GABRIEL BYRNE: We live in communities now that are so fractured that — who do we talk to? I walked down Seventh Avenue last night, and I just decided I would look in every, like, kind of cafe that I saw. And there were so many people sitting by themselves, having dinner by themselves, and I thought, wow –

CHARLIE ROSE: Wow.

GB: — who are these …

CR: And two seats away is somebody else having dinner by themselves, and you say, “Why don’t they tell each other stories?”

[Watch]

I’m alone in the wilderness … Here’s the thing: I am one of those people eating alone in a restaurant, and I actually enjoy the fuck out of it. Restaurant time is me-time, Economist time, not-law time, not-music time. I don’t turn to the lady next to me and start recounting the intestines scene in Paranoid Park because she probably needs this hour just as much as I do. I certainly eat with friends, but if it’s seven on a Monday, like, even if I’m swimming in groceries, I’ll walk down to Kate’s Joint and have my McKate and PBR, thanks, because it’s a wonderful evening. I’d say a whole lot of us aren’t replacing real live human interfacing with self-loathing and skittishness; I, for one, am replacing it with the very computer I’ve been on all day (and I’ll be on all evening). Alone is… peace? Is that confounding?

When I get home from Kate’s, I usually put on last night’s Charlie Rose because that guy is a gem. (In Treatment, however, feels kind of masturbatory in the vein of Six Feet Under… you know, serious for seriousness’ sake. Apparently people will pay extra for this.) If I sit at that table one day, I die happy. But this whole interview feels a touch like a couple of popular kids wondering why all the dweebs aren’t going out for football, too. We play chess, guys, and it’s pretty satisfying.

It’s as if this isn’t creepy: You’re at a single phantom-lit table in a pitch-black, windowless room covered from all angles by remotely-operated cameras. A man, who’s maybe eleven feet tall, is sitting at the table. And he has some questions for you. About your recent translation.

Honest to blog … I don’t really Twitter. I started an account after reading a blurb by some douchebag and was virtually dunzo after two days.I follow, as the jargon goes, only one dude on Twitter, that dude being Barack Obama. Basically, I’m waiting for him to finally come clean about being both a Muslim — one of those dreaded secret Muslims — and the Antichrist, and I figure we’ll hear it first on Twitter. In any event, for a few weeks there I was really absurdly caught up in this election, to the point where the Caucus overtook Beatport as my new crack. But I’m currently feeling more than a bit over it over it!, and I don’t think it’s just because my guy is (purportedly) no longer on the upswing. A contest that’s increasingly coming down to rule-bending (or spirit-of-the-rule-bending) and marginalizing and downright Republicanining is one I will increasingly be expending less energy thinking about. Because it’s dumb. That’s really what I’m trying to establish here.

And I have a funny feeling that’s the danger of this thing. There are a whole bunch of us out there who hate both Bush AND “Paradise Hotel 2″ (ironic viewing excluded), who actually buy into the idea that there might be a type of change that goes beyond party and policy and Best Political Teams Evar. We — meaning those friends of mine Charlie and Gabriel think I don’t have, as well as a whole shitload of people who are kinda my age and somewhat over my age and much much over my age, and I — have really only been cognizant for one sort of politics, and it’s a sort that seems tiresome and irrelevant (or painfully relevant, depending on how you look at it). I’ve been told how important it is that we vote in a Democrat in the fall. But is it just me, or does that ring hollower and hollower with each passing week?

I drink your kool-aid! I drink it up! … While I’m off techno for a few paragraphs, I should note that this is the new this. And the way I see it, the more of these we have in the world, the better.