It is grey and raining hard out right now, and that seems to have infected my mood with similar gloom. I feel achy and irritable and bored. And sleepy, even though I slept between 9 am and 2 pm already. Perhaps I am heading into one of my hyper sleepy periods. I hope not.

It would be most inconvenient to have a Big Nap Attack right now, because I have plans for today. First to go to this month’s BCSFA meeting, then to entertain my friend William afterwards. He will be at the meeting too, and will come back here to Nerdvana with us afterwards.

At least, that is the plan. Right now, I kind of feel like just crawling into bed and lapsing into a light coma for as while. Of course, I also kind of feel like stomping around in a circle while screaming, so you can’t take these transient whims too seriously.

There would probably be a primitive bonfire in the middle of the circle. I am not sure. I am new to this whole Maurice Sendak vibe.

And to just doing what I feel like doing in general, really. Pop culture spouts a lot of “follow your heart” garbage, and for all I know that might honestly be the best way to approach long time life planning, but in terms of what to do in the next five minutes, I am here to tell ya it just plain is not that easy. My hive is alive on overdrive pretty much all the time, and if I tried to follow every urge and impulse my mental megaplex puts out, the only question would be whether I died of exhaustion before they dragged me off to the loonie bin, or after.

Or at least, that is how it seems to me right now. Perhaps people who follow their whims all the time thereby discharge a lot of their excess impulses and so their mental vestibule is not clogged with a long long line of impulses who got checked at the door by the doormen of internal censorship.

I am certainly open to the idea that my life is just not working out for me how it is, and I would be well served by considering other ways to go about things.

I am still pondering trying to make the move to permanent diability status. I think the fact that I have been on “short term” disability for over a decade alone should be a broad enough hint to the System that I am not going to be getting a whole lot better any time soon.

If i succeeded in getting my status “upgraded”, I would get around $100/month more in cashola, which could help make life a whole lot easier for me, plus I would be able to get that golden ticket known as the Disability Transit Pass, which gives you unlimited travel on the bus and Skytrain for the whole year for like eighty bucks or so.

With something like that, it would be a lot easier to become a more active and outgoing person. I could wander the GVRD at will, attending various events and meeting new people and who knows, maybe actually finding something useful or at least interesting to do with my so called life.

In order to get the ball rolling, I apparently have to call up my social assistance office and make an appointment with my social worker and she (or he, but honestly, probably she) will do it all on the computer or some such thing.

I guess this is the paperless future, and I am all for that, honestly, especially if it saves me the humiliation of having to fill out a massive form and then tote that around to various agencies and beg them to fill out huge portions of it as well.

Doctors do not want to fill out forms for patients. They don’t like paperwork period. That is what secretaries and receptionists are for, after all. They get real grumpy when you turn from a patient for whom conversation and a hastily jotted prescriptions are enough into one that actually makes them have to sit down and do grunt work.

And when you are a shy and timid person who has a tendency to sort of fold in the face of authority anyhow, facing a grumpy doctor can be a major deal breaker right off the start.

But I have this horrible feeling that what will happen is that I will make the appointment, go see my worker, she will ask a bunch of questions and type a whole whack of stuff into the computer, and everything will seem golden…. until she presses “Print”, then hands me the massive printout and tells me to go get THAT filled out by various agencies. Psych!

Paperless future my ass. That will only happen when all the doctors use computers too, and have you seen how old most of them are? Not going to happen.

Then again, my doctor is pretty young, and seems at least familiar with the existence of those “calm pew tar” thingies, so perhaps it will not be an issue.

I will try to work up the energy to make the phone call on Tuesday. (Tomorrow is a stat holiday here in Canada, Victoria Day, when we all get together and watch Victor Victoria). And when I say “the energy” I really mean “the nerve”.

Being timid really makes life more complicated in so many, many ways.

And yet, in different circumstances, I am so bold as to be downright brassy. I guess everybody has their areas of confidence and of lack of confidence. Put me in an argument, or in a situation where I am called upon to stand up for a friend, and you will see a very NOT timid side of me emerge.

In the right circumstances, I fight like a fire breathing dragon, ready to burn down anything that gets in my way in my fight for what is right.

I just wish I could do that for myself.

Well, here it is, my 39th birthday. That is thirty nine trips around the solar systems on this big beautiful ball of mud we call Earth, and that is a hella of a lot of tickets spent on the exact same corny old carnival ride.

