Today over lunch a friend and I were sharing our disappointment about John McCain. Today’s John McCain bears no resemblance to the one we believed we knew 10 years ago.

Then I came home tonight and saw this.

Somehow or other, the LA Times recently finagled a phone interview with the reclusive R. Crumb, whom I got to see, once, at a comic-book convention in either Philadelphia or New York, 25 or 30 years ago. Opportunities since then have been just as limited.

I’ve enjoyed Crumb’s work for more than 30 years now. I admire his talents, his frankness, and his artistic scruples.  But Crumb the man is getting left further and further behind. Which is fine for him. For me, it’s different. What he sees as relentless commercialism, I see as an offshoot of a web of possibility that almost all of us were utterly closed off from until the past 20 years. Thanks to the Internet, we can connect with almost anyone. We can self-publish — instantly. We can self-produce goods and services. We can record and upload and share and sell digital music. Artists in particular should cheer the new age. It isn’t for Crumb — but it’s great for the rest of us.

Oh, if only Ikea made instructions for everything. Here’s how much more easily things could work.

Thanks to good friend Doug Hackney for sending me this excellent post about the impact of paywalls on online newspapers. Clay Shirky’s post gets at two key points:

• That whereas  the average newspaper formerly enjoyed status as a monopoly, the internet has commodified the delivery of  news.”The classic description of a commodity market uses milk. If you own the only cow for 50 miles, you can charge usurious rates, because no one can undercut you. If you own only one of a hundred such cows, though, then everyone can undercut you, so you can’t charge such rates. In a competitive environment like that, milk becomes a commodity, something whose price is set by the market as a whole.

  Owning a newspaper used to be like owning the only cow, especially for regional papers. Even in urban markets, there was enough segmentation–the business paper, the tabloid, the alternative weekly–and high enough costs to keep competition at bay. No longer.

  The internet commodifies the business of newspapers. Any given newspaper competes with a few other newspapers, but any newspaper website compete with all other websites. As Nicholas Carr pointed out during the 2009 pirate kidnapping, Google News found 11,264 different sources for the story, all equally accessible. The web puts newspapers in competition with radio and TV stations, magazines, and new entrants, both professional and amateur. It is the war of each against all.

•  That as newspapers move behind a paywall in an attempt to squeeze some revenue from their heretofore free delivery of news, their online numbers dwindle to only a highly engaged fraction of their print subscribers — or, in Shirky’s brilliant analysis, what one equates with the subscribership of a newsletter, not a mass-consumed, mainstream, newspaper. In Shirky’s analysis of the Times of London, as way of example, the online version is trending ever more Torie for this reason.

I bring this up not only because of my longstanding love for newspapers, but also my ongoing daily thoughts about the Los Angeles Times in particular. Last month I did finally call to cancel, as I’ve threatened to do so many times on this blog. I don’t like paying for the delivery of a newspaper that everyone else gets for free online, and which contains news (and even features!) that is older than the free online version, and which often lacks content that is found free online. It seems counter to common sense, and decidedly unmeritocratic. In fact, it seems like charity on my part — and I don’t feel that I owe the Los Angeles Times any charity. My sense of this deepened last month when I was given an iPad, which now enables me to read the LA Times with as much ease of portability as the print version. The final rub was when I learned that the Times was charging me something like four times (!) the rate they are charging new subscribers. That finally got me to call and howl — “I’ve been a paying customer for 23 years, but you’re discounting for new people?!?!?!” Whether or not that’s an industry standard in print marketing (and it is), it’s insulting — especially to someone who has begun to feel that he shouldn’t have to pay anything.

A friend emailed me tonight to let me know that the television show “Rubicon” had been canceled. He said he knew it seemed silly, but he was a little down about it, as though he’d lost a friend. Why did he email me? Because he knew I’d feel the same way. We were the only two people we knew who were watching it.

“Rubicon” dealt with a group of government analysts tasked with sifting through reams of data, usually in the form of stacks of reports, to find clues about terrorist strikes. Ultimately, the team finds the source of terrorism against the U.S. — and it turns out to be their own organization. The first (and now last) season ended with the group having perpetrated a terrorist attack of enormous proportions, scuttling U.S. access to oil from the Gulf of Mexico and deeply wounding the U.S. economy. What would have happened next, we’ll never know.

