Taking a week or so off from the blog to rest, commune with nature, and regroup. When I return, there will be changes.

That the press scooped the VP announcement is irrelevant to the real story, which is that Obama managed to take what would otherwise be an important but only moderately exciting news item and turn it into the media event of the weekend.

The MSM may be smugly patting themselves on the back for their crack investigative reporting, but the joke's on them. Obama eclipsed the news this weekend. Instead of spending the day dutifully passing on the latest slurs from the McCain camp, the media went into full-on panic mode trying desperately to root out information that would normally have been placed in front of them on a silver platter. They danced like idiot puppets on their strings while Obama sat back and grinned.

Not only that, but in one simple move, Obama showed why he's going to be the next President of the United States. The simple matter of his VP pick became a frenzied media event. Love him or hate him, Obama is a superstar. McCain by comparison is just boring. Does anyone expect McCain's announcement to cause the ruckus that Obama's did? Forget about it.

And every time something like this happens, where every move Obama makes becomes a media sensation, it will just cement the idea that Obama has the aura of victory about him, while McCain is the loser whose sputtering Straight Talk Express just can't keep up with Obama's Kool-Aid-burnin' Presidential Funny Car.

As for Biden, I'll refer you to Marc Ambinder and the Rude Pundit, who sum up my own feelings.

All I have to add that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that the greatness of Obama's choice is that it leaves the field wide open for his successor in 2016. Biden will be 73 in '16 and (probably) too old to run, unless of course we get the Singularity by then and we're all living eternal digital lives inside gigantic mainframes. Clinton will also probably be too old to run. So there isn't any automatic 2016 front-runner among the potential candidates out there right now.

This is great because I don't think there's anyone out there right now with the potential to move forward from the kind of transformative, unconventional Presidency Obama is promising. I hated the idea of Obama choosing a mainstream, middle-of-the-road politician for his VP because I hate the idea of going from someone like Obama back to some Clinton-style hack.

I like Obama, but I see him as more of a transitional leader, someone who isn't exactly the progressive's dream President, but who has the vision and the right intentions to take us as far towards that goal as the country's prepared to go in 2008. He's the "bridge to the 21st century" that Bill Clinton wanted to be. Not quite President 2.0, but at least 1.5, which is a hell of a lot better than what any of the other guys were offering.

There are guys out there like Montana's Brian Schweitzer who are still politically new but have the potential to pick up where Obama leaves off, and the next eight years will provide an opportunity for other 21st century candidates to develop. I like the fact that Obama will leave behind him a clear field for a new generation of Presidential hopefuls.

OK, now I gotta drag about five tons of fragrant trash to the dumpster.

Hannah and I were at Obama's town hall event today at Rio Grande High School in Albuquerque. I got some incredible photos of this event which I would love to share with you.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but that half-semester of photography I took in junior high continues to pay hefty dividends!

H and I livetweeted the event -- we had three hours of waiting around to fill, so what the heck? -- and you can check out my tweeting here and Hannah's here.

If you're curious to know what actually happened according to someone who wasn't being a goofball during the thing, here's a good liveblog of the event by New Mexico FBIHOP.

We got to the high school about 45 minutes before the doors were scheduled to open, and stood in line outside the gymnasium. Not surprisingly, there was already a pretty huge crowd, although we're not talking Berlin numbers -- this is Albuquerque, and anyway the gym isn't that big, so I suppose there were only so many tickets to go around. I guess for Obama this was more like a second-tier club gig rather than an arena show.

I don't know if I ever mentioned to you guys that New Mexico is hot. It's not Vegas hot, but the sun burns with a peculiar intensity here, supposedly because of the thinner air. I'll be shocked, amazed, and, frankly, appalled if H and I aren't completely sunburnt tomorrow. This is my first summer around these parts, and being mostly an indoor cat, I haven't yet absorbed the lesson that you shouldn't venture out of doors for any length of time without water and sunscreen.

As appears to be the norm for events like this, organization was pretty half-assed. H and I got shaken down right away for our e-tickets and IDs, then directed to our choice of three lines. The lines were marked with signs like "yellow ticket" and "green ticket," which seemed to bear no relation to anyone actually standing in those lines.

