But what am I supposed to do? Is this any kind of way to run a democracy? We’re at seven months and change until the November election, and, even with the tightest Democratic race in a generation, we’re out of news. I don’t know how to make sense of this campaign, and I don’t know how to talk about it for the next five weeks until Pennsylvania.

As a result, I find myself more transfixed by the detritus of the process, by the television commercials I have to endure when I’m trying to find out where the day’s best lead is buried. It’s a lobotomizing contact high, a confounding and stupefying exercise that becomes more fascinating the dirtier I get by it. Rather than really putting intellectual boots on the ground and trying to figure out what weakness or pressure point is going to be the opening of Senator Clinton’s superdelegate gambit, or using a random cross-section of central Pennsylvania counties to assess the racial bleed in the latest polling that is causing Ms. Clinton’s lead over Senator Obama to widen, I really wonder how a God-awful, sleep-inducing acoustic outfit like Hem landed three Liberty Mutual commercials, and if I saw a passing postal carrier hold a ladder for a homeowner cleaning his gutters if I’d really be inspired to help a tiny Asian woman prop up a seven-foot hoagie sandwich she’s trying to carry across the street, and what does that have to do with insurance?

I wonder whatever happened to the hapless fat man who lost another loan to Ditech in the campaign that ran for years before the subprime mortgage crisis hit.

I wonder why the FreeCreditReport.com commercials are like a knife in my soul with their stupid jingle and an ever-present reminder about how I prison-shower-raped my credit betting everything I had on the dot-com I worked for seven years ago and their revolutionary search engine technology that they were too hapless to get to market, and wound up being invented, released, and marketed by another dot-com a year later who wound up charging $500 a license for it.

I wonder if HeadOn really works, but I wonder more why the African-American man who hates their commercials but acknowledges that their product is amazing insists in talking in a McGruff the Crime Dog accent.

Does John McCain really understand the dynamics of terrorist infiltration in Iran? Meh. I don’t care. I’m more interested in the Geico lizard ad and why they changed his accent four years ago from effeminate Cockney to manly Australian. They clearly had to have had a meeting to talk about it. Who all was there, and did it get heated? Did it go for more than a few hours? Or days? Did someone quit in protest over the final decision?

I’m not sure how the so-called professional pundits do it. They don’t seem all that medicated (except Brit Hume), but there must be something that gets them through the day, that inspires, that sees them through to the next deadline.

Oh, I know what it is: It’s called a paycheck.

I don’t know such a luxury yet. I’m young and hungry and unpublished–not a place you should be at 41 years old. Especially since you’re not young anymore. I’m going to weather this storm and keep publishing, even if I occasionally publish something awful, as I’ve been in the process of doing for the last three days. This is where men are made, and with my 42nd birthday only a few months away, it’s high time I became a man.

I did what I had to do last night. I took myself out of the process for an evening. I watched naked women feeding live goldfish to hungry piranhas, and I drank light beer while doing so. I never drink light beer. Is this what Tim Russert does on an off day?

He should, actually. It’s a barbaric tableaux, but it’s fascinating. You’ve never seen mortality writ large until you’ve seen an orange goldfish cornered by a pack of piranhas, hiding in a corner of the tank hoping they don’t notice him. It’s a story in fortitude, in courage, in putting yourself out there against a vicious and hungry world. It’s about facing down impossible odds and surviving—well, for a few minutes, until you get your brain bitten in half and die in a grotesque spasm with your entrails pouring out. But up until that point, you’ve never been so touched and emboldened by anything as that brave albeit doomed little fish.

That little fellow was my inspiration before he was torn apart in a flurry of gills, scales, and eyeballs.

More importantly, though, I did what I had to do to get through this insanity-inducing process of following a Presidential campaign every day, when either nothing is happening, or, worse, the same thing is happening day after day. I have a tattoo on my left shoulder that reads “Titties and Beer” in Asian characters. I took a night off and went back to my bedrock principles, as I quite literally wear them on the sleeve of my flesh.

And it’s a better day. This blog is getting posted and it’s a new news cycle. We’ve salved my distress with mammaries and alcohol. And only a few dozen goldfish were devoured in the process.

The stakes are higher for me because I am the one who has made a far greater mess of my own life. When I used to fancy myself a writer back in the day, nothing less than my own imprint would suffice, which would keep me busy between outings directing my own scripts. Mainstream media was beneath me, unless I could reinvent it in my own grand and incomparable design. I wouldn’t waste my talents with a national newspaper or a magazine that people read on airplanes.

