A Hazy Shade Of Summer

Am I (already) bored with the presidential election cycle? I find myself sitting at my computer--right now--meaning to type something pithy about the electoral process as it is playing out before our very eyes...perhaps focusing on certain strategies employed in particular ways by both the Obama and McCain camps this week...and yet I can't bring myself to get fired-up about much of anything insofar as that's concerned. (I've purchased my weekly allotment of political material--magazines and such--this past week, but read only about a third of it, and I've found myself reacting to it in a generally indifferent, if occasionally mildly interested, manner.)

Why is this? Am I increasingly displaying the types of inward symptoms others I know have reported they've been feeling of late--that "they" (of which I might be a part) are simply electioned-out? Have there recently been too many "critical primaries," too many "strategically-important caucuses," too many "strategy sessions" by painfully focus-group-friendly television pundits over a too-lengthy period of time? Is it simply a natural, very human reaction to shove all of this weighty import to the back of one's mind for a little while, in order to re-charge one's internal batteries? Has this exhausted, "pooped-out" sense of things (as a friend of mine might say, "You look like you're out of poop...") taken me over?

Maybe. After all, during June I've begun avoiding the types of television shows ("Road to the White House" and the like) I found interesting for the first several months of 2008. I've also found myself putting the more academic-oriented political and/or historical material I often read on the shelf, in favor of cottage mysteries by characters like Agatha Christie's Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot who mutter very twee, relatively contradictory phrases such as, "See you, my friend, there is no time to lose. The Continental express leaves Victoria at 11 o'clock. Do not agitate yourself. There is plenty of time." Another of my recent favorite "ejaculations" (as Dama Agatha would call it), this one by another character, was the following: "Say no more! Nobody loves me! I shall go into to the garden and eat worms!" (Well, who wouldn't?)

Maybe that's it (the necessity for taking a break; not the worms). It's summer, after all, and, judging by what my neighbors and I have been doing of late, we want to giggle a bit more now that it's warmer, and laugh a bit more, and meander around the local roads on our bicycles, and support our chosen major league baseball team as they win several games in a row (or make a big, false act out of being "depressed" about them if they've lost several games in a row). We want to drink our beer cold (even the British Mrs. Hasslington, who suggests that "...it's presently too humid for sensible people to get worked up about politics...," prefers her beer ice cold during a Minnesota summer) and wander about the local shops in a zombie-like, almost Zen-like state, accidentally bumping into other zombie would-be-shoppers, in a very slow-motion version of human bumper cars--"bumper people" as seen through a foggy, feel-good haze.

Oh, the madness of presidential politics will return, my friends. It'll be here quite soon again indeed. In the late summer, "Presidential Election Insanity, Phase II" will be everpresent, and it will carry into the autumn at levels of increasing intensity that will make "Phase I: The Nominating Process" look like mass human hibernation by comparison. People will become politically interested and invested again, and politicians will feel the scrutiny to the point where they may do the oddest things in order to alleviate the pressure (I can't wait to see what happens on that front), and political money will be flying all over the place, and fights will break out over politics in the U.S. and, by extension, worldwide, and we'll all have a ringside seat.

So for the next several weeks I will keep blogging as I keep one eye (at least) on politics, even in my present, rather sedated state one could term "Summer Slow-down." That will prepare me for the historic autumn ahead, to the extent that anyone could possibly be prepared for the zaniness that is sure to commence....

Let the madness begin again, but not just yet, because I feel as though I need a cold beer right now--the Minnesota Twins are trying to win their ninth game in a row, you see.