The Centerfold of Elder Statesman Magazine

When I started blogging in 2004, I was writing every day. To support the habit, I had to read a lot, watch a lot and basically be plugged in to the public discourse in the way not dissimilar to the way tapeworms pay attention to the parade of digestibles through your small intestine. It's possible to make the argument that the blog output I produced had roughly the same relationship with popular culture as the tapeworm has on its host, but I would disagree in the strongest possible terms. For instance, a tapeworm could theoretically aid with weight loss.

Eight years later, my circumstances have changed. As an older version of myself, some of that youthful white-flame fire of pure partisanship is more of a lower orangey-blue as it burns fuel polluted with retardant distractions like employment, older kids and all the levels of Angry Birds. I can't be quite as passionate about politics because I simply lack the time to be irritated by Chris Mathews on Hardball on the schedule true engagement would require.

Eight years ago I would have watched the GOP convention in an active search for indignation. This year, as very recently noted here, I may have skipped it entirely. At age 38, if I've learned anything, it's how to generate all my own indignation, thanks very much. If you're not sure about it, ask me about American Idol some time.

It may seem like an act of civic indifference or intellectual cowardice, but I have been paying attention somewhat to the Democratic National Convention this week. A valid criticism would be to suggest I was only interested in listening to validations of opinions I already held. But I will say that in watching, something stirred in me. I felt something of the old zombie of my politically sophisticated self climbing out from under the six feet of intellectual detritus made up mostly of headlines forwarded to me from The Onion and marching again toward the Shopping Mall of Last Popular Culture Resort to feast on what meager brains it might find there. I found the old logical lumber, the old rhetorical girders, the old argumentative bungee cords to cobble together a superstructure of a position growing in complexity and solidity. I came away with two fantastic, epiphanic explosions of insight I had to run here immediately and express to you in the fourth of fifth paragraph after jokes about tapeworms.

1) Rooms full of white people make me nervous. The DNC wasn't all white people, but it wasn't until I saw an Indian woman standing next to a gay black guy at the DNC that I realized just how Osmond the  RNC was.

2) I would totally fuck Bill Clinton.

Republicans considering Point 2 would probably draw the conclusion that "Ha, see, being a Democrat makes you a homo," but they should consider a) they are probably a little right and b) wanting to fuck Bill Clinton doesn't make me gay, it makes me a living, breathing person. There's a certain undefinable mote of charisma living at the soul of some human beings that the attraction defies any rigid Kinseyan scale of sexual identity. This is the same reason I would also fuck George Clooney. And most women I know would take a serious run at Beyonce Knowles. Because we're human beings, naked apes in the Darwinian mold, built by a million years of evolution to do one thing and one thing only: bone famous people. You know, for the survival of the species or whatever.

Politically I may have become slightly less open minded, but it doesn't color every part of my personality. That's something else I've learned in the intervening eight years: a little heteroflexibility really broadens your options.