Many years later, as a 41-year-old man coming out of a failed marriage and working a temporary job at the purchasing hotline for a national chain of day care centers, where all day long I answer the phone with the sunniest of dispositions only to have shrill women berate me over the fact that they can’t buy high chairs for their centers and are expected to feed their infants in nine-inch low chairs (and a childless man of my age shouldn’t even know what a “boppee” is, much less have to sell them over the phone daily), where I leave every day with their voices ringing in my brain like harpie tinnitus and go home to a neighborhood filled with men and women restarting their lives after lengthy prison stints, I’m a bit less discriminating in the writing jobs that I might deign to loan my name to.

I would write pamphlets that people read on airplanes if it would mean that I wouldn’t have to tell women at bars and parties about how many evacuation cribs I had to arrange return shipping for that day, and then have to explain to them what an “evacuation crib” is.

With that impetus, this blog is an attempt to strike while the iron is hot. We’ve quite literally written the book on the American Vice Presidency (at least the latest book), and in just a few months, we’re going to be the new It Girls of the Vice Presidential cognoscenti. I don’t even know if there is a Vice Presidential cognoscenti, but if there is, we’re going to be their new sages, the toast of their town.

This is a way up for Wayne, but it’s a way out of the life I’ve unfortunately made for myself. And that’s why I’m here at my computer every night, when I’d rather be drinking beer from unclean mugs and laying down dollar bills watching nude women dancing to the same Def Leppard songs I listened to in high school and feeding goldfish to a tank of live piranhas (which I’ll allow myself to do for an hour or two tomorrow night before I come home to critique the latest machinations of the DNC’s Rules and Credentials Committee and wonder aloud why Wolf Blitzer’s delegate count is so suspiciously different from Chuck Todd’s).

So why do I feel myself getting dumber every day that I do this? When I sit here with the media spigot on, pouring MSNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and even FOX News out into my living room every night, it gets harder and harder every night to put the sentences together to get this blog posted on time; to get it up before the stroke of midnight so I can put another notch in my belt and boast about having yet to miss a day, I should be smarter every day that I get that done.

But I’m not, and I think I’ve finally figured out why. It’s not the self-imposed pressure, it’s not the struggle to find news on a day where there is none; it’s not resisting the temptation to give into my worst urges and go with material I don’t feel good about every night, to sell my soul as Anderson Cooper does every day of the week (and he’s got a team of writers). Nope, none of that.

It’s the fucking commercials. The same goddamned commercials I listen to over and over and over and over again while I’m trying to find a vein, while I’m trying to harness the energy of this, the most exhilarating Presidential campaign of most of our lives, I have the inane din of the worst of American advertising beating me about the skull repeatedly, sucking the brains out of my head like a straw jammed into an orange.

Yes, the irony is that this daily effort to edify me intellectually, to make me a more engaging and appealing person, to sculpt my metaphorical pecs and carve out a set of rock-hard rhetorical abs and make myself a lean, mean, elocuting machine…is actually making me dumber. In spades.

I don’t begrudge advertising firms, and I don’t begrudge the networks who need their advertisers to keep the lights on and to keep Anderson Cooper gainfully employed, no matter what you feel about the merits of that.

But honest to Christ, do I really need to hear about how to erect (no pun intended) a 36-hour-window in which to achieve an erection? And why in God’s name does it have to be deployed in twin bathtubs dropped in a meadow plenty far from nowhere? I don’t understand a 36-hour erection window, and I’m their target demographic. If I’m that unenamored of my wife, I’ll close my eyes and think of Salma Hayek, and we’ll be off to the races, even if I’m married to Ann Coulter. I don’t understand the smiling man talking about his erectile dysfunction and how he can good-naturedly handle the disruption of an exploding kitchen water pipe when he’s getting ready to sneak into Sally’s alley.

The more disturbing thing is…why am I thinking about this? And I think about it all the time, because I hear about it all the time.

Am I losing it finally? Is this election cycle getting the best of me? I thought it was just me, until I had a conversation with Wayne the other night. We talked about it for a good 30 minutes. “Hey, there’s that fucking ‘miracle’ commercial again.” He was, of course, referring to the CVS commercial. The anguished faux Judy Collins talking about a pharmacy being just another ordinary miracle today. I’ve been to CVS. It’s a miracle they get away with the prices they charge. What’s the other ordinary miracle–that they don’t misfill your Prozac prescription with Thalidomide?

This way lies madness, and it’s the only way currently at my disposal. With Pennsylvania four weeks away and the conventions not until the last weeks of summer, I’m just running out of ways to dissect how the superdelegates are going to swing, or how Michigan and Florida are going to be resolved.

Anyway, I’m losing my nut. We’ll continue this tomorrow.