The following is the text of an email I just sent out to my local Family members.  Figured I’d cross post it here to broaden the audience (although the personal appeal at the end will have less of an impact).

“Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.”

Before I get into the meat of this, I beg a small amount of indulgence from those of you I am sending this to.  I believe I can safely say that throughout the years I have made it a point not to forward political emails (or any type of emails for that matter) or inflict my political viewpoints on the unwilling with this medium.  We all have our beliefs, and I’m certainly not under any illusion that I can possibly persuade you to change your vote by sending you some kind of ill-informed and factually void email about how evil the other candidate is.

For the record (and in the interest of full disclosure), I will be voting for Barack Obama.  If you are undecided about the upcoming election and would like to know my reasons for doing so you are welcome to ask and I’d be happy to discuss it with you.  I have nothing else to say about the Presidential nominees in this post other than to ask all of you, regardless of who you feel would be the best candidate, to make your vote count and vote for somebody.  If you are too disgusted with the current top two choices look up who else is going to be on the ballot and vote for one of them.  Those votes help keep those parties valid in the states and help their candidates get elected to other posts.  Please don’t just write in “Mickey Mouse.”  That sends no message and does no good in the long run.

All of that being said, this email is not about the Presidential election.  It’s about an Amendment you’ll be voting for on the same day.

I pasted the key phrase from Amendment 2 at the top of this email.  I’d like you to look at it again, if you will.  Look at it closely and really try to grasp the consequences of what it says.  This isn’t just about defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.  This amendment would go one step beyond that to make the recognition of any kind of union outside of marriage illegal.  It would outlaw domestic partnerships and civil unions as well as same-sex marriages.  This amendment could potentially impact not only homosexual couples, but the large number of people living in our state who have Domestic Partner benefits in their heterosexual relationships as well.

Beyond that, though, I have to ask all of you – Do you really want to live in a state that has an amendment on the books that legally creates second class citizens?  That tells its residents how to conduct their private affairs?  Do you really, truly, believe that allowing two people who love each other to have legal recognition of that love is going to have any kind of impact whatsoever on whether or not your heterosexual marriage is valid?

And if I can appeal to you personally here – As I am sending this mostly to local friends and family, I can safely assume that most of you have had the pleasure of meeting Kim’s friend Duffy.  If you haven’t, you’ve missed out.  It’s very rare to meet someone so kind, so giving, so loving, and so willing to simply give of himself and not ask for anything in return other than your friendship.  He’s been there for Kim more times than I can count, and has even gone so far as to subject himself to 2 day trips on a Greyhound bus to middle-of-nowhere Missouri just so she didn’t have to make the trip alone.  If you’re considering a “Yes” vote on this Amendment, I ask you to really think about him before doing so.  Is this such an important issue that you would make it impossible for him to ever get married if he found someone he wanted to settle down with?

Ok, I think I’ve made my case here.  As always, if you’d like to have a discussion about this or any political issue I’m certainly open to it but this will be the last time I sully your inbox with political noise before the election.  Whatever you do, please make sure you get out and vote!

If you play video games at all and don’t live under a rock you’re probably aware that Blizzard is releasing Wrath of the Lich King (the next expansion for World of Warcraft) on November 13th.  On the day this happens millions of happy little geeks will stay up until Midnight, plop down $50 to purchase the pre-order they made at their local video game shop, and proceed to ooh and ahh over all the shiny new content that Blizzard is offering to them.

I’ve been joking for a while that I was going to pre-order my copy through 7-11.  I figure you can’t go wrong with video games and taquitos.  Thing is, I haven’t made a pre-order yet.  If the way I currently feel about WoW doesn’t do a major turn around here in the next month I may just take my chances with whatever store I happen to drive by on November 13th.  If I bother to do so at all.

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So I have this very unusual sense of loss this morning that is related to the dream I had last night.  In this dream I had a daughter (the odd thing is that I don’t know if I ever remember her having a name in the dream).  While this is not odd in and of itself,  what made this dream somewhat different was that about 3/4 of the way through it she realized she wasn’t real.  She and I both knew she was a dream, and that our time together was only going to last until I woke up.

The last thing I remember of the dream is holding her while she cried and said “Please, daddy.  Don’t wake up.  Not yet.”

Another interesting thing about this is that I was woken up not by my alarm clock, but by my son’s.  Not only was I profoundly sad when I woke up I was also slightly angry with him for cutting my time short with her.

Clearly I’m fully awake now and the dream is slipping away, but I still have this feeling like I lost something wonderful this morning….but it’s something I never really had in the first place.

How odd is that?

What’s even odder is the fact that I was going to just write about this on my Twitter, but something inside me said that she deserved more than a 140 word recollection.  That her online eulogy not be condensed for quick reading.

So…yeah.  I’ve sat here and tried to think of some poignant way to wrap this up and it isn’t happening.

