The unofficial journals and online musings of Ed Hale
God is New York beautiful. Everyone is so smart and handsome and educated and hip. It’s really something.
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.
Now today we can look back at that think it’s the most ridiculous thing we’ve ever heard… but maybe old jackass fuckhead bastard Calhoun was right in a way…. If you look at the last thirty years, what’s it been? Thirty years? since the black people were really free in America? About that anyway, maybe forty years at best…. their quick ascension to complete domination in sports, of the arts, and the world of entertainment, maybe they’re just plain better than the white people in a lot of respects. Maybe that’s what Mr. Calhoun knew all along and was just scared shitless about so he kept it a secret. They sure have the biggest shlongs. That’s for sure. Honestly if you’ve ever seen one, its just plain scary. All I know is I don’t care who was right or who was wrong, but I do know this. I sure would like to play the guitar as good as Jimi Hendrix did, or rap as well as jay z or chuck D, or dance as well as Prince, or play ball as well as Michael Jordan or Barry bonds, or be as smart, and rich, as oprah winfrey, or be as funny as Chris rock Eddie Murphy, bill cosby or Richard Pryor. That’s for sure. So say what you will my Negros but them blackies are taking over. And they’re doing it fast. I don’t think they’re equal at all. I think they may just end up being superior to the white people in a lot of fucking ways. The only thing the white people had was more guns and more money.
Last screening: MOTORCYCLE DIARIES. HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS FILM. this is a great movie. This is a major chill factor movie. Man I was enthused coming out of there. boo boo my companion wanted to walk but I said fuck that I’m hopping in a cab, I have to get home and write and work on this reality show thing. it is everyday becoming more and more clear. same thing with the diaries. PS – the American CIA helped kill che guevera. Why is America always involved in this kind of stuff?
History of The Curse
Jan. 3, 1920 — Boston, winners of five World Series appearances (1903, 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918) sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. The Red Sox received a fee of $125,000 plus a loan of $350,000 for Ruth, and superstitious fans believe a curse was thrown in for free. The “Curse of the Bambino” has followed Boston through four World Series defeats — each one in seven games.
May 8, 1926 — During a span in which Boston lost over 100 games in three consecutive seasons, much of the left-field bleacher sections in Fenway Park were destroyed by a fire.
Jan. 4, 1934 — When Tom Yawkey purchased the Red Sox in 1933, restoration began on Fenway to repair damage from the 1926 fire. During construction, another fire swept through the ballpark, undoing much of the progress.
Oct. 15, 1946 — In Boston’s first visit to the World Series since 1918, the Red Sox lost a decisive Game 7 to the Cardinals. Tied at 3-all in the eighth inning, Enos Slaughter scored from first on Harry Walker’s double in the bottom half when shortstop Johnny Pesky hesitated with his relay throw.
Oct. 4, 1948 — The Red Sox lost 8-3 to Cleveland in a one-game playoff for the American League pennant.
Oct. 12, 1967 — The Red Sox lost to the Cardinals in their next visit to the World Series. After leading the Red Sox to victory in Games 2 and 5, Jim Lonborg returned to the mound in Game 7 against the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson. Gibson gave up three hits while Lonborg, pitching on only two days rest, allowed the Cardinals to score seven runs for a 7-2 loss.
March 22, 1972 — In yet another of a long line of bad Boston trades, the Yankees acquired relief pitcher Sparky Lyle for first baseman Danny Cater. Lyle was a three-time all-star with the Yankees and won the AL Cy Young Award in 1977.
Oct. 14, 1975 — Cincinnati took a 2-1 lead in the World Series with a controversial 6-5, 10-inning win. Reds pinch-hitter Ed Armbrister hesitated after a bunt and collided with catcher Carlton Fisk, who was trying to field the ball. Fisk’s throwing error allowed Cesar Geronimo to advance to third — and later score the game-winning run. Home plate umpire Larry Barnett ruled there was no interference despite heated protests by the Red Sox.