What drew me to the show was its deliberate pacing, and its layers of meaning and characterization. In an age where it’s expected that everyone will be distracted at all times, “Rubicon” insisted that you pay attention. Midway through the season it occurred to me that some of the characters’ odd names must have been anagrams, or clues — and, indeed, I unscrambled “Kale Ingram” into Leak Margin — because he was a leak, and he played the margins. That sort of exploration provided superficial fun; what was more exciting was deciding that Mr. Ingram, who by all evidence could not be trusted, needed to be trusted by the main character, Will Travers, because Travers had nowhere else to turn. And so we were vicariously put into the position of all the characters — making alliances with unfit allies, just as players on the world stage do every day.

I did my bit advocating for the show, and I did manage to get one new person to watch it. “Rubicon”‘s finale claimed just over one million viewers. “Mad Men,” a show that has descended into ludicrousness, netted two-and-a-half million people for its own season finale. In a nation of 300 million people, that’s not that great a difference. While “Mad Men,” somehow, is in the zeitgeist, it didn’t start there; most people climbed onto the show via DVD prior to the second season. I think something similar would have, or could have, happened with “Rubicon.” At the least, I wish AMC had invested in one more season to find out.

I’m not the only one who will miss the show. (Here is Vanity Fair’s Mike Ryan bemoaning the show’s demise.) “Rubicon” was the only show I ever wanted to have a water-cooler conversation about. The problem was that no one else was at the water cooler yet.

As a followup to my having related that the dream follows the real-life narrative, last night I dreamt that I was aswim in the licentiousness of urban Cambodia, with vacant-eyed perspiring young girls wearing red shifts and nothing else entreating me into dark doorways, the erotic foreshadowing the necrotic. Where did that come? For some reason, before bed, I chose to watch “City of Ghosts,” in which Matt Dillon finds himself largely in the situation described above.

But I still have no idea why I would dream I was mistaken for the bassist of Metallica.

This is five minutes long, but it is a shiver-inducing five minutes. The final scene of last week’s episode of “Walking Dead,” in which our hero finds himself trapped beneath a tank while hordes of crawling undead grasp at him, has nothing on this true-life scene of formerly dating young conservatives debating their personal affection for the cruel impacts of “Republican Fight Club” while the moderator chuckles nervously over one affront after another. It would be too much to say that these people represent some large segment of the people now romping into office, but that they represent even themselves, even some small aspect of humanity, is disturbing enough.

Every night, I have vivid dreams and am able to remember them when I awaken. (There’s a term for having that ability:  sleep disorder.) Usually, what I dream is related to what I was thinking about when I fall asleep. But for two nights in a row, I’ve dreamed that I’ve been making music with famous people, even though that hasn’t been on my mind at all.

On Thursday night, I dreamt that Paul McCartney and I were hanging around in my bedroom recording some songs. I should say, I’m not a particular fan of Mr. McCartney’s music. Yes, I like The Beatles. But I haven’t given his solo career much thought. I own two Beatles CDs, and that’s if you count the version of “Let It Be” that McCartney took it upon himself to revise a few years ago. (Theoretically, Ringo was consulted, but what was he going to say? Except for, “Thanks for the call.”) In my dream, Paul is playing guitar and I’m working the studio controls much as I think Brian Eno does:  using his own instrument (the studio) to improve the song while co-writing it. In the alternate universes of my dreams, even when the people are familiar, the logic of the situation falters. So in this case, while I’m making music with Sir Paul, it gradually occurs to me that, hey, this guy was in the Beatles. (Whereas in our world, this would be our very first thought.) And since he was in the Beatles, maybe I might like to have my picture with them. And then I realize that if I can get my picture with Ringo, I’ll have my picture with half the Beatles. But then I realize that I don’t care if I have my picture with Ringo, and actually I don’t care if I have it with Paul, either. If John were still around, that would be good, or if I could get photographed with John and Paul, and all the while I’m thinking this I’m trying to get the song I’m doing with Paul McCartney, the most celebrated and successful songwriter of all time, to sound less… saccharine. Then I wake up.