And as I feel the big four zero coming up, and it feels like the sand in my hourglass gets heavier and heavier and more eager to slide down to the bottom and make be disappear by the minute, my darkest thoughts follow me like the shadow of a bird in flight follows it no matter how high or how fast it flies.

Age old issues of worth and value and license to live grow stronger every day, It is a fell and nasty thing indeed to feel ashamed to even be alive, and to have that shame grow larger with every heartbeat until the cold within its shadow penetrates the very bones of your heart, and it becomes harder and harder to remember that you are alive and that somewhere out there, the sun still shines.

So in these dark moments, instead of giving in to the wretched despair that has been my soft and poisonous refuge for so very long, I will try to tell my story a different way this time,

We are our own narratives, after all. As a writer I am more aware of this than most. So here is the first draft of an entirely new story of me.

I was born on May 19, 1973 in Prince Country General Hospital in the safe and sleepy little town of Summerside, Prince Edward Island. I was, by all accounts, a healthy baby, quiet and content. I did not cry as much as other babies. I waited till I had a good reason.

I do not remember the house that received me when my mother brought me home that first time. I barely remember moving in to 135 Belmont Street, the house that would be my home and refuge for the next twenty years and more of my life.

I was a sweet-natured, gentle, sensitive boy with a friendly, outgoing spirit. I loved animals, especially our many cats, books, video games, and Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends. I had parents who nurtured my eager mind, a babysitter who was both tough and gentle enough to handle a precocious and stubborn little redheaded charmer like myself, and older siblings who put up with the constant outflow of questions that my eager little mind produced.

School was never a problem. My bright mind made short work of schoolwork. And sometimes I had friends. There was Kevin and Trevor, who introduced me to KISS and Judas Priest and Metallica, an influence that would persist throughout the rest of my life. I still love the heavy metal. I also used my budding comedy talents to make up dirty lyrics for the songs we sang in music class.

Then there was Philip Oatway and Troy Little, two people who sat with me in homeroom in junior high and who shared my nerdish interest in things like comic books, science fiction television, and Voltron. We shared good conversation, trips to the local Mom and Pop grocery store for gross looking candies with which to menace the girls in our class, and the secret of who it was that fed a Gummi bear into the pencil sharpener to see if it would survive. (It didn’t. Neither did the pencil sharpener.)

Then I started hanging out with Jason Heisler and Michael Coupland, and got into punk rock (DK RULES!), skater punk (a little), Dungeons and Dragons (so long, any chance of not turning out to be a big ol nerd) and even very weakly dabbling in the occult. (Not my idea. I was a skeptic even back then. )

Then I went to college, the University of Prince Edward Island, and found it to be a great place where they had thing thing called philosophy, where they actually valued people who sat around thinking about things. Imagine that!

I also discovered my nerdiest, and hence most wonderful, group of friends ever. Myself, Hal Keller, Michael Dorsey, Chris Smith, Michael Lamoreaux, and a mysterious entity known only as “Bino”, we hung out chatting and playing cards in a library cafeteria call The Pit, and called ourselves the Pit Crew, and braved schoolwork, stress, and the seductive dangers of the Pit Chili together.

We also started hanging out a couple of times a week at each other’s homes, playing oddly ruthless board games for such a jolly group of friends. Even omega males need an outlet for their competitive bloodthirst sometimes, I suppose.

Then, after leaving college, I bummed around my hometown for a while more. Living with your parents as an adult is never very fun, but on the other hand, I was getting really good at Nintendo.

Then an opportunity to follow Internet love to the opposite coast in Portland, Oregon, and like the foolhardy star-chaser I was, I took it. I moved in with two gay guys named Brian, and discovered just was a cool, laid back, and artsy town Portland really is.

It was only after moving there that I came out to my parents. Via email. Not my proudest moment.

When that ended, I moved in with David Ihnen and Dhugal, two great friends who were nice enough to give room and board to a stranded Canadian out of the goodness of their hearts.

Then, after drifting back home to Summerside for a while, lightning struck again,and I followed love all the way to the Silicon Valley in California. And when that ended, who did I end up living with again? Why, David and Dhugal again, plus an awesome guy named Ross Archer, and eventually, a big lovable White German Shepherd named Zane.

And when my time there ended, I drifted up the coast to the Vancouver area, and that is where I have been ever since.

First I lived in a tiny bachelor suite, then I moved into my friend Steve’s almost as tiny apartment with him and kept our cat Tabico (part tabby, part calico) company.