Oct. 22, 1975 — One day after Carlton Fisk hit a 12th-inning homer off the left-field foul pole to win Game 6, Boston lost Game 7 by wasting a 3-0 lead. Joe Morgan blooped a go-ahead ninth-inning single off Jim Burton in Cincinnati’s 4-3 win.
Oct. 2, 1978 — The Red Sox lost the only other one-game playoff in AL history. Bucky Dent hit a three-run homer off Mike Torrez to lead the Yankees to a 5-4 victory at Fenway Park. The Red Sox at one point in the year had a 14-game lead over the Yankees in the East division.
Oct. 25, 1986 — The Red Sox were one strike away from the title. But then came Bob Stanley’s tying wild pitch and Mookie Wilson’s winning grounder through the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner in Game 6.
Oct. 27, 1986 — Boston again wasted a 3-0 lead in Game 7, losing 8-5.
Nov. 5, 1996 — Roger Clemens was granted free agency after Boston’s then-general manager Dan Duquette said the pitcher was in the “twilight” of his career. Over the next eight years, Clemens
went on to post a 136-53 record while earning three more Cy Young awards and two World Series rings with the Yankees.
Oct. 18, 1999 — Boston blew a three-run lead in the bottom of the eighth and stranded 11 runners in a 6-1 loss to New York in Game 5 of the ALCS. The victory clinched the Yankees’ 36th American League Pennant and led to their 25th World Series title since the acquisition of Ruth.
Oct. 16, 2003 — Aaron Boone homered off Tim Wakefield in the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 7 of the ALCS and the Yankees advanced to the World Series for the sixth time in eight years. Boone was just 2-for-16 in the ALCS before the home run.
Feb. 14, 2004 — The Yankees and the Texas Rangers agreed to the outline of a deal that sent Alex Rodriguez to New York. The Red Sox nearly acquired A-Rod in December of 2003, but a proposed deal that would have sent outfielder Manny Ramirez to Texas fell through because the players’ association blocked Boston’s attempt to restructure Rodriguez’s record $252 million, 10-year contract.
June 13, 2004 — Hoping to lift the curse, divers attempted to find and raise the sunken remains of a piano that Babe Ruth allegedly pushed into Willis pond in Sudbury, Mass. after the 1918 World Series. The fourth such dive surfaced without so much as a pedal or a piano string.
AND:
Scientists uncover possible new species of human
Dwarf skeleton is 18,000 years old
Wednesday, October 27, 2004 Posted: 1:06 PM EDT (1706 GMT)
(AP) — In a breathtaking discovery, scientists working on a remote Indonesian island say they have uncovered the bones of a human dwarf species marooned for eons while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.
One tiny specimen, an adult female measuring about 3 feet tall, is described as “the most extreme” figure to be included in the extended human family. Certainly, she is the shortest.
This hobbit-sized creature appears to have lived as recently as 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores, a kind of tropical Lost World populated by giant lizards and miniature elephants.
Read more here:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/10/27/dwarf.cavewoman.ap/index.html
Last screening: Ken Burns documentary entitled ‘The American Congress.’ See it. its good.
We spent a lot of time discussing this whole new reality TV project idea I have been dipping my feet into. she had many good ideas and suggestions. Feeling very excited about it actually. So I sit here and try to take as many notes as possible while attempting to stay diligent to the transcendence diaries at the same time.
Changing the transcendence diaries now. making them more public as we have kept them in frame sets to keep them off the search engines and rather a private affair just for fans. But the idea now is to not only open them up to the public by allowing search engine robots to see them, but to actually make them more of a forum situation where users can post comments and replies to one another based on the content of the diaries. bloggers are already doing this. its funny. I’ve been doing the transcendence diaries for years now and to a certain degree, for a short time, it was a quite a novel and fresh and controversial thing, but while I was doing it this whole blog phenom starting hitting so its right in line with what’s going on. I was doing it the whole time and here it turns into this whole public phenom. And now it certainly isn’t a novel idea. Whether or not it is controversial still remains to be seen since the only people who read the transcendence diaries seem to be die hard fans and they don’t really care how far off I go in them. I assume that people who don’t like what I write will just stop reading and close their browser window.
