2:15 a.m. It's technically tomorrow, but I'm still up. We can't be rigid about this, you know.

3:50 a.m. I'm working through the backlog of email postings to the journal news list. All those voices, all those links ... I'm intent on getting all my folders read and emptied so I can join in the conversations again. Can't post until I've read everything.

4:16 a.m. I'm yawning. And I really really want to go to bed. I'm going to have to admit that I've tried to do too many things today. I have failed to complete even one simple task. Well, actually, I did one thing. I made chicken soup -- not for the soul, but for the bowl.

And I watched most of the 25th anniversary special of Saturday Night Live, and it was a melancholy thing, indeed. People have died. People have become unrecognizable. Twenty five years ago I watched the show on a TV set in a basement playroom. I had big dreams.

It seems no distant than yesterday. I could get up from this computer, go through that door, round the corner and go right back down those stairs to 1976. That's how clearly I remember.

And just as surely as I know my own memories, back then I knew my own imagination. I believed in myself, for no good reason. And I believed in my future. I was so sure of things back then that I could have turned off the TV, gotten up from the couch, climbed the orange shag-carpeted stairs, and sat right down here in 1999 to write.

I am the person I imagined.

And now? Now I must climb the white-carpeted stairs and go to sleep, perforce to dream. There's tomorrow to create and it's still hazy, after all these years.