Right after we got into a line, they closed off the lines and resumed them a few feet back, to make a corridor for the students (school was apparently still open, despite the hubbub).

You might guess that having three lines abruptly end and then resume a short distance away would create panic and chaos, and you'd be right, mostly, except the panic part. Panic? Come on, be reasonable, what the hell, man? No, no panic, but it was chaotic to be sure.

Predictably, some shameless jackasses oozed their way to the rear of Part One of the lines, leaving the poor saps in Part Two to simmer in a spicy, bitter broth of outrage in the slow baking heat.

Let me share with you my incriminating crime photo of two of these miscreants:

Not only did they shamelessly -- shamelessly! -- cut into line, but they didn't even have tickets, and managed to snag a pair from a harried volunteer passing by. If you ever come upon a pair of women who, from the rear, resemble this slatternly duo, please do me a favor and give them a swift kick to the ass.

Man, if we were trapped in Part Two and watching these bitches -- and we very nearly were! -- we'd be outraged. Outraged! As Ra's Al Ghul so pithily opined, "Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding."

Oh well. To paraphrase Woody, they're assholes, but at least they're assholes for the Left.

So after standing in line for about five years, ten months, and eleven days, the doors finally opened and we filed in through the security screening. Metal detectors always make me nervous. When I was younger, I'd always set them off. Every time! I was always that guy you see at the airport who has to get the wand treatment. I used to think I had some kind of overabundance of iron in my blood or something.

At some point, though, I stopped setting them off all the time. Maybe they improved the way those detectors work, or maybe it was that I stopped wearing foil-wrapped cucumbers in my jeans. Not sure.

The gym wasn't that big, and we all got packed into those wooden risers we remember with such nostalgic affection. It was a lot easier getting up those things at 15 than at 39, lemme tell ya. And did I mention packed? To the guy in the yellow Obama shirt sitting directly behind me who had his knee digging into my back and then started bouncing his knee, my sincerest thanks for the kidney massage.

And then there was the couple in front of us. I don't want to spoil your morning oatmeal, so I'll just say that it was pretty apparent that these kids had had a hearty, fiber-rich breakfast just before they came to this event. Next time we go to one of these things, I'm adding a personal fan to the list of must-haves.

Seriously, people, you're packed like Japanese subway commuters in a poorly-ventilated space, and that's where you're gonna cut buttloose?

Fortunately, but much too late for our liking, Mr. and Mrs. McFarty left the gym for a few minutes, presumably to go outside and air themselves out.

We passed -- uh, I mean spent -- the three hour wait tweeting and playing the always fun game of Spot the Secret Service Agent. I guess it's not that hard to pick them out of the crowd, since they're usually the ones staring grimly into the audience while appearing to sniff their lapel buttons every few seconds.

Otherwise, there wasn't much to do but sit and slowly steam in a rich bath of agitated crowd sweat. Wouldn't it be great if they sold beer at these political rallies? Just sayin'.

Watching the local political bigwigs make their entrances was fun. I'm not at all familiar with any of these guys, except for Gov. Richardson, so I couldn't share in the excitement whenever cats like Tom Udall (Senate candidate) or Marty Chavez (ABQ mayor) walked by.

I definitely knew when Congressional candidate Martin Heinrich walked in, though, because this one old timer in a cabbie hat who was either drunk or seriously serious about local politics started shouting "MARTIN HEINRICH!!!" at the top of his super loud voice. Cripes! I'm pretty sure Cabbie Hat was the same guy who fingered Peter Lorre as the child-killer in M.

Here's a brilliantly composed and shot, and not at all blurry or crappy photo of Heinrich shaking hands with the peoples, very much within face-punching distance of yours truly. Note the smiling, slightly creepy handler guy next to him. If I'd known in college that majoring in Poli Sci would enable me to get a job as the secret alien overlord of local politicians, I so would have signed up.

Personally, I find über-Aryan Heinrich muy guapo, although Hannah sez he's funny looking. I'm gonna complain?

My first "holy crap!" moment was when Bill Richardson walked in. There are literally no photos of this man entering the gym, because he swept in with the stealth and swiftness of a ninja, or a goateed jungle cat. People were sitting there talking about how much they love the Eagles or whether or not the rumor was true that Sheryl Crow was in the audience, and then suddenly it was like WTF? WAS THAT BILL "LA CHUPACABRA" RICHARDSON???

