The Transcendence Diaries were an experiment in the ongoing saga of The Adventures of Fishy. Not being able to complete the work, or better put, not even being able to make sense of it, I decided to abandon it all together and just start keeping a daily journal. Both factual and fictitious certainly. Thoughts, events, ideas, feelings, stories and fantasies, expurgations and exploits alike. It was much easier to journal everyday than it was to pen a novel. And I being a very lazy person thought the idea a brilliant one. At least for the benefit of my own sanity, but perhaps unfortunately not for the old bank account. I thought that going back to journal writing might help me one day prepare for novel writing. They were a therapy perhaps even more. Having been estranged from the lovely and mysterious Cleopatra at that point for close to a year, I needed something to fall in love with. Why not myself. I needed something to feed and water and care for. And the daily habit of diary keeping was just that thing.
They were started on July 12th, in the year 2002. not any different than the thousands of pages I had already penned as a young teenager and college student before I got the notion that I would turn it all into a novel one day. that idea and my many attempts at it so destroyed the journals completely that I soon started detesting the idea of writing. And for years I never even opened a book to jot down a word. Out of necessity really I began again simply and soon found my self so addicted to the process that I never travel anywhere now without my laptop and never find a quiet moment in the old noggin when there isn’t a narrator deep in the recesses of my mind recalling and retelling and reshaping every moment that I breathe, everything that I witness or observe, every thought, feeling, action, or event is narrated for me as if by some mysterious and unknown third party that dwells somewhere within my skull without me actually ever doing a thing. I just listen; attentively sometimes; except when I am trying to sleep; and I try my best to write a little bit of it down every night before I go to bed.
Although they are regularly posted to the Internet every few days a few pages at a time, they are actually kept in one-hundred page word documents to keep the file sizes manageable on my hard drive and a few external back up drives. Regardless of the date, each chapter is closed after a hundred pages have been typed. This evening I closed the ninth chapter to begin the 10th. That makes for an approximate count of 900 pages. [After a quick survey of each I found the actual count to be 944 pages to be exact.] Today’s date is October 30th, 2004. Two years and three months later and 944 pages typed in. Not bad kid. Not bad at all. Especially since I don’t take it seriously and don’t even spend much time doing it. for the most part I had long considered it an almost fruitless exercise that I had created simply because I was too lazy to be a real writer. I had always compared diary keepers to part-time musicians who never bother to write complete songs or record albums. Hobbyists at best. Most of the time just nuisances.
But the project has not been without its benefits. I do derive an immense pleasure from the practice for some reason. I think partly because it affords me something to do with my mind. I have from what I can tell an certifiably insane mind. I was born with it. always had it since I could remember. Since I was a baby I could always hear this other voice inside my head speaking to me; no, not speaking to me. speaking to itself. While I listened. ‘so this is the nice woman. this is the mean man. This is my grandfather. He is the father of the nice woman. she is my mother. That is her mother over there. she does the cooking. She is the wife of the grandfather. He sits around and tells everyone else what to do. how long have I been here? who am I? how did I end up here? with them? who are these people? what if there were nothing in this world? what would the world be like if there was no world? would I still be in this world? is there another world besides this world? what world did I originally come from?’
These are my earliest memories of my earliest thoughts. Before I could walk or speak or communicate with the outside world of the giants all around me. I would close my eyes for minutes at a time and try to imagine a world where there was no world in it, or try to picture the world from which I came. For I knew that one day I was not here, and the next thing I knew, I was here. this I knew. The other voice in my head always thinking, calculating, analyzing. And me just following along for the ride.
I ask other people do you have this voice in your head that is always narrating everything and commenting on everything and cataloging everything and judging everything? and most often than not they say no and that I should seek medical treatment. So I think the diaries are that medical treatment. It’s the way I ward off the insanity that would surely come from someone living with this day in and day out without any rest from it like I do. so I write it all out instead. I think that’s the truest thing I’ve ever written in my life.
