My son is studying government in school, which in itself is not distressing. What is distressing is the fact that he arrived home from school yesterday and asked me to explain the Electoral College system to him.

I fear that the four hours it took to explain the basics has shortened my already depleted life span. Besides the fact that I was a heavy drinker, I smoke and consider salad to be an appetizer. I also think exercise is for people with no sense of humor. As you can see, I am not a candidate to live to be 200 years old.

Still, I needed to do my job as a father and try and make my son, who has trouble with "turn the light off when you leave the room" understand the system we use to elect our president.

The main problem people have with attempting to understand the Electoral College system is the fact that it was not meant to be understood. The men who conceived the system didn't even have a clue as to what they were doing, but it sounded good on paper, so they went with it. To prepare myself for the discussion, I went online and looked for the history of Electoral College. I found a twenty-page history of the election system which I was only able to access if I signed a waiver that held the author blameless if I were to experience spontaneous cranial explosion, the need to stick a fork in my brain, or the desire to run for political office. I decided to take my chances, but I hid all the forks.

It is possible, however unlikely, that you could read a history of the Electoral College system such as the one I found and come away with some sort of understanding. This was not the case with this report.

After reading all twenty pages, including the footnotes, I was more confused about our system of government than I was before having read it. The basic idea I ascertained, only after using a stapler on my tongue to restart my brain, was that the original framers of the Constitution not only thought that voters were cement heads, but also considered politicians to be crooks, much like themselves.

They feared that people would not vote for a candidate based on his specific platform, but instead vote for whoever held their short attention spans with promises of chickens in pots and so on. To quash all of their fears, they elected a committee whose job was to form a committee that would oversee a committee then report back to the committee about who should be on the committee. Once this was finished, half of them were dead (cranial explosion) and the other half came up with Electoral College.

The end result was each state was issued a certain number of Electoral votes. Today, states have between 3 and 55 electoral votes depending on population, average net worth of residents, and how many hotels offer discounts for extra-marital affairs with interns.

The electors vote the state's given amount of electoral votes depending on how the people of the state vote. The candidate who receives the most electoral votes wins the election and proceeds to the White House to accept blame for everything that is wrong with the world.

After I regaled my son with all of the inner workings of our government and election system, he stood up, went and got his mother, and informed her that either I had had a stroke or I was hitting the bottle again.