The greatest trick Ninja Bill Richardson ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And poof -- just like that, he's gone....

This event being billed as a forum on local-level economics, when the Big O finally came out, it was with his arm around a Hispanic single mother -- I don't know if anyone caught her name, because people were so freaked out over finally seeing the big guy after three sweaty hours -- who read a little story about her experience.

I felt severe empathy for the poor lady, who was clearly nervous as hell. Opening for Obama is like being the poor sap who had to open for the Beatles at Shea Stadium. She read in a halting voice from a piece of paper, and although the sympathetic crowd ate it up, one thing I'm gonna remember if I ever have to read in front of a crowd is to pause during cheers from the crowd (or in my case, loud boos). Most of what she had to say was unfortunately lost because she just kept reading through the roar of the audience.

Obama's speech was good stuff, but basically his standard stump speech. What was more interesting to me was noticing how different it is to hear the guy in person instead of on TV or YouTube. Yeah, he's got the charisma going, but a lot of what gets you worked up is the energy from the crowd.

People want to like Obama. The hunger for hope and renewed faith in America is -- and it's an overused word but truly apt here -- palpable. There's a buzz that surrounds him that is partially generated by the man himself, and partly from the excitement of the people around him.

Obama the symbol is the manifestation of our beat-down but still-breathing optimism. It seems like all we're really asking of him is to perform the role we've created for him. All he has to do is not fuck up too badly.

One thing I noticed about him in person (aside from the VPL that Hannah helpfully pointed out) is that his charm isn't that kind of phony "just plain folks" faux familiarity that every other politician uses. You know, when these millionaire lawyers and CEOs suddenly start pretending they're ordinary people and talking like Andy fucking Griffith.

I think what makes Obama seem more authentic is that he doesn't do that. He doesn't condescend, and he doesn't pretend he's anything other than what he is -- a super smart guy from modest beginnings who has earned some phenomenal achievements and is now a political superstar. He doesn't try to "relate" to you like "common folk" because he's not common folk, he knows it and we know it, so let's just talk like Presidential candidate to ordinary people and not like two guys in a bar.

After the prepared speech came the audience questions. They weren't pre-selected, as far as I could tell, but just people picked from the crowd in, as Obama decreed, boy-girl order. Clearly, though, Obama made a point of selecting an ethnically and, uh, gender..ally? diverse group (which really seemed to exasperate Cabbie Hat, who almost fell over his seat waving his cap and trying to get Obama's attention).

The first question was the best, from a young woman who took Obama to task over his backpedaling over troops in Afghanistan and his vote on FISA. Let me just say here that the reason Democrats, despite their many and deep flaws, rule over the Republicans is that this woman can even ask this question in this forum. At any McCain event, I assure you, the questions would be pre-screened, or the attendees would be pre-screened, and anyone asking a question like this woman asked would be swiftly escorted from the building.

Instead, Obama addressed the question head-on and with characteristic bluntness. Not so great was the answer itself -- something about the exclusivity provision of the FISA bill -- which didn't do much to mollify anyone who's already pissed off at him on this issue. Clearly, Obama caved to a compromise he didn't even really need to make, and there's no way he can talk himself out of that.

This isn't exactly a bunch of people who are in the mood to hear about compromise, so although his statements on the matter sounded reasonable enough to me -- "There's nothing wrong with compromise as long as you remember what your core principles are" -- material like that is not going to pump up the masses.

I wonder if his audiences are as crazy enthusiastic as they were a few months ago. Maybe it was the heat, but I didn't think his reception here had the kind of fanatical fervor I've been reading about all this time. Super upbeat and positive and loud, yeah, but I felt a little bit of restraint, and maybe it has something to do with the disappointments he's been dishing out to his supporters recently.

You really want Obama to be America's progressive redeemer, but he's just not anywhere near as progressive as progressives want, and now that he's running more to the center, it's got to be dampening down the excitement a little.

