I am not, by natural preference, a Politics Junkie.

My good father is an addict, though, of a very different color. I used to watch him go google-eyed (this was before Google’s failed challenge of the Microsoft eyeball patent) between CNN and MSNBC and (later) Fox News, shouting at regular intervals at a prime-time pastiche of puffy politicos and pontificating pundits. Again and again, Whitewater or Iraq or Osama or Lewinsky or The Giant Wall To Eliminate Mexico, his mustachioed point was pretty much always the same thing:

This thing that was happening! He could not BELIEVE this! This thing!

The things the man is unable to believe are, I think, a great source of fun and energy for him. As the kid, though, I found it all kinds of depressing. I mean, it was basically the same Talk Stew 24/7 . . . the context kind of changed, I guess, but for me it was all just a re-type of a nearly identical format. That whole Journalism thing - - I couldn’t really see why anyone would need to actually take out student loans for that sort of thing. You just needed to read The Onion or The Lampoon or The Daily Omniscient Laughtacular or whatever, and have less of a sense of shame about spotting inconsistencies in the figures and events of the day. (That’s called bias.)

So now I’m steering the ramshackle Life Express towards Thirtiesville (Population: Previously Unnecessary Zeal for Hair Removal/Preservation); apparently we are in the midst of some kind of election, here. And wouldn’t you know it . . . I think the horrifying civics-minded parasite paddling around my father’s spinal fluid has somehow, in some way, gotten to me.

Oh, I vote. I vote and I have voted, but in terms of actual gee-gosh civics rushes I’d have to say that helping send this one Baby Shaker to prison for life was a far cleaner and longer-lasting high. But now I’m starting to get breathless at the little things. WILL the Puerto Rican delegates become instrumental to selecting a candidate they can never elect? DOES futuristic space candidate Barack Obama have the momentum to carry a demographically-challenged Rhode Island? HAS McCain’s face been subtly re-textured and stylized throughout the course of the campaign? I’m starting to believe that it has. I want to believe that it has.

You should not DO this for days at a time, as I foolishly have. I’m starting to think big and hazy and conspiratorial: just how did Hillary get that mysterious cough, anyway? Am I really supposed to believe that Bill Clinton was able to smooth his way through an impeachment and a record-breaking number of presidential pardons, and then - - OOPS, SORRY HONEY - - accidentally blow off his wife’s leg (metaphorically) by disenfranchising a legion of committed black voters with a sudden case of late-onset foot-in-mouth? If Obama’s soul-stirring podium-rattlers are just the Powerbook tappings of his 26-year-old speechwriter, could I maybe vote for him instead?

In an effort to try and regroup from a four-day political enema of Google News and happushu, I went to an International Party in the love hotel district of Shibuya last night, spur-of-the-moment. I needed to get my feet out from under my desk; I needed to connect. It was a party kind of party; full of the kinds of people that I rarely see or talk to anymore, and I got kind of wistful and tipsy and cocky and I caught a girl’s eye, and we traded numbers and got to kissin’ for a while.

“I have rare picture.” She snapped open her cell phone.

It was a picture of her, maybe three years prior, naked, hugging the naked and furiously-tattooed back of a naked and furiously-tattooed man.

“My father. Very powerful mafia.”

She sent me an e-mail a little while ago suggesting we “play” at my “house”. But I think I’m going to go back to my other mistress for a while. I know where she liked to be rubbed, she’s quiet, and she continually consolidates news from hundreds of sources every few minutes.

That, and I think she’s less likely to get my smeary torso dumped into a shallow river.