It’s the end of the world as we know it. Perhaps because the political climate in the country will shift significantly on Tuesday (ha – politics is politics). Perhaps because some evangelical muckity-muck got caught with his nose in the meth jar and his naked old wrinkly flesh in the hands of a — gasp! — HOMERSECKSYUAL. Perhaps because people are finally seeing beneath the surface of things, whether because they’re forced or because they are getting smarter.

Perhaps it’s because I’m sick of CL, and I don’t love her anymore.

(That’ll teach you to read over my shoulder.)

I turn another year older tomorrow, and nothing has changed. People that act as though they are holier than the rest of us — they’re the ones with the most to hide. Politicians on both ends of the spectrum are crooked and looking out for their own interests, the rest of us be damned. Working for a living is less than fun. We pay taxes and get harassed by The Man and get sick and die.

There have been major changes in the world in the 35 years that I’ve been alive — the fall of Communism, the rise of the Internet, the disappearance of the UHF dial on your TV set — but it’s all the same, really. And I don’t know that I have any real hope of real, significant change to the underlying current.

So you take a step forward, closer to the picture, and realize that on a microcosmic level, things are getting closer to idealistic every day, give or take. I’ve found a job that is, perhaps not perfect, but enjoyable (work-wise and peer-wise). I’m producing art at my own pace, under my own control. I’ve met the woman of my dreams without having to settle for less than I conceived. No, things aren’t perfect, but then, perfect is a fluid and shifting ideal from one day to the next for me.

So then, what’s stopping me from stepping back and applying this break from the conventional wisdom — that things are what they are and always have been and always will be, and that’s that, because human nature means people suck — to the big picture? Applying the skin and blood of my life to the world around me and producing a viral shift to reality?

Maybe nothing. Maybe other people. Maybe a subtle lack of interest, too.

Or maybe it’s just people reading over my shoulder. That could be it, too.