The next night, I dreamt that my lamp grew taller. I woke up at 3:08 a.m. (yes, I always check the time) to see that my nightstand lamp, which ordinarily peaks at only about 18″ in height, is suddenly far far taller — the lampshade now towers four or five feet over my head. I realize this can’t be so, and that I’m still dreaming. So I sit up and look at it. And look at it. I really stare at it. Because I’m sure that at some point my vision will return to normal and the lamp will scale down to its correct size, because I know it cannot have grown while I’m asleep. But it never shrinks to respectability, no matter how hard I look at it, so I roll over and go back to sleep. This is unfortunately common for me:  being awake, but still seeing what I was seeing in the dream. For 47 years, I saw some very unpleasant things, even while I was still awake.  But hypnosis seems to have solved that; now the night terrors are gone, and while I don’t enjoy seeing things that can’t be there, at least now they’re less ominous.

When I gave up on the lamp returning to scale, and fell back asleep, I dreamt that the band Metallica had confused me for their bassist.

Much as with Mr. McCartney, Metallica is not a favorite of mine. I have no Metallica CDs. And I enjoy no Metallica music. If you like them, that’s fine with me. Enjoy. But I do not. My dislike for their music carries over into the dream, where the other three band members keep insisting I’m their bassist, and would I quit fooling around, because they’re getting ready to go on. I think they’re playing some bizarre practical joke, and I’m wondering why I’m even at their concert, which seems to be playing in a small basement club. No matter how hard I try to convince them that I’m not their bassist, and how could I be since I don’t know their songs and don’t even know the names of the people in the band who are insisting that I play with them, they keep walking me along backstage toward the band platform. Along the way we pass a mirror and they almost have me convinced that I must be their bassist, but I look into the mirror and I can see damn well that I’m him and not me. But when they look they see him, or at least that’s what they say. So finally I give up. I figure:  “You know what? It’s playing bass and it’s Metallica. How hard could it be?” I was in a band once where the bass lines in one of our songs went like this:  C, C, C-C-C. C, C, C-C-C. Even I could play that. And maybe, hey, I’ll get to participate in the hedonistic after party. So I say yeah, sure, hand it over, give me that bass guitar. I get the bass and I go out on stage and I start to try to play — and that’s when I notice that the strings are made out of cloth, like wide flat shoelaces. And now my bandmates are all staring at me because I’m not playing anything, and I’m not playing anything because the guitar won’t play anything. That’s when I woke up.

I’m not a morning person, and I never have been. Would you be, if every morning you woke up from something like this?

This morning I called my 84-year-old mother on the East Coast to say hello. I told her I was calling to ask her what she went as for Halloween. She laughed and said she’d gone as herself. So then I asked her if now she was the old lady who scares all the kids on the block. She laughed at that, too. We talked some more and I made some other crack and she chuckled and said, “You’re too much.” That’s a high compliment. It was a good start to the day. Then I went on to my playwriting workshop, and my next audience experience.

Here’s what I know about leadership from my reading of Sun Tzu and Macchiavelli:  Being nice is easy. Being powerful and feared is better.

One would have thought Barack Obama knew this.  I didn’t expect George W. Bush to have read them (although Dick Cheney could have written sequels), but I assumed that  Obama had read “The Art of War” and “The Prince.” Read them and understood them. But there he was the morning after his electoral “shellacking,” promising to work closely with the very people who that same day were saying that their primary mission is to restrict or undo his achievements thus far, and to deny him a second term. I’m trying to decide whether the appropriate word for Obama’s response is “feckless” or “craven.” Until the final month before the election, he hadn’t stood up for what he believes in, had not propounded his principles in a way that would resonate and draw respect, and now here he was the morning after the mid-terms again folding his tent. What the moment demanded was Churchill. What we got was Neville Chamberlain. Obama is the president of the United States. The Republicans took one chamber of the Congress, not two. What can they pass without the president? Nothing. What can they undo? Nothing. How can he not know this?

Unless, maybe, he is ready to employ a tactic from the masters of intrigue:  deception. If I were Obama, I would put on every outward sign of “cooperation” for the next six months, feeding my foes’ underestimation of me,  while sticking a shiv in them every chance I got. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what he’s going to do. He still hasn’t learned that he was right the first time, when he sized these people up as his enemies.