But then Steve moved in with his girlfriend, and I got booted out of there, and ended up living with a way cool guy named Eamon Jones for a while. He worked in the movie biz making bloody special effects for horror movies, and was bemused by his failure to shock me with his art.

After Eamon, I moved in with my friend David and a crazy guy from Quebec. Literally crazy. There is a big difference from “Man, you so crazy!” and “No, seriously, you are literally insane. ” And the first one is a heck of a lot more fun.

Then, after a few more bounces, I moved in with a nutty hoarder with a zillion pets. The place was full of cats and rats and even a couple of house bunnies, and I loved having so many cute fuzzy critters around to love. The atmosphere was rather toxic, though (mostly ammonia) and I was glad to move out of there and into the place where I live now, and have lived for six years or more.

That is with my buddies Julian and Joe, two funky cool gay nerds like me, and we have an apartment jam packed with books, DVDs, and nerdly memorabilia.

That is the story so far, and of course, this story is far from over. Heck, if i am lucky, it is not even half way over.

I wonder what the other half will be like?

Holy crap, this super intense dreaming shit is getting hardcore.

I just spent another day mostly asleep and the dream level was maxed the whole damn time.

It really feels like I just came back from somewhere far far away. Or worse, that I just went to sleep in one life and woke up in another, and I am not totally sure which one is real.

In popular culture, we have a lot of wonderful things to say about dreams. Follows your dreams, don’t be afraid to dream, a dream is a wish your heart makes…

Well my dreams scare the shit out of me. So forgive me if I do not feel the same.

And it is not like they are nightmares. Usually they are quite pleasant, in a neutral sort of way. So no big orgies or hot sexual encounters or wild wish fulfillment trips where I am rich and powerful and a superhero or anything.

Honestly, most of them seem somewhat like I am living another person’s life. Perhaps that is one of the things that frightens me. It feels so much like I am someone totally different in these dreams that I feel like my dreams make me unsure of who I really am.

And the other lives seems so real at the time, although when I wake up and think about what happened, there are always a lot of things that are pretty weird about the dream world that you would thing would tip me off at the time that I was dreaming.

But that is that lucid dreaming stuff, and I can barely manage lucid waking.

But the usual themes are always there. Constant motion is one of them, generally in the form of searching for something, like, for instance, the way back home. I have a lot of dreams, as I have mentioned before, where I get lost and as I try to get back to where I was, I just get more and more lost, usually with things getting “curiouser and curiouser” as I go along.

But without the cute dresses or charmingly whimsical animals. Dammit.

It is usually not very scary, being lost like that. I am usually quite confident that I will find my way back sooner or later, and meanwhile, I suspect that I am kind of enjoying the challenge, and the sidelines that I encounter.

Sometimes, though, there is no being lost aspect at all. That is happening a lot more lately. Sometimes, I am just slightly adrift in somebody else’s life, usually a quiet pleasant one with plenty of people they are close to in their lives. I consider this progress. I think my mind is trying to dream up the things I have missed out on in my life, like all the personal connections that people usually get through their families, their friends, their jobs, and their romantic relationships.

I see this as part of my mind’s attempt to heal itself, and I applaud it.

In fact, I am beginning to wonder if I have been “blaming” the wrong factors for these bouts of heavy dreaming. I have blamed caffeine, weird weather, sleep apnea, and sinus malfunction, and probably a lot more things besides.

But maybe it is all much simpler than that. Maybe I have these days upon days of dreaming simply because my therapy is causing a lot of deep emotions to rise to the surface and be processed again, and my brain simply needs to do a hell of a lot of dreaming, and hence a hell of lot of time sleeping, in order to deal with all the changes going on in there.

I suppose that means that if I spent more time consciously thinking about and dealing with these things while I was awake, I would have more peaceful and less disturbing sleep.

But I am way too lazy and self-indulgent to do something while awake that will happen automatically in my sleep without me having to lift a metaphysical finger.

That might cut in to my valuable wasting my life on video games and Internet chat time!

So on the plus side, while I would rather be awake, I am glad that things are getting done while I am sleep, even if waking up from all that dreaming can be dreadfully disorienting and downright scary when I can’t even remember who I am, where I am, what day or year it is, or whether or not any of this is real at all.

