What's going on? Well, the usual pre-election malaise. As mentioned in a response in this month's AMA thread (which inspired this riff on the subject), I find the height of election season annoying/dissatisfying.
It feels like these civic rituals suck all the interesting air out of the communal room. In October of even-numbered years, writing starts to feel like ... work ... in a negative way. By this point in an election year, I usually feel like I've said all I have to say about the election and I usually feel like nobody wants to talk about anything else.
Today, I met reader GregL for a soft drink and some conversation. We talked quite a bit about the election, but that's fine, it's not exhausting in the way writing about the election is. And it may help with the writing -- he asked me a couple of questions that might become column topics and/or blog posts because they're not the kind of questions you get from reading the punditry.
Rolling out to meet GregL was a nice excuse to do my favorite thing (lately), which is climb on the motorcycle and put a few miles on it. Getting up toward 700 miles on the Italica Bulldog 150, and I'm starting to become fairly confident (hopefully not over-confident). Nice ride there. Not so much home (I hit evening rush hour traffic and didn't get to stretch the thing out to its 55-57 mph top speed until I was near home).
Nice day overall, and when I got home I caught up with work not much later than I usually do anyway. But of course I've got a column to write tomorrow. If anyone has any topic suggestions that 1) are in the news cycle, 2) not about the elections for office (referendums might do), and 3) of likely interest to the mainstream newspaper reading public, put them in comments!
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