I fully intended to start this post off by talking about how I usually don’t talk about politics, but then I realized I’d sound like everyone else in the blogosphere recently who has posted about how they usually don’t talk about politics and proceeded to do so.  We’re less than two months away from a Presidential election.  Like it or not, we all talk about politics at one point or another.  The question becomes whether or not we wish to actually have an open and honest debate on the subject or if we’re so mired in our own beliefs that we cannot even hear an opposing view without feeling threatened our taking it personally.

For the record, that’s generally why a lot of folks who decide to post about politics start with “I don’t usually talk about politics.”  It’s a security blanket.  If you attack them for their views they can draw it around themselves and make you look like the bad guy.  “See!  You’re the reason I don’t post about this stuff!”

So yeah, I was gonna start with that.  I was going to use that security blanket.  But I decided not to do so because, frankly, if someone can come up with a rational answer for my questions and concerns I’m all about it.  Explain this shit to me, because right now there’s a whole lot going on out there that just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

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Up until Wednesday, I had never served on a jury before.  I’ve been called once, shortly before Alex was born, but at the time I was working in a strip club and I’m pretty sure I did not match the criteria of “upright citizen” that they seem to go for in these things.  Twelve years and a fairly major shift in pay grade seems to have changed that, though.

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So now that the month of vacations is over and I’m re-establishing a somewhat normal pattern around the house I decided to be Mr. Productive today and get some stuff done around the house.  Well, that was my intention at the beginning of the day.  I ended up being delayed in the morning by several hours due to the fact that there was yet another scammer trying to get our Member account information this morning.  It’s the second one in a week!  Last week it was a pretty elaborate phishing scam, but this week it was automated calls that were asking folks to call another number and enter their credit card information!   I had originally intended to hit Home Depot early this morning, but I didn’t get out of the house until around 12:30 becuase I was was waiting for official word on what we should post on the web site.

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Well, the month of August has finally come and gone.  Convergence 14 is done.  Gen Con is done.  Dragon*Con is done.  I’ve blown through the large majority of my vacation hours and maxed out several credit cards.

Was it worth it?

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So the first two days of Gen Con are under our belts.  Alex and I started out every early Thursday morning playing a game called “Welcome to the Hotel California” using a new (and as of yet unpublished) system called Endless Terrors.  Alex enjoyed it, and while I have to admit that the idea for the adventure we went on was pretty decent the game itself wasn’t all that grand.  The pre-generated characters were a “who’s who” of pop culture figures that the players had to choose from.  Our group, for example, consisted of Peter Vincent from Fright Night, Angel from Buffy/Angel, Anita Blake, Ash from the Evil Dead series, Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China, Oz from Buffy, and some guy from Supernatural.  I guess they were shooting for some kind of Modern League of Extraordinary Gentlemen type of deal, but the premise of the game is that the player characters are investigators for an…insurance company.  That’s a totally viable setting, I’m sure, but not when you’re dealing with that type of cast.  Playing that game did give me the inspriation to maybe purchase GURPS and have a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen type of game setting ready to go when my players feel like playing something a bit different.

And for the record, gamer geek boys?  Anita Blake does NOT seduce people, especially strangers and pre-ardeur (which was the description they gave for her powers on the characters sheet).  It’s those squicky kinda things that give us all a bad name, fellas (and yes, it was a dude playing Anita Blake).

Since then things have started going at a pretty breakneck pace.  I actually started this post on Friday morning but didn’t get to finish it, and we really need to get out the door soon.   So a quick bulleted list of highlights –

• Games purchased – Desolation, Munchkin Booty, Settlers of Catan (with the 5-6 player expansion), Munchkin expansions 2-6, Zombie Fluxx
• Played in the Munchkin tournament.  Got our asses handed to us.
• Hooked up with Random and had a grand time walking around with her.
• Met Drew yesterday and made dinner plans with him for tonight.
• Video Games Live was absolutely amazing, and made me realize yet again how much music touches me.  Got misty eyed at several points in the show.
• Late night card gaming with Xany.  Mad Scientist University is too silly.

Ok, that’s pretty much all the time I’ve got to write at the moment.  We have a Paranoia game in 90 minutes and Alex is still sleeping.

I’m having a “fat” morning.  You know the type, right?  Where you realize you’ve eaten a bunch of crap in the last few days and you know for a fact that you’ve put on some weight?  Yeah, one of those mornings.  I haven’t worked out in about a week and I’ve been (and will be for the next three days) eating lots of restaurant food.  Coupled with the lower back numbness and stiffness I’ve been dealing with, and I really don’t feel like someone who regularly works out for 30 to 60 minutes a day.

Which is kind of a pisser, yo.  You’d think that after nearly two years of pretty consistent exercise I could maybe wake up in the morning without being stiff.

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