Perhaps part of me just does not want to come back. Certainly I want to escape the life I lead right now (no offense to the people in it) and in my dreams, I do just that. I get to be someone else, someone who increasingly has it better than I do, even if they are just as poor. Someone who has close connections with lots of people, someone who has a close knit family, and most importantly, someone who has that sense of security that I have longed for my entire life without even realizing it.

A long time ago, I was emotionally abandoned by my family, and withdrew into myself as a result. And for a long long time, the very concept of being able to feel secure in the warmth of relationships with others was so far from my mind that it might as well have been written in an alien language deep under the surface of Mars.

As a result, I think I was more distant with people than I realized. You can pay a hell of price for being a nonjoiner. I did not trust the world enough to risk committing to connection with others. I have always gone very slowly and cautiously in my relationships, such as they were, and not a lot of people have the sort of perception and patience needed to wait around for someone to finish coming out of their shell for them.

And I need to work on that.

Thanks dreams! Keep up the good work.

(This is a followup to my previous letter to my three siblings, which you can find on my LiveJournal here )

Well, it has been a while since my first email to you three, and I very much want to keep this line of communication open. I know it can be hard to stay in contact with people far away, even if they are your family. Trust me, I know! To quote sister Goldenhair by America :

“I’ve been one poor correspondent
And I’ve been too, too hard to find
But it doesn’t men
You ain’t been on my mind. ”

I think about you three, and Mom and Dad, all the time. I seem to have hit the stage of life when you spend a lot of time thinking about your childhood. Call it middle age. Call it nostalgia. Or just call it the inevitable result of being in therapy.

But I think a lot about my childhood, and what an odd child I was, and well, if I am thinking about my childhood, I am perforce thinking about you guys.

After all, you were there!

The other reason I wanted to write to you again, though, is that I feel like my previous letter did not come across the way I wanted it to, and that has been gnawing away at me for a while now, and I feel like I need to clarify things in order to salve my conscience.

I did not mean my letter to come across as accusatory or spiteful or especially as an attack on any of you. That is why I titled it “How I felt growing up”. My feelings, I can attest to without fear of contradiction. They are my feeling, subjective and personal, and that is that.

But I know that they are just feelings, that the realities were likely very different from what I felt, certainly different from what I feel now. Depression tends to make you very self-absorbed and liable to interpret things according to a very narrow narrative that puts you as the helpless victim all the time.

But I know I have played an active part in my own downfall, and I am at least mature enough to admit it.

So I am sure that you all have quite different takes on the events of our childhoods, and perhaps you even remember things very, very differently than how I have described them from my POV.

If so, I dearly wish for you to share your perspective with me. I want to know what it was like for you growing up in that crazy household. I want to know what it was like to have me as a little brother. I want to know the whole story.

For instance, I know I was a difficult kid in some ways. So stubborn! And not just stubborn, but precious as well, so I was not only stubborn, I was argumentative. It must have been a heck of a lot of hassle to try to get met to do things. No wonder you three never had the patience to teach me to do things. I was probably quite the handful.

I can clearly remember you all getting mad at me when I used my “professor voice”. It must have been quite galling, not to mention patently absurd, to me lectured by someone so much younger than you. I swear to goodness, I was not trying to talk down to you or assert myself. That is just how things come out when I am trying to organize and impart information. Perhaps it has something to do with having a teacher for a mother. Maybe I am just pretentious, I don’t know. But it wasn’t intentional.

Same with my being a little slob. I guess some of us are born neat and tidy, and some… not so much. Or maybe something went wrong when I was a wee tot. But I just don’t feel the physical world and my body the way other people do. For me, cleanliness is always a specific effort. I have to consciously remember to take care of things. I have no instinct for it.

I certainly remember poor Catherine sitting opposite me at the dinner table, desperately trying to civilize my table manners. Sorry about that sis! I must have seemed like a little animal to you.

I don’t want all of you thinking I do not appreciate what you have done for me, either. My conversations with you, Anne, did amazing things for developing my breadth of imagination and perspective, even if they did tend to get a tad heated at times.

And I remember you trying to teach me some of the crafts you so avidly pursued, Catherine. Too bad I was such a stubborn little clutz. Rug hooking seemed kind of neat. And what was the one with the little plastic tub? Some form of weaving?

And of course, Big Bro, I treasure all the time we spent together. Words cannot express.

So I do not want you to see my previous letter as an attack and I certainly do not want you all to think I hate you for how my childhood turned out. I was not purely innocent in it all, and I love all of you, and want us to be emotionally closer even though we are many miles apart.

