Well, we’re on the eve of the Inaugural.

Millions of people, they say, are going to be watching Barack Obama sworn in as the first black president of the United States of America. To say that I am out of my mind with delight would be an understatement. To say that I am out of my mind with delight that I am not going would not. Lots of people are going to be going to this thing, because people want to see it — they want to be there for history. But I’ve discovered something about myself and this new age that we live in: I’m quite content to watch history happen on the television.

Why, you might ask, is that my decision? Well, first of all, I started thinking about being surrounded by millions and millions of people all trying to see the teeny-weenie little dot up on the platform that is Barack. So I figure, “OK, can I handle millions and millions of people?” Yes, I could do that, but in the event that you have to go to the bathroom or that some strange flip-flop happened in your stomach because you were too tense — well that got me thinking: How would I get through all those people to go the loo?

Now, I’m not going to be sitting with the VIPs because I’m just an IP — not a VIP, just an IP — and I realized that I would be in the middle of all of that, unable to drive in any direction I chose. And if, for whatever reason, there was a moment of panic on my part, I would not be able to move. So I thought better to sit at home and not have to look like an IP, not have to think about how I will get to one of the many port-a-potties that will be there. Just the basic stuff.

Forget all the amazement, the idea that, for the first time in history, in the history of our country, someone who wasn’t a Caucasian man was going to be president of the United States. Do I think that’s a great thing? Yes, of course. But boy, does he have his work cut out for him! I listened to a lot of people talk about all the reasons that some of the decisions he’s making are wrong, and I thought, “Well, if they were wrong, why didn’t anybody start to correct the problems as they happened?” Surely all those Republican and Democratic senators who were sitting for the last eight years saw what was coming, and maybe they were all so brilliant that they couldn’t figure out how to articulate the problems at hand. But now, since we have a new guy coming in, it seems everyone has the information.

Let’s take a look at the economic picture. I’ve talked to a couple of great folks that I know who said, “You know, the only way we’re going to be able to move forward, is taking and creating a gazillion dollars to put into our system of government right now, and the government has to take care of this. The government has to bail out business because business is so far down and so far out of control that it cannot right itself. So government has to step in and go, ‘This is how we’re doing it. This is what you’re going to get. This is the situation we’re going to take hold of piece by piece.’”