The dynamics of change and the dynamics of compromise don't quite fit, and if you're gonna point out what a shitty job the Republicans have been doing for the past decade and then talk about how you're gonna change things somehow by "working with" (translation: bending over for) the same fuckups who fucked everything up in the first place, I don't think you're gonna wow the crowd with that message. We want to throw these bums out of office, not "include them in the process." Unless it's the process of burying these assholes up to their necks in human sewage and using them as lawn dart target practice.

But to end this on a positive note, I'll tell you the best thing about being there today, and that was looking around the room and seeing, not just a gigantic crowd of people, but a truly diverse crowd -- male and female Americans of every flavor from Anglo to Asian and African and Latin and Native.

One thing I remember from a while back in Wisconsin, attending that year's Fighting Bob Fest -- and this was in no way the fault of any Wisconsin progressives, but simply a consequence of living in Wisconsin -- was how homogeneous and vanilla the audience was. Looking around and realizing I was one of maybe two or three Asian-Americans in a sea of thousands, and being unable to help feeling weirdly marginalized, as if American politics was something only "regular," white Americans participated in. (Which I know is bullshit, but I'm talking about impressions, here.)

It's not like that here. One of the high points of the event was seeing all of the Native American tribal governors in New Mexico show up, and Obama mentioning having met with them earlier in the day. Native Americans tend to be pretty much ignored by politicians, so it's great that Obama is actually making an effort to reach out to that small but politically active group. Is McCain bothering himself to court the Native American vote? Doubt it.

The great thing about living in this region is the fantastically rich stew of cultures. There's something different about the mix of people here that I can't quite put my finger on, but it's distinct from the melting pot of transplants I've experienced in the big cities I've lived in. Seeing such a crazy quilt of people participating in this wacky process we call political makes me feel hopeful about this country.

I'm glad we went to this event today, and I'm proud to be a progressive American New Mexican Democrat.

Let me tell you a spooky story of something that happened last night. Hold on, let me get a flashlight to hold under my face.

Okay.

We're watching Northern Exposure, and in one scene Shelly mentions the miniseries Shogun, with Richard Chamberlain. Which prompts Hannah to ask me if I had ever seen the Thorn Birds miniseries, also with Richard Chamberlain.

I say no, which Hannah finds shocking and appalling. Yeah, I say, but the only people I knew at the time who were watching Thorn Birds were girls. Which leads to this discussion about pre-teen girls and their unseemly love of super-sexay viewing/reading material. I tell of my shock and horror when I actually read Flowers in the Attic and discovered what all these seemingly innocent girls were reading about.

Then Hannah told me about working at a bookstore and having girls ask her for recommendations for books in the vein of Flowers in the Attic, which is basically a modern Gothic romance, and how it was an opportunity to steer them towards stuff by the Brontës, especially Jane Eyre.

So then we start talking about Jane Eyre, and in the middle of that conversation Hannah's phone buzzes with a text message alert. We have our mail set up to send us a text message whenever we sell an item on Amazon.

Hannah looks at the text message with this crazy expression of stunned WTF. She says to me, "Guess what we just sold."

"I have no idea," I say. She says, "Look at this," and shows me the text message on her phone.

We just sold the DVD of the 2006 Masterpiece Theater version of...Jane Eyre.

There's a guy, a weblogger, I won't name him, but he's a funny, cerebral, thoroughly one-of-a-kind thinkin' feller that I used to know from way back. He probably doesn't read this weblog anymore. I can't say he was a friend, exactly, but we were friendly. We'd run into each other on AIM -- this was a few years ago, when I was still on there -- and have pretty good conversations. Sometimes email. We couldn't have been more different in our personalities or choices of blogging subject matter, but we had a mutual admiration thing going on.

It was all great, and then I found out he was moving to the same town I was living in. Which was okay, fine, terrific. And then occasionally he'd sort of hint around about wanting to get together in person. And then I'd start to get anxious. It's not that I didn't want to be his real-world, I-R-L friend, but I'm pretty shy, and I'm especially shy about meeting people I know from the Internet. Not as much now as back then, but back then? A lot.

It wasn't long before he got around to asking me straight out if I wanted to meet up. And I had to -- well, I didn't have to, but what I did was, I explained to him, in terms as gentle as I could conjure, that I had pretty severe social anxiety and didn't like to meet in person with online people.