That is why I write these letters, and I hope you will continue to respond to them. I do not want to set off a firestorm of accusation and recrimination and counter-accusation. I am not looking to hurt anyone or make anyone feel bad, although I recognize that with dealing with things long past, some negative emotions are bound to be stirred up.

But I am in therapy now, and there is only so far you cn go in therapy without dealing with the people in your family, the people who were there when it all happened, the people you love and will be connected to your entire life, no matter how long you spend apart.

I love you all so much. Please talk to me.

Not feeling any better than I did yesterday.

If anything, I feel a little worse. And I am pondering what I am doing wrong here.

Well, I know I have been abusing sleep lately, and that is a serious problem. By abusing sleep, I mean that I go to bed not because I am tired, but because I am bored with being on the computer and just do not know what to do with myself except read and nap.

Just think about how sad that is. If I am not here at the computer, I nap. No wonder life is passing me by. I keep sleeping through it!

And I think that has a lot to do with being beaten and battered by bad sleep. I think that at least some of the time, what is happening there is when I sleep when I am full of energy, said energy instead goes into my dreaming, pumping it way up past the point of comfort and forgetting.

And it is not like there is nothing that I could be doing besides sleeping. I could be cleaning up my room so that it no longer makes me sad to look at it. I could be cooking up something nice,like for instance finally learning to make some Splenda desserts for me to treasure and enjoy and help deal with all that resentment of people who get to enjoy the sweet life.

Or I could even be working out. Get some exercise, work off tension, build up muscle, burn off fat, lower my blood sugar. Stranger things have happened.

Spontaneous human combustion, for instance.

But I am stuck in this absurd pattern of meals and video games and naps. I am still living as though I am just waiting for something to happen, like I am still a kid in school who, when not in school or doing homework, has nothing to do but fill his time.

And I am quite tired of this, and yet, I feel like I can not break the pattern. Why not? Mostly fear, and the fear that hides under a mask of laziness and apathy. Like I have said before, depression makes you very conservative. You cling very hard to what you know because you have absolutely no faith that anything else can work as well as the few pleasure and/or reward stimuli upon which you depend.

So there is a deliberate donning of the blinders of parochialism where depression is concerned, You adhere to your routine as though your life depending on it, and do not look outside your highly circumscribed world at all, because doing so only makes you sad, and worse than that, angry and bitter and longing for escape.

So like any caged animal, you learn to ignore the cage and to treat it like it is the actual structure of the universe. This convinces you that escape is literally impossible. And should someone try to suggest ways out of the cage, you will reject those routes of escape with great fervour and vehemence, because the truth is, you do not want to leave the cage.

It is, in fact, a cage you built for yourself to keep the world out. And you are not willing to let the world in, so you are not willing to let yourself out, as much as you might pine for release.

I have been feeling increasingly grumpy and unhappy and frustrated lately, so that caged animal feeling is strong with me right about now. I am guessing that I am just on the part of my cycle where all my little frustrations and pains and fears that I do not express are bubbling and boiling up inside me as they build, and that is displacing all the bright and happy emotions I would prefer to be feeling.

I just get so sick and tired of my stupid fucking life. So pointless, so inane, so boring, so unfulfilling, so meaningless, so childish, so god damned futile. No wonder I spend so much time in bed lately. I just do not feel motivated to get out of bed and do all the stupid shit that I do.

And in many ways, I am trying to keep this discontent alive. Being happy on my situation sure as hell has not changed jack shit. “Making do” is a virtue only up to a point. You are only supposed to surrender to the things you cannot change. Things you can change, and don’t like, you are supposed to fight like hell.

Never learned to do that.

My approaching birthday is probably not helping my tension levels either. I will be turning 39 next Saturday, on the 19th of May, and after that, it is just a slow slide to 40, and honestly, I an not sure I want to make it to 40.

I know that will be a very bad day for me. I mean, 40. Fuck. It really feels like if I have not made something of my life by then, that is it, I just plain do not deserve to live. I mean, how big of a loser can you be, 40 years old and you have never had a job or a relationship or anything? Please. What is the pint of going on when each day makes you more of a loser? More of an embarrassing burden for the people you love to have to lug around?

I knwo these feelings are a product of insanity and does not represent how others feel about me, but tat does not keep said feelings from haunting me. I feel so pent up and trapped and crazy and hostile and just plain demented lately that I find myself wondering if it would not be easier to just stop clinging to sanity and let myself drift into total dementia.

