At midday, from my house on this hill miles away, I can hear the traffic lights change on Elm Street in downtown Waterville. I sit and stare at my reflection in the big television screen. It's just me -- tired, old, liberal me. The Democratic "surge" is successful. Mission accomplished.

What do we do now?

The screen looks back at me. There is no Brian Williams, no David Gregory, Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews. There is only my reflection. I seem to have grown, in the past six months, visibly older, wearier, like a Teamster driver after passing through Kansas and trying to make Tempe, Ariz., by dark. The feeling is exhaustion. What do I do now?

The chattering class sleeps.

I hear only the birds now.

I walk the grounds this morning, free of media rattle. I make a list of things that leap out at me: a panel on the north side that needs repair, the tacking up of a loose piece of plastic on a back window. The last of the year's leaves await the swoop of the rake. Nov. 5 is here and gone. The roar of the armies of left and right has faded. It's over. What do I do now?

In the living room, my book table near my chair groans with its stack of magazines -- The Nation, The Economist, Time, Newsweek, The New Republic -- their covers ablaze with John and Sarah, Barack and Joe. Come and touch me, they cry. Let's read this over again. Let's reconsider Iowa and Michigan, study the poll tables and pundit opinions and the conventional wisdom.

I walk away. It's over. I say it out loud, and it bounces off the wall. "What do I do now?"

In my office, my computer screen is dark. There is no Politico.com, no Huffington Post, Drudge Report, DailyKos. There is only my face on the big 22-inch screen. I want to turn it on, but I'm terrified of what I'll find. I like the sound it makes when it boots up, kind of a rhapsody in cobalt blue, a Gershwin tune for the Internet age, Sondheim meets Gates meets Jobs.

I sit there and stare at myself. What do I do now?

It seems to know I'm here, like HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey." I want to turn it on and erase and delete all the sites; but HAL seems to say, "I can't let you do that, Dave."

I spent countless days navigating in a 22-inch pool of political porn -- one face, one sentence, one partisan blog after another. Now, the computer sits in a haze of silence. What can I do?

It's so quiet I can hear kids laughing in a yard on the corner, and my dog Jack's breathing as he sleeps right behind my chair.

He pops his head up in surprise. He doesn't hear the keyboard clicking. He cocks his head in wonderment. To soothe him, I turn the computer off and on, and it hums the Gershwin tune. He falls back to sleep. I stare at the white, fake-paper screen -- white like the bones at Megiddo. I write one line. "What do I do now?" And the rest is silence.

J.P. Devine is a freelance writer who lives in Waterville.