I don't know what his reaction was to that, because I never heard from him again.

Which is a shame. I don't know if he took it as a personal rejection; I tried to stress that it wasn't like that. But it's pretty much impossible to say to someone that, effectively, you don't want any kind of "real" relationship with them, without sounding either like you're blowing them off, or like you're mentally ill, or both.

I live a pretty insular life. I have since I was born. Shyness I guess has something to do with that. Probably the Asperger, too -- it's hard to feel comfortable around people when you're sort of wired to be socially awkward. No matter how much you may like people and be interested in their lives and interests, when it's mentally and physically draining to be around them, it's a lot easier to just avoid social encounters altogether.

Sometimes I talk to people about being shy, or having Asperger, or being introverted in general, and they'll say something like, "You can't have Asperger -- you seem so normal!" And this is especially true of most things involving Asperger Syndrome, the thing people find hard to understand is why someone like me is any different from them, when the "symptoms" of AS seem to be things that pretty much everybody deals with. Things like social ineptitude, becoming preoccupied with things, problems with empathy -- issues most people have to struggle with. It's hard to convey the notion that having AS means having problems that most people experience, only about 100x worse.

I'm 39. If you meet me now, I might seem kind of "off" in that classic AS way, but probably not "off" to an extraordinary degree. But man, you should have met me when I was 14. The person I am now is the product of a monumental effort towards restructuring my mind and personality to make me more socially acceptable. And I'm still probably kind of weird and off-putting to many people. There's only so far I can go. And being even where I am now requires a great deal of attention and deliberate effort that, whether it's apparent to people or not, takes a great deal out of me. Being a person who doesn't like to harm others or make others feel uncomfortable, I'm most comfortable when I'm alone or with people I completely trust.

When I was a kid, I spent most of my time alone, wandering around the forests and vacant lots around my house. Sometimes I had friends. But mostly I didn't have friends so much as other kids who, for whatever reason, decided to hang around me, no matter how unpleasant I was toward them. It's hard to be around someone who has a singular focus combined with a lack of real awareness of other people's existence.

I did some mean things, back then, to kids who didn't do anything to deserve them. I'm still capable of that kind of meanness. I often wonder what would have happened if I'd gone a different way in life. But I'm not really very mean, these days. At some point I developed a sense of shame. The things I did almost mindlessly before, all of a sudden I saw clearly.

After that, two things happened. One, I became intensely self-conscious and was no longer someone who pursued his course in life without consideration of other people's feelings. Two, I withdrew even further from the world. It's one thing to be vulnerable to being harmed by the world, and another to be vulnerable but also aware of how harmful you yourself can be to the world. Withdrawal can be a way to protect both yourself and the innocents out there who might otherwise fall into your deadly orbit. Better to make yourself small and unnoticed than to go out there like some kind of acid-secreting snail.

But I think it's possible for people to change in positive and fundamental ways. I'm not that same kid I was when I was eight. Or even the same man I was at 30. We all have these core problems in life, the demons we live with, and life has a sadistic way of making it so that you encounter your demons, make mistakes, learn from your mistakes, and then meet those demons again, in different disguises, so that you make the same damn mistakes, only on a whole new level of ineptitude. It goes around and around and around. But each time, if you play it right, you learn a little more than the last time. The game doesn't change, but you get better at the game. And eventually, maybe, if you stay in the game long enough, you might learn enough to beat it.

All I need is 400 more years and I think I can pull it off.

The pump in our swamp cooler has been broken for who knows how long. It's one of those things where you think something might be broken, but you're not sure, and it's hard to tell if it is or not. The air the cooler's been pumping out has been feeling warmer and warmer, but since the weather's been hotter and hotter, we kept thinking maybe the air we were getting was as cool as it was going to get.

It's also not easy to tell when the pump is on, so we'd listen for the faint gurgle of water moving through the pump, and hear some kind of tiny sound and think, maybe that's as loud as the pump gets.

Meanwhile, it's been getting hotter and hotter inside, to the point where we finally had to start leaving the trailer in the afternoon and going to someplace air-conditioned.

Finally, we broke down and had someone come look at the pump, and sure enough, it was broken. He fixed it. Now it definitely works!

Now I know how the frogs felt in that story about the frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water.