2003-02-04 - 10:34 p.m.

I've been out walking around downtown Sacramento for hours now, swimming (drowning?) in thought. Now I'm trying to dry out with a pint of Guinness. Good stuff. At one point I ended up outside a Blockbuster store with no doors. I kid you not, I walked all around the outside and there was not a single door! I could see the people inside and I knew they had gotten there somehow, but, but how?!?!? I felt like a goldfish in some kind of inverted reality. There was a slot where people could return their movies, and being the brilliant logician that I am, I deduced that if someone showed up to drop off a movie, maybe they'd know how to go about getting a movie in the first place. It worked! The first person to show up knew the secret - the only way in is through a parking garage. Something about that disturbed me... Anyway, I got Harold and Maude. Up until two days ago, the only time I'd ever heard of the movie was the reference made to it in Something About Mary. I guess that never piqued my interest enough to rent it. But when Tom Bruce, my Death and Dying professor, recommended it, I just had to see it. The guy is just plain cool, so I figured it couldn't hurt to get it. We'll see how it turns out tomorrow. I just finished reading Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson. WOW! I can't wait to read some more of his stuff. I was really taken by a passage where he describes his reaction to witnessing his friend making love to a girlfriend in the warm Caribbean ocean among the coral reefs: �I left then, and drove back to Jes�s Lopo�s place. I bought a small bottle of beer for fifteen cents and sat on a bench in the clearing, feeling like an old man. The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories � not of things I had done but of things I failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeamon and felt sorry for myself all at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.� God, how I can relate! I stuck the quote up on my bathroom wall to force me to reflect on how I want to have real memories as opposed to those hollow should-have-dones. This is the only life I've got and I've already pissed too much of it away. It's time to take some action. Even if it's in the totally wrong direction, it doesn't matter. Anything is better than the stagnation that has been my life up until now. Carpe Diem!