The presidential campaign has been going on for, what, 10 years now? The sad campaign reporters are all about to collapse. Take CNN's Candy Crowley, who writes the following on a Post-It to look at as soon as her three alarms go off and she wakes up, weary and confused: "What city is she in? What time zone? What time does she have to be out of the hotel room the next morning? What day is it?" Crowley pleads with a New Republic writer (do follow that link, it's an awesome story) that she just wants. To go. To a simple. Grocery store. Please! And the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza described a harrowing scene on board Barack Obama's stinky airplane:

"It felt like the Lord of the Flies in there," he says. "The people who have been there for a long time have all of their little decorations and knickknacks all over the back of the plane. Everyone's a little grumpy and territorial, and there's this sense of people thrown together who have been with each other way too long. I got the sense that I was dropping in on a hostage-captor situation."

The Times' Matt Bai, sitting out the campaign trail battlegrounds in DC, sounds like a veteran rights activist:

"There are guys who went out to the primaries in November, December, and thought they'd be done in February or March, and they just never came home," he says with grave admiration. "They never came home."

Family life is not spared. The wife and children of compulsive Politico blogger Ben Smith cope by sabotaging and threatening to destroy his BlackBerry.

The book and movie deals will be small consolation, we're sure. But at least they're not having to pay their $1,000/day expense out of their own pockets. Most of them, anyway.