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The old man leapt up from his desk and confronted me. “You weren’t trying to resuscitate me, were you?” He demanded. “Everyone’s trying to resuscitate me,” he went on, shouting and drawing attention to himself. Eyes turned to me since I was the one getting reamed out. “Can’t a man keel over at his desk and fall lifeless to the floor without a bunch of damn do-gooders and screwball Samaritans bothering him?”

As a history buff, I spent my recent vacation on a week-long road trip to sniff out real American history, and failed miserably. I wasted hundreds of dollars and put countless furlongs on the car to arrive at the completely faked Abe Lincoln Birth Cabin in Hodgenville, Kentucky, for example. This monument to a great president contains not a twig from the original cabin, but the shed-like structure stands close to my home in the Midwest, so that’s where my ill-fated journey began.

Today’s televised political debates are a difficult medium for the candidates, since each must craft a memorable sound bite of his or her position in thirty seconds for an audience that would rather be watching Dancing with the Stars or Chopped. But were things better on town squares and fairgrounds in Illinois in 1858 when the candidates spoke uninterrupted for two hours on a rickety wooden platform in each of seven open-air encounters? Here’s the truth about those highly touted Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Day 1, Saturday. My wife of thirty years has left me—who knows why. Sure, it annoyed her that I hadn’t changed out of my bathrobe or moved off her sofa since my retirement in 2005, but is that a good reason? Tonight I went to the bar where we first met and tried again. Actually that bar was gone, so I tried one down the street that looked similar, only someone had removed all the Pac-Man games and the jukebox and substituted a virtual darts thingum and a mechanical bull. I sat down next to a fox in her early twenties who was blonde like my wife was thirty years ago and asked her if I could buy her a drink.