How to Prepare for the Final Presidential Debate

1. Go home after a long, exhausting day managing the corporate social media accounts of a variety of regional fast food chains, the names of which you can't reveal because of strict NDAs. You also can't reveal your salary not because of any legal document but because you make so much money that it embarrasses you, as does the amount you spend renting your coworking space. Your passion, which you haven't been doing enough of, is building your own ventriloquist dummies for a one-man show you've been working on for the past two years about your childhood and your love of the ocean. This is totally normal.

2. Google "What time is the debate on tonight?" and scroll through the results hoping you can find out without have to click anything. "A third US presidential debate: What's the point?" reads one link you don't click on. "Benghazi victim's mom to attend third presidential debate" says another. Open another tab in your browser. Think about maybe watching some porn? No.

3. Open Facebook.

4. Close Facebook.

5. Text your roommates: "Debate watching tonight? Where?"

6. Turn on the TV just to hear some sort of comforting noise. On Law & Order, a woman is in tears as Sam Waterston badgers her into admitting that she killed her own daughter. On the next channel over, a bald man demonstrates for everyone how to use a new kind of drill. "No complicated attachments to deal with!" he says. "Look at it go, even through that brick!"

7. Change the channel to a debate preview. Put it on mute.

8. Open a beer and look out into the alley. Something has gotten into the garbage and is rustling around inside of it and the noise sounds too loud, as if you were standing right next to the—raccoon? rat? stray dog?—pawing through the trash.

9. Contemplate for a second, the way distance has seemed to cease meaning anything this year. On the TV five feet away from you, two people are about to argue over which of them should take over the most powerful nation on the planet. In your pocket, inside the circuitry of your phone, a million angry voices, each somehow unique. All that seems somehow more immediate than that beater of a car at the end of your block, but less real.

10. The car, you notice, has an entire back seat filled entirely with garbage: ancient computer parts, scrap metal, trash bags slashed open to reveal what looks like some sort of insulation. It's been there for days, or maybe weeks. Something going on there.

11. Open another beer.

12. Flip on Tinder, even though you know you should be doing something productive, like working on your dummies or at least cleaning up your room. You don't even really want to go out with anyone, and your swiping is driven by a vaguely voyeuristic impulse. Who are the people floating out there in the internet? Do they feel the same pangs that course through you?

13. Open another beer.

14. Deal with some urgent, complicated, but NDA-protected business involving the founder of an Illinois burrito franchise going on Facebook to rank the industriousness of various nationalities. This is why they pay you the embarrassing bucks.

15. Unmute the television. The debate is close enough now that the camera is turned to the debate hall, which is in Vegas but could be anywhere. The candidates aren't here so you have a view of the Declaration of Independence, a reminder that the country was founded on grievance, it's just that back then they expressed rage so much more artfully, couched it in philosophy.

16. Get two responses from your roommates on the order of, "Nah dude, in Jeresy still" and, "At my girl's," respectively.

17. Take your six-pack for a walk. The street is weirdly empty, like, is everyone inside watching this thing? Is the idea that they want to be informed citizens, they need more Trump glowers, more Clinton deflections and stern rhetoric, to make up their minds? Or is this basically entertainment at this point—I mean, two people who hate each other forced to answer uncomfortable questions about their worst mistakes for half an hour, what could be better television? What could happen that would change anyone's mind? What is left to be said?

18. Drink on your porch and watch nothing in particular happen.

19. Think about the vastness of the ocean, which, as mentioned earlier, is one of the themes of your one-man show but also something that has intensely fascinated you for your entire life. You remember going to your family's beach house when you were five, before your dad's streak of good investing luck crashed horribly, and at night staring out at the blackness of the water. It was impossible to see where the water began but there was this immense wall of noise coming at you, an otherworldly hiss, and that was the first time you ever conceived of the idea that there are things much, much bigger than you.

20. You look up to see if there are any stars peaking through the light pollution. Nope.

21. Finish your beer and wonder if you should have another one, because one more beer would probably take this beyond "casual weekday night drinking" to a Thing, and you don't want to be too drunk in case either of your roommates come home and start thinking of you as the Weird Drinks Alone Guy.

22. Open another beer.

23. Go around to the alley feeling pretty good, actually, like you're getting away with something (and it is true that you are ignoring a couple scathing posts from something called the Illinois Immigrant Action Network, but nothing you can really do about that). This is your porch, your yard, your beer, and you feel that warm American glow of ownership, the way a settler must have felt slicing a plow into unfriendly soil (or whatever) for the first time—this is a crappy land, yes, but it is my land. Take a piss against the side of your house.

24. Swerve around the corner into the trash area and see, no lie, a fox suddenly skitter out into the glow of a streetlight. Do they have foxes here? They do. It's looking right at you, eyes like a couple marbles, body oddly scrawny and strung-out. You've never seen a fox before but this one looks unwell. It pads away completely silently, like a rag being carried away by the breeze. You feel like you have made contact with something and you make a vow that you will carry this feeling of otherworldliness around, a vow that you have made before, at other moments of brushing up against the sublime, but always forget minutes after.

25. Go back inside your house, which now seems small and cramped. Try to microwave a burrito, a process that takes you a while and also strikes you as funny. Realize that you're pretty drunk.

26. You don't really want the burrito.

27. Check Twitter, see a flood of unfamiliar jokes and memes unspool out. The debate has started.

28. Go to bed.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.