It's a weird, cold new year. I left a message for a pal that said something like that, and I meant it.

As the new year opens, I find myself ping-ponging crazily between the irrational euphoria of having the grown-ups about to return to some semblance of power again and the incredibly overwhelming amount of work that it's going to take to fix what's now busted.

Once, during the whole Bosnia mess, I found that I had to stop listening to the morning radio news because it simply lent a horrible pall to my day - the sort of thing that I've said happens in Milwaukee (and probably most of Wisconsin) the day after a Packers loss.

The difference here is that there's no solace to be taken in the loser's mantra of "Wait 'til next week". There is, I fear, no next week here. This is like the Super Bowl of crises a do-or-die moment - with potentially no next season.

When I stop listening to the morning news on the radio, I tend to replace the void not with music, but with other talk of humans. I listen to sports radio precisely because it allows for that loser's mantra and it has the same sort of histrionic bipartisan arguing, but at the end of it, I can just turn it off and walk away.