So this is day two. I laid awake last night, till about two in the morning, wondering what I should start with for day two. Not so much thinking about what I wanted to write about, but what I felt I ought to. This is, after all, a presentation, something for the outside world to consume, and such things should be, you know, highly polished, and have a solid theme, and be pleasing to the eye and to the intellect. Well, we're already in too deep for all that folderol, so fuggit.

There are too many loose ends in my life, too many things I've never gotten closure on to even start categorizing them all. I suppose, if I can wax morbid for a moment or two, that life is just that way. "You never know when your time is up," my good friend Keith said to me on the phone yesterday. You always assume your best friend's not going to be hit by a drunk driver, or your dad's not going to fall of a bridge, or your sister's not going to get killed in a stickup today. Or that any of those things are not going to happen to you, today. But, of course, eventually, they do, or they don't, and you get old and cork off anyway. I must be hungry. I always get depressed and glum when I'm hungry, so that in mind, I'm going to eat something.

Never pontificate about life on an empty stomach. It's a bad thing to do.

So anyway. I was thinking last night about closure, and about how people's lives essentially have none. A lot of people want to die in bed, surrounded by loved ones, with a few philosophically choice last words, and then do the "Hollywood die" while the end credits roll. Most of the time, that doesn't happen, but I hope it'll happen to me. Well, I can't decide between wanting to live a full, rich life or die before I become a drooling vegetable in some God-forsaken old folks' home somewhere. Wait, I was supposed to stop talking about this, dammit.

Okay. Movies. When I was younger, I used to always cry at the end credits of movies, especially if the ending song was kind of melancholy and sad (as, it seems, they were more often in those days; now, most movies end with a techno-pop-single hit by Artist of the Month, so they can sell more records by having a movie tie-in. Tends to take the edge of the melancholy a bit). This hearkens back to what I was saying before, about the imagination wanting to fly away to other times and places. When I was younger -- not so much younger at all, in fact -- I would throw myself into movies with a complete abandon. I bought into the world the movie presented, hook, line, and sinker. The window to this other world would open, and I would fly through and BE in that movie, for as long as it lasted. That's why the end credits made me so melancholy; the end-credit music was the sound of that window closing, and the real world coming back in. The world in the movies was so much more grand, so much more beautiful. It had heroes, and villains, and empty-eyed romantic love that lasted forever. It had victory over evil and happily ever after. The real world, need I say, is rarely, if ever, like that.

Now, I'm older, and my eye is a lot more clinical. I look for the product placement, analyze the plot forumula, grouse about overpaid actors and overblown special-effects budgets, and when the end credits roll, more often than not I'm rolling my eyes rather than drying them. I've turned jaded and cynical somewhere along the line, and sometimes I feel like the weight of my disbelief has grown so heavy that my imagination can no longer lift it. Of course, I know that's not true, because there is still that occasional movie, be it old or new, that can make me pause -- a moment of emotional intensity that will catch me off-guard and close my throat. Most often it's something offensively melodramatic, not frank and realistic. Maybe life should be more like that, with heroes giving grand soliloquies and pounding their fists on tables, then rousting the troops and galloping off into the sunrise to victory. I think the world would be a little more charming if people acted more melodramatically more often. At least, it would be fun for awhile.

This, of course, is assuming I live forever, which everybody who's young plans on doing. That's the fallacy of my thinking, and the reason I want to get into the habit of writing again, and to finish this project, this 99 days... to get down to Day One, and start from there. There's a reason why I'm counting down instead of up. I am not moving from a beginning to an end, but from a beginning to another beginning, and the closing of this chapter will be the beginning of another.

Okay, well, now that I've waxed all pretentious on you, I can get on with it. I don't really know what the coming pages will bring... be kind of interesting to see, I imagine. I have no shortage of ideas... a series of pages dedicated to the people who have changed my life, the defining events of my life, the usual Web manifesto of "ME! What I think about everything, and why you should care!" That's all any of this is. I'm not going to let that bother me, though; once you realize that it's all bullshit, more or less, the whole thing bothers you a lot less. Placing words like these in a public forum is a far cry from forcing someone to read them, and I simply assume that when that anonymous someone is tired of reading, they'll simply stop. I'm opening my window to the world, and if people want to drive by for a short glimpse, or a prolonged look, that's their right and privilege to do so, and to move on when they're sick of it. I make no apologies for what I'm embarking on. This is as close as I'm going to get to that.

Well, that having been said, it's time I went and tackled the day. See you tomorrow, likely as not.