(Please note: I redid the HTML of this page on March 30, because I thought the first entry needed to look a little slicker than it initially did. The original entry is still from February 05.)

Well, I suppose the first of these entries should be what this is all about, why I'm doing it... why I would want to do it, why anyone would want to do it. When I told my history professor, not too long ago, that I had a web page, he looked at me in bafflement and asked, "Why would you want to let the world know so much about yourself?"

Why not? Have I got something to hide? Maybe I'll accidentally talk about those declassified CIA documents I was tracking, or something, and someone will come after me? Nah. There's no good reason why not. Then why?

There is a line, in Colin Wilson's The Occult, that has always stuck with me. "The human imagination yearns to fly away to other times and places." This is wholly true to me. People do desire to fly away to other times and places; those people with imaginations, anyway, or overactive ones like mine. Sometimes that place is somewhere a book can take them, or a picture, or a piece of music. Sometimes that other place is another person's mind, another person's soul. I think the world is full of isolated people (yeah, big revelation, right? Look, I can read Sartre, everybody!), and we all search, in whatever way we can, for someone or something to connect to, to remind us we are not alone. Some people are fortunate enough to find that, in another person, or in an art or craft they love. Some people never find it, or stop giving a shit, or what have you. I don't pretend to have the lowdown on the panoply of human loneliness.

All I know is this. To spend some time in the epistolary of the soul, reading another person's thoughts, their feelings, however superficial, or flip, or brutal and honest -- these are priceless things to me. I have much of the voyeur in me -- not in the sexual, trying-to-see-people-naked sense, but in the mundane sense... I like to look in people's windows as I drive by their houses, and see the bric-a-brac on their walls, what they're watching on TV, that sort of thing. The glimpses are small and they're fleeting. Maybe this is just a longer look, at myself instead of at someone else. So, if you're not me, here's your long glimpse into my window. If you're the sort of person who's into that kind of thing, well, there are 98 glimpses to go from here. They may not be consecutive glimpses, or all good glimpses... some of them are bound to be trite, or stupid, or just plain boring. I don't know what's to come, so I will evolve along with you, assuming anyone on Earth ever sees this turkey. One can hope.

Okay, that's all for tonight. Carry on.