understood Having a Beer; if you're not out to get wasted, why not just have a Coke? But the beer itself is a reward, a garland for the exhausted Greek athlete, I suppose. The beer itself matters less than what it represents: Victory. Or, in my case, Survival.

If you don't want to Have a Beer, or Go Out for a Beer, you can always Get Drinks. "Let's Get some Drinks" used to be a danger sign in most places I worked, up to and including my current occupation. It was an open door policy: the more the merrier, true, but x amount of people fed into the equation equals a certain number of hours out, of money spent, of poison ingested. If, say, Tom Haldemann were to send out an e-mail tomorrow, "Out for drinks at 4," the danger would be minimal: It's a Tuesday, most people are going to work late or go home; Tom is not, shall we say, universally liked; e-mail invites are routinely ignored, etc.

But if John Pepper sends out such an e-mail, as in "We're going out for drinks at 4," the equation shifts: John has something political to get off his chest or he wouldnt' be offering; John will scare several others into going and I don't want to leave them hanging; he owes me two rounds and this is my chance to get paid back.

None of that is likely in the second week of February, especially while we're in the midst of all this damned snow. I'd worked late, not really wanting to stay but hating the thought of rattling around an empty house in the mid-afternoon with anything school-related on the brain. So when I Had My Beer, it tasted more like water down a Welsh warrior's throat, the cries of the dying surrounding him as his king stares at him inscrutably. Only I had no king to adulate, the battle was far from over, and I can't shoot a longbow to save my life.

The bar was relatively empty, but what it lacked in population it made up for in volume: the Juke Box O Matic was blaring something by the Scorpions, and two guys on my side were bellowing at each other about their wives. No fooling. I make claims like that sometimes, they're total crap, but this was true: "I just said that to fuck with you!" the first guy called.

"Yeah, better fucking with me than with your wife!" the other catcalled.

"Better than fucking her in the ass, you mean!"

And on and on, and I knew I could never reproduce the conversation believably. It would look too cliched. And isn't it pathetic that was what I was worrying about, sitting in a bar all by my lonesome, guzzling cheap Heineken while the two guys on the other side of me watched a high school volleyball game on TV with, shall we say, more than usual interest. That I wouldnt' be able to tell about it and make people buy it.

I could have sat there all night. Cars were passing out the window. My mind, weighed by the minutae of daily teaching while at school, found itself strangely untroubled in that dump. I started glaring at everyone around me: "What're you so happy about, asshole? Bet you don't have to redo curriculum. Bet if they ever gave you a study hall, you'd run screaming. What's that you do, lay bricks? Come over here and lay on my asshole."

It's a bad idea to be eyeballing so many of this sort. They're not bad people, but they're not used to taking crap from anyone (one reason, I suppose, they're not co-workers of mine, watching fifteen-year-olds roll their eyes and shoot water bottles across the room), and they're certainly not going to take it from yours truly. When the volleyball watchers started glaring at me and the wife-fuckers on the other side started scaling back their conversation in favor of curious glances in my direction, I realized I'd been muttering to myself. Bad habit. Thought I lost it years ago. Wasn't even drunk. So either get drunk now, Teacher Man, cover your tracks and dive into the bottle, or get out. Go home, put on Jane Austen from last night, maybe have a glass of wine. Show those Philistines.

So that's sort of what it likes to Have a Beer on a Monday night. I'd like to try Getting Some Drinks tomorrow night, but I think it's much more likely I'll Down a Brew when I get home, and maybe Go Out to Imbibe Wednesday or Thursday night. Or maybe I'll just wait until Friday and Get Plastered. There ought to be a flowchart for the options you're supposed to exercise. Me, I'm reduced to a self-created blog.