In Two

Well, I don't necessarily agree with you (eksfaktr), but I think you're sort of right. First off, I don't think it's literal. I think it's more about how he has changed over the years and grown as a person. The first verse seems to be about him being "reborn" in a sense, and I think that's what he's referring to with the imagery. "Shed your precious skin" where the "skin" is his image, the image everyone expects him to wear. He's telling himself that he needs to stop trying to be what everyone wants him to be and just be himself, even though it is vastly different from who/how he was during The Downward Spiral era for example. He has to purge who he was, which basically means the same thing as shaking off his image, because his image was who he was in the past. It is going to hurt to fully change and show the world who he is now, show the world his new image. The part about it being "someone else" I think is about him doubting and second guessing himself about being this new person. The chorus is again him being unsure of who he really is or really wants to be. The next verse seems to be like two different parts of him talking, one part being the part of him that wants to change, and the other being the one that wants to hold onto the past. "Thrive just become your disease"-this is the part of him that wants to hold onto his old image. His "disease" being addiction and self-destruction. I think Reznor makes a connection between his past self-destructive self and his fame and success. I know when With Teeth came out he said how he felt unsure about even being able to write songs sober. So now it's like he wants the success and all that from his past, but without the addiction issues and self-destructive attitudes and behaviors. And that's precisely where the dilemna lies. Part of him thinks "fuck it, just go back to being an addict so you can have all the success all over again," but the other part of him says "no, you can't turn back to drugs," so he's stuck in this decision about what to do. "Leave them behind you are free"- this part is the part of him that wants to change telling him to leave the past behind him and accept who he is today. "Take what you want, what you deserve"- what you want and what you deserve are often two different things. He wants fame, success, etc.., but wonders if he really deserves that after the way he abused things before, if is family deserves that. Either way, the decision he makes is going to hurt him. He concludes by saying he still isn't sure what he should do or what he wants to do or if he will even be able to do it once he decides. Think of it as an identity crisis, or possibly even a mid-life crisis.

Just my $.02 here, but does anybody get the feeling like the main character in this song maybe had a case of DID, and the personalities are starting to bleed into each other? That's how it feels to me. Especially the other voice, "It's getting harder to tell the two of you apart", seems to be intimately familiar with both sides of the person and how they tick, and yet they can't see the difference anymore either.

it's about all of us and our struggle to come to terms with the fact that we're simply animals

Had a think about this one the other day, and came to the conclusion that, keeping with the album's theme of reflecting on his time as Nine Inch Nails, it's about the differences between Trent himself and the NIN identity he's built, and is, in a sense, showing both why he had wanted to split himself "in two" by killing off the project and why he ultimately decided not to do that.

Going by the song's logic, there's this idea that the person's two identities are growing farther apart while simultaneously getting more and more tangled up in each other -- the "person" and the "artist" feel like different people but at the same time it's hard to tell which one's in control at any moment, or if that even means anything. And there's the declaration that "this is going to hurt" -- pain can sometimes be a necessary part of the healing process, but most of the time it's an indication that you're doing something wrong. While he starts the song seemingly convinced that it's a case of the former, by the end he's questioning whether he should be listening to the pain instead of pushing through it.

And ultimately, it comes back to the theme that's also touched on in "Came Back Haunted", "Disappointed" and "Everything" -- maybe more times than that, it's just what I remember -- the decision to keep that second, "artist", version of himself alive but allow it to grow with the first one, instead of killing it and replacing it with something else.

It means the number 9 was your KiSS of death. And 19. 17, 22, 33, 55

And 25. (7)

And 15 for more reasons than you are smart enough to know.

Gotta love My (OUR) Girls!! Happy thanKSGiving.