Finally complete the wall and shut myself off from reality forever. Let the world take care of itself. It had done OK without me so far.

Hopefully, by putting these words onto the page, I will release them from my soul.

Not exactly on top of my game right now. In fact, it feels more like my game is on top of me, along with several obese elephants and a small assortment of battleships.

The problem is that I am sleepy. Sleep has been kicking my ass today, and to be honest with you nice folks, I would much rather be asleep right now than writing another blog entry. And normally, this being Saturday, that would not be a problem. My usual Saturday is completely devoid of social engagement, and hence I would be free to sleep all day if I needed to do so.

But tonight, I might be hanging out with my friends, so I thought it best that I get my daily blog writing out of the way and free up my options for the evening.

Sounds good on paper, but right now my eyelids are heavy and my head keeps drooping a little and my brain feels like it is being pressed between the pages of a very large book.

But oh well. If I keep on long enough, perhaps I will awaken further. You just have to keep it up long enough so that your body is convinced that it is not going to convince you to go back to bed no matter what, so it had better just deal with it.

Kind of like dealing with a bratty child. Sure, the kid will try to make your life miserable for a while. But if you endure and persist, you can prevail.

Or at least, that is the theory.

Let’s see, what to write about. Oh, how about this cute little short animation about a wily dog stalking his natural enemy : crisps.

That is one very sneaky dog. Silly dog, those crisps (what we would call potato chips) are not even good for you. Dogs are more omnivorous than cats, but I am still pretty sure they would not get a lot of nutrition out of a potato chip. Neither do we, truth me told.

Oh well. Studies have shown that dogs always value what we humans value over anything else. They figure if we, their magical powerful alpha dogs, like it, it must be good. I imagine that is how dogs and other canids learn what is good to eat in the wild. They eat what the leader eats.

It’s just that we human beings are highly omnivorous, and we eat all kinds of things that are not good for doggies. So we have to keep them away from the human foods that are bad for them, like chocolate.

In fact, humans beings are the only animals known who can metabolize chocolate. Now I am not a religious man, but if I needed a proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, that would be a good one.

Of course, I think the same thing about marijuana and sex, and I doubt that would align with the dominant religious orthodoxies of the world.

Over at Pop Sci they are talking about some game that has a hyper-realistic “KillCam” that shows you exactly what your killing shot is doing to the brains and other organs of your victim, CSI style.

And of course, they are blathering on about how this is the “most violent, gory game ever” and asking themselves and us “Are gamers ready for this level of violence?”

The media is so predictable. Sure they are ready. I remember a really great PC game that was very similar to this game called Soldier of Fortune. When it came out, its big ballyhoo was supposedly that your enemies reacted in different ways to being shot depending on where they had been shot. This included the much lauded “crotch shot”, which some considered the height of comedy.

This new game, called Sniper Elite V2, seems like it is made along the same lines. Like Soldier of Fortune, it is actually a highly detailed single person tactical commando type game, where you have to think in terms of strategy, steal, deception, and precision, not mindless Rambo style violence.

But also like Soldier of Fortune, it uses a fairly mindless advance in violence to draw people in.

So to answer the question “Will gamers accept this?”, the answer is “of course they will”. We gamers are not a squeamish lot. And at a certain age, more violent means better, especially for male gamers. Video games are a great way to work out all your male aggression in a harmless way. For teenagers and young men, the more violent and bloody the game, the better it is for this purpose.

But I am an old old gamer, and frankly, this KillCam bullshit does not impress me at all. I would likely watch a few KillCam shots out of curiosity, then turn that shit off because it slowed down the game, and for me, it is all about the flow.

Finally, in political news, this hot bit of schadenfreude fresh from the liberal grapevine : a top pollster for the Republicans says that the majority of Republicans favor a softer line on a lot of a gay issues.

Now the establishment Republicans (including Romney) have already made noises affirming that they are not going to make gay marriage a big issue in the upcoming election, instead focusing on “jobs and the economy”. both of which are improving under Obama and have been for a long time.

But still, this is a heck of a wake up call for the right wing machine. And for those of us on the side of truth, light, and justice, it is quite clear that the last walls of intolerance and hatred are tumbling down and people’s basic sense of fairness and equality is shining through.

The war is almost over, folks. The conservatives have never, despite all the noise and smoke they generate, succeeded in turning back the tide of social progress, and we get to watch as the times a-change right before our very eyes.

I can hardly wait.