If you can't stand the heat, no problem. Winter is almost here.

I am beyond anger. Beyond indignation. Beyond labor-intensive attempts at deciphering--for myself or anyone else--the embarrassing behavior of politicians and their henchmen. I'm just tired.

It's just not worth it. People are going to vote for who they're going to vote for at this point. There is but a small--perhaps indecisive, perhaps shrewd--demographic of truly undecided voters, and my feeling is that these are people who will make a game-time decision based on their own pocketbooks and their own immediate concerns. Maybe they are people who will simply vote against whichever pig wears the lipstick last. Maybe it will be the last frenzied minutes of this circus-posing-as-serious-business that will cement their choices: Maybe they will decide, at the 11th hour, that they dislike Cindy McCain's expensive wardrobe or Michelle Obama's smug grin. Maybe they will go into the booth and flip a coin. Part of me wonders if this isn't just as sound a decision-making process as any other their more decisive countrymen might have used.

Maybe they will actually believe that "community organizer" is code for "black person." Everything is code for either black person or woman these days, no? The sensitivity on racism/sexist radars is turned to 11, and it is sometimes difficult to remember that only a very small portion of the statements earning these hysterical labels now would pass for racist or sexist in a non-election year (or I hope they would not, but who knows the future).

Paterson's comments really put an end to any debate that might have existed as to whether or not this is the single most absurd--and ultimately, insulting--campaign cycle in recent memory.

The Washington establishment, to which--do not delude yourself--McCain and Obama both very soundly belong (if they did not, they would never, and I mean NEVER have been nominated) is but a joke. It is a bunch of very wealthy, very spoiled, very powerful, and very manipulative people biting, clawing, and pulling hair in a playground popularity fight of global proportions. The insult comes when either candidate looks the American people in the camera lens and says, straight-faced...with all seriousness... "Well, HE started it." The disappointment comes, for me at least, when people stare back through the live feed and believe it.

For either candidate to deny that he is in on the federal joke represents such an obvious assumption about the stupidity and gullibility of the American people, I'm surprised more people aren't pissed off. But they're really not. Mostly they're just happy to gobble it up, wash it down with some blue or red kool aid, and defend party platforms and other delusions the same way anyone defends adopted ideologies that he doesn't really understand: As a zealot--a person uninterested in logic and entirely overcome with emotion.

In any event, that small handful of truly undecided voters are not people who I'm going to convince with all my philosophy-heavy, big-picture, academic approachs to the election.

I can't say this will be the last time I'll ever mention the election, but this will be the last blog dedicated almost entirely to it. It's tiring. It's pointless.

The academic year is on, and I start a new full-time job on Monday. This means four 12-14 hour days a week for me and, ulimately, that I will simply not have the time or energy to invest in scrutinizing what new clowns either party might loose from their car.

Despite all this activity, though, fall has always been my winding-down time. Winter in MN is--for me at least--a kind of still, quiet haven. A stasis or waiting. I keep busy enough, like anyone, with school and work, but winter forces a person to pay attention to other, more basic things, too--heat, cold, family, home. At this point, I welcome it.