Our trusty old SLR camera lens finally bit it this year. After too much accidental cranking on the focus ring while it was set to “Auto Focus” we stripped the thingamajiggy inside and created the next piece of space junk – temporarily terrestrial.

So, our lives required a new lens. Wouldn’t it be great if when it arrived our lives would become clear and focused and well composed? Of course, these thoughts never occurred to me quite in that way as I searched e-bay for a replacement but they seem pertinent now that I’m writing about it. Writing about something transparently mundane like this doesn’t happen for me unless I can whip up some kind of “concerto of meaning” to play in the process. Actually, more like a “jingle of meaning” in this case but you get the idea.

So I did the bid on e-bay. I lost the first lens at $150 in the e-bay countdown. During those minutes my brain entered into a tiny sliver of awareness where even house fires can not enter. A place where my need pushes and my sense of comparative valuation pulls. A place where life becomes simple and everything comes down to one question, “Will I get a deal?” In this case the answer was “No” because some greedy bastard wanted it more than me.Â

I lost the bid on the second lens a few days later. Same scenario; great buying strategy, fixed and final price point, absolute focus… all for naught. And this time the winning bid went up by twenty bucks.

I did my research. I went to the library and parked myself at the microfiche reader. (Just checking if you’re still following along here…)

What I really did… duh…Cha!!… is use Google like every other single person with a question on the known planet. Did you know that “Google” starts with the same two letters and has exactly twice as many as “God?” Yeah, Google is God squared. Actually God helped us to invent Google to handle all the questions like, “What’s the going price for a used Tamron AF 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 XR Di aspherical IF camera lens for Canon?” Turns out to be around 200 bucks. Google knew because God’s got other stuff going on.

So back to the biding war. I set my price point higher (at just under 200 bucks so I could claim a “GREAT DEAL!” And… I lost again in the classic final flourish of ascending bids and white knuckle brinksmanship.Â

Losing three bids on e-bay on the same item just makes you crazy. You want it so bad now you can taste it. The little things just don’t matter anymore.

After coming around to the idea that it is actually e-bay that makes my life worth living and not my wife or family or my well-reasoned philosophical stances or my even my deeply held convictions, I finally won a bid on a lens. I put $150 in as my top provisional bid, intending to finish it off in a blaze of glory. But IÂ forgot about the bid’s “end time” (oooh… got to love the apocalyptic flavor of that one!) during dinner.

I got the news about the great deal I made after desert. “Hey honey, e-bay says ‘I won!’” Darn right I did, e-bay! Darn right. Even the absent minded occasionally have the winning strategy.

We all seem to be well rid of 2008 by now, what with its economic calamities and recurring images of a world in crisis. Our own tone-deaf and world-blind President leaves office with abysmal support, even among the party faithful. The New York Times tells me that only a third of Americans polled want him to have any public role whatsoever once he leaves office. While we all pretty near uniformly want to see the back of him as President, two-thirds of us want him just to disappear completely from view after January 20th! No role whatsoever. Be gone sir!

I have made personal confession that I see past Presidents in a different light after Mr. Bush 2′s performance. Reagan? I had him down as evil incarnate at the time. I thought he was the master showman who soothed our national nerves with that ersatz cowboy confidence while performing dirty little international Iran-Contra tricks not wholly embraced by our Constitution.

Or George Bush the First. The father of “W” seems like a sweetly benign paternal figure after seeing what his son provided in the second act. How quickly I forget all the campaign shenanigans provided by the likes of Lee Atwater and crew (think “Willie Horton”).

I won’t go into guys like Nixon or even rehearse the foibles and failures of guys I supported like Carter and Clinton.

After seeing the debacle of this year’s Detroit Lions football team, a team that lived through the absolute horror of going 0-16, I told my coworkers, “You know all those really bad Lions teams of the past 10 years or so, the ones we all thought we’re so unbelievably crappy? Well guess what… not so bad.”

That’s the effect that President George W. Bush has had on me. His record has been so consistently awful that he’s softened my memories of past presidential-related traumas. After this experience I look back and say, “Reagan? Hmm, he was alright I guess.” Funny how he now looks so much better in comparison. All you have to do at the very least is manage to win one stinking game a year.