What a day

I'm in New York. Have been meeting with Al Gore and Bono about their global warming concert series. Apple is totally going to be a lead sponsor. Bono played me a few bars of the big ballad that he and Geldof are working on for all the superstars to sing in a giant chorus. Something about the fookin ice floes meltin and the polar bears a-drownin and the fookin smokestacks belchin while mankind does fookin nuffin, blah blah blah, and then a chorus that goes, "CEE-OH-TWO-OO-OO, let's do what we all can do, CEE-OH-TWO-OO-OO, reach across the oceans blue." Or something like that. Needs a little work. But I'm feeling it.

Anyway. Bigger news is this. The concert discussion was just a pretext. They really wanted to get me to New York and talk to me about the race in 2008. As in, running in it. My first reaction was like, You gotta be kidding me. Do you have any idea how many times I dropped acid in the Seventies? They say that's no big deal, Obama went on TV and talked about smoking weed and doing coke. I'm like, Dudes, I'm talking about friggin hallucinogenics, okay? The kind of stuff that wipes out entire sections of your brain and twists your DNA into pretzels. I've got sperm cells with twelve tails and fourteen heads and each one looks like the Keep on Truckin' guy. I did this shit like five hundred times, at least. Not to mention all the crystal meth and coke and weed and hash and angel dust and black beauties and downers and whatever else. I mean it was a lot.

No worries, they say. America's moved past that. Gore says his machine is primed and ready, but he's not going to be the candidate. I am. He says this isn't about me, or him, or any of us -- it's bigger than that. It's about saving this country from that woman. He says Hillary can probably raise $250 million. I'm like, Why can't we back Nader? Or Jerry Brown? Nope, Al says as he sees it I'm the only person on the planet who has the mixture of charisma and cash that this battle is gonna require. Heck, I can raise half a billion and not even feel a pinch.

Think of all the stuff you've told me, Al says, about the ways you'd like to make this country better. Including reforming the DOJ and ending this crazy practice of turning hard-working entrepreneurs into the the target of ridiculous criminal investigations, and wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on pointless crusades.

All good points. But it was Bono who closed me, and God love him he did it by throwing my own words back at me. Boyo, he says, do you wanna make fookin music players for the rest of your life, or do you wanna change the fookin world?

So fair enough. We've set up an exploratory committee and talk to some fund-raising type people and see what kind of reaction we get. We'll do some polling too. Apparently in some of the prelim work I've put up some ridiculously high name recognition numbers and some very low negs, as long as they don't poll former Apple and Pixar employees. So we'll see. We're a long way from actually declaring a candidacy, so let's not get too excited just yet.