Someday this election's gonna end.

I say that at least once a day now. It's like a mantra. It's my only hope. It's like soup. It's like, nothing bad, let me tell you that much. I can't get away from it. The headlines keep screaming at me. Anyone who says this makes any sense at all is either lying through their teeth, or so hopelessly biased that listening to them would be like trying to discern between barking dogs.

And, because of this, I've had to flee reality. Go back into that never never land of yesterday. Maybe I can find an answer in those old forgotten filing cabinets in the cobwebbed corners of my brain. Maybe, back when Axl Rose was a god, everything made more sense.

So last night, with the prospect of not much going on, I decided to take a jump into that murky puddle. I pulled out close to 50 CDs and 25 tapes from the late 80s, early 90s. High school and early college for me. I strung a string of Christmas lights (sorry about that whole grumpy X-Mas thing last week, someday this election's gonna end, y'know), perked up a pot of coffee and set my mind a hummin.

The intent was to start a novel of sorts.

The day before I had an idea for an interactive type novel of searching through someone's brain by way of a search engine type device (like Google or Lycos). Where the actual text is stream of conscious and the subtext, noted by the search engine and interpreted through an "impartial" computerized jury, would help to explain what is going on. This was the plan.

I had also been shopping with my roommate for gifts, which inevitably led us to a bookstore (many of our friends read, you see). And I remembered to look for A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, which was written by Dave Eggers, one of the founders of Might magazine and, just a few weeks ago, gave Dave a cool $2 million for the movie rights.

A worker at the bookstore showed me where the journalism section was (way away from other books) and then told me that he heard Hunter Thompson (whose books were situated close to Eggers' in the small journalism section) wrote Hells Angels in one night with the help of a bottle of whiskey and a bunch of coke. I mused about how long that night must really have been.

Might Magazine has a bit part in my past as well. It was a source of great inspiration for parts of Lies Magazine (which was my much less successful version of a wacky magazine), and there was a bit of a mutual admiration society going on between us. I was talking to one of the Daves (both editors were named Dave and I can't remember which one I talked to most of the time) and he mentioned that he loved our Mudhoney cover with the tag "Talking Bout Our Generation," which was a reference to a line in one of the songs on "My Brother The Cow." No one else in the world got the joke.

I stole the way we reviewed music from Might, and they stole a couple other things from us. Of course, Dave Moodie didn't give me a job at Spin when he went there, and I'm not mentioned in Dave Eggers new book (which is a memoir). So it's not like we were tight or anything.

But the thought of jumping into a novel idea sounded good. And what if I could write a solid 60 pages (single spaced, and the length I figure the main text of the stream of conscious part should be) in one hellacious purge?

It took a while to get the motor going. I gulped down a cup of coffee (tainted, as usual, with Irish Creme and half n half), had to abort because I was called away for a slight emergency, came back, fixed another cup, played computer games for a solid 45 minutes and then started it up.

I'd written the gist of the first line of the book earlier in the day, when I'd decided that I would start this whole thing. So, in a way, I already had the hard part done. I just had to flow.

And flow I did. For most of the night, I cranked away while Poison, Warrant, Tesla, Faster Pussycat, Junkyard, Bang Tango, the Dogs D'Amour and others of a mostly forgotten time urged me on with cheap sexual come ons and half-felt ballads of true love gone bad. I only made it through 15 pages, but it's a good start. And because of the nature of what I want to do, it's not necessary that it all comes together right now.

By the end I was drunk (coffee turned to beer after the pot was empty) and spent. But what does this have to do with the past? And why should you care about the machinations of a novel that might never see the light of day? And how long is that day they keep talking about when they say "At the end of the day" before launching into the reason for more lawsuits and dog barking?

Nothing. And everything. It all is part of this whole mess of an end of the year 2000. We waited with baited breath for the world to end last year and realized that we were afraid of ghosts. This year, we can't make our minds up about anything. Should we be bears or bulls? Should it be Gore or Bush? Do we want all the votes to be counted or have all the votes been counted and we're illegally counting votes two or three times?

No one wants to know the answer to these things anymore. We don't care. We just want to get on with our lives. And if it means staying up until almost four in the morning because of massive caffeine intake, or drunken incoherent rambling about the rise and fall of late 80s hair bands, so be it.

We've all got lives to live, let's forget this year and get on with it.

Matt Worley is still a bit surly about this never ending election thing.