All I want is a debt ceiling deal.

And some peace and quiet.

Lately, one can’t turn on the television, open a newspaper or check one’s electronic device without being barraged by endless reports on how the seemingly interminable series of meetings concerning raising the nation’s debt ceiling are going.

We’re told by many that if the Congress and the President can’t get their act together and reach an agreement on raising the allowable level of indebtedness, all manner of catastrophe will ensue.

And somehow the deadline date they’ve picked when the four horsemen of the apocalypse will be loosed is August 2, this writer’s birthday.

Now how are folks going to concentrate on the important stuff, like deciding what present to buy me, with all this debt ceiling hoopla going on?

It’s just not fair.

I guess I could pretend that watching the national sparring partners is a comedy routine put on by an especially inept troupe for entertainment at my birthday party.

But I’d much rather that Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, had picked another arbitrary date for the deadline to this contrived theater show.

Here at the local level we have had our share of theater, with the two boards going back and forth with budget proposals, citizens chiming in with their thoughts, charges of dire consequences if one thing or another is not funded, until at the end, all is finally somehow decided and the process ends.

At the national level the nation has operated without a budget for several years now, the Congress not even bothering to perform one of its basic functions. They just pass continuing resolutions authorizing things to continue on for a little longer. The debt ceiling talks are, it would seem, just more of the same, an authorization for the country to keep on borrowing money a little longer, since it can’t live within its means.

Just as many households do, the nation has been paying the bills as they come in, hoping without hope that its income will meet the demands of creditors, hitting the plastic (in the form of selling debt) for another injection of cash when the income is not there and the country needs something really bad.

It’s not a sane way to run a household, county, state or nation.

Luckily for the county and the state, they are required to balance their budgets.

At the household level and national levels, unfortunately, we are not.

But I’m convinced, despite all the dire warnings, that the four horsemen will unsaddle their steeds at the last minute when a deal is reached, probably the night before my birthday, to raise the debt ceiling so that the nation can borrow more money to be repaid from Lord knows what resources later. Then we can get back to the important stuff.

Like opening my birthday presents!