You're never too old to read a love letter.  It's not embarrassing, either.  It's downright invigorating.  Even at my age.  Or yours.

Age is just a state of mind, anyway.  In a year that's been filled with keen reminders of just how tenuous this whole business of breathing and remaining upright really is, Mark Twain comes unshakably to mind:  "Age is an issue of mind over matter.  If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

I'm not usually so accepting of such homilies and bromides, especially the ones bordering on such blind, positive-thinking alleyways and perky, overly-caffeinated boulevards -- but there you go.  The effects of reading last night's love letter, I suspect.

The love letter was called Young Frankenstein, first rolled out on its electrical scroll, way back in the Dark Ages (as some would say) of 1974.  Hard to believe almost four decades has slipped through consciousness since, the years as easy to misplace as handfuls of lake fog gathered just before dawn.

Welcome to the sequel:  Monday, Part 2 -- The Non-Incredible Sameness of It All.

Oh, sure. We could mist up some, get all starry-eyed, get down on one knee, mutter a hazy, uncertain prayer, and utter our eternal gratitude, all because our elected representatives in Washington finally started doing (gasp!) their jobs.  Avoiding a national and worldwide financial meltdown was a side bonus, of course.

Somehow, I'm just not there, way off in Blissful Gratitude Land somewhere.  It just doesn't seem like that much of a bargain or blessing.

Of course, we're not currently engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the streets, with the prize being the dubious but life-sustaining reward of dining on weeks-old dumpster fare.  That's a Good Thing, that whole Avoiding Apocalypse business.  I'm glad House representatives are finally allowing the country to do as its laws say, and actually honor the debts they have approved all along.

Popcorn could be just the breakthrough we've all been looking for.

We've long needed something to help break through Madison Avenue's icy grip on our minds and on our wallets.  It could even allow, and help facilitate, contact with the Space Aliens openly living in our midst, called Republicans.

Popcorn?  Madison Avenue?  Space Aliens?

OK, let's back up and go slowly.  For openers, you know how a familiar feeling of vulnerability sometimes goes -- the sense that there are teams of psychologists working around the clock, seeking inroads to your psyche, in order to make you want to buy useless products, and ensure you are helpless to all commercial ads and suggestions, right?

Those feelings are normal, of course.

It's an interesting phenomenon:  You have a tiny shard of the U.S. population holding itself, and the world, hostage via the Shutdown-Blowdown-Blowup fever dreams of a handful of boneheads who dress up like Constitutional preservationists and protectionists -- while those same boneheads betray the very document they themselves claim to be supporting and providing safe harbor, all while using that same document as a handy club on all who dare disagree with them.

It's interesting, all right -- and in the same twisted, horrific, hold-your-breath-way that it's interesting to consider what happens, say, when a freight train filled with 13 million gallons of molasses and Super Glue piles into an oncoming train loaded down with 42 tons of high grit sandpaper and radioactive goose feathers .

But, then, such confusing Constitutional antics are in keeping with all the other hypocrisies of Tea Party nitwits, so there's no real surprise that their train of thought has once more leapt the tracks and pulled up outside a station named "Tri-Cornered Logic" -- if you'll pardon the oxymoron.