Opening them up to the public, putting them more out there, could certainly open up a few cans of worms. But I believe that it may be part of the bigger picture. After all it has been almost a year since last years ski trip when the artisan pleaded with me vehemently to have my own TV show and do whatever it took to expand my horizons and my image beyond just standing on stage and singing. So being here now, I feel very open all of a sudden. You cannot help but feel this sense of infinite possibilities.
I have taken an office on park avenue. Which really made me walk out of there kicking my heals with excitement about how much I will be able to get accomplished now. (never been one to be very adept at working from home myself. Wish I could actually because this fucking office is expensive.) How you might ask? Since I am flat broke? Oh well that is the secret I have been living my life by since I can remember. Some call it living beyond your means. I call it living your dreams. something akin to believing it first and seeing it soon after. I have always lived this way. and whenever I have found myself living through more mainstream belief systems, like being prudent or scared of not having enough money etc I have always popped out of it and realized that I wasn’t really living the life as fully as I was meant to or was capable of.
[Take Boo Boo Kitty for instance. She has over four hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Invested. And I ask her today if I can borrow the second volume to pride and prejudice and she tells me that I can only come over the her house to watch it and cannot take it out of her house because it is too valuable. Go on Amazon and you can buy a set for less than twenty bucks. Prob less. So you just have to wonder where that comes from. that kind of lack mentality, where even if someone has that much money in the bank they still feel poor and worry about losing a used videotape.]
Within a matter of less than two minutes it went something like this I noticed: “oh that’s a pretty girl. Is she pretty? Let me see her face. I wish she would turn around. Great body from behind. I feel a sense of urgency and fear. She’s turning around. If she is pretty I will surely feel sad that I cannot have her. how do you know you cannot have her? you don’t even know her. well I guess I just assume I cannot have her. well maybe you can have her. she’s probably married. Look at her finger. If she is hot and she is married then I will feel relief and the sadness will go away because then I don’t have to worry about her wanting to go out with me or not. She’s taken. Yes true but I will also feel sad because she is married and all the good girls are already taken. How will I ever find a great girl of my own? oh look she’s not that pretty. Good. now I feel better. She’s not pretty. So I don’t have to worry. but man what if she is not married? Oh that will make me sad because now I will feel sorry for her and worry about her getting married….” that is when I realized that I was watching my thoughts rather than thinking them. or rather, that is when I stopped thinking my thoughts and realized that I was watching them at the same time. again, fascinating. What irony. So lets get this straight according to my insane thinking, if a girl is hot then I feel bad for myself that she probably won’t want me, unless of course she does then I immediately don’t really like her or want her anymore for some strange reason. If she is married I feel a little bit better because at least I don’t have to worry about her wanting me or not. Can’t fault her for not wanting me if she is married after all. but if she is unattractive, then I feel immediate relief from this nagging sorrow that no hot and eligible girls like me, fucking fascinating. And yet at the same time I immediately start feeling bad for them and hoping that they meet someone fast that will love them and marry them. crazy series of fears, resistances, and projections. A psychotic brain if you ask me.
The whole time I am observing this I am taking notes in the restaurant. The Syrian girl is curiously reading my every word, attempting to discover what I am scribbling about. I am sure she has no idea.
Later that night the Syrian girl seduces me. I am serious. I have no attraction to this girl. Some but not a lot. I have never had Syrian before so I tell myself that I should at least attempt to sleep with her if that is what she is aiming at just to rack up another country. Syria is totally uncharted territory to me. so I jump up and look up Syria on msn Encarta world atlas. Wow there it is in the middle of all of these Muslim countries. I ask her to show me exactly where she lives on the map. So there it is. crazy. what the hell is she doing all the way over here in New York? She tells me that she listens to my cds everyday and her favorite song is superhero girl. That it is her song. She then takes off her clothes and tells me to make love to her.
In the bad news dept the Yankees somehow managed to take a 3 game to 0 lead against the sox and lost the series. New York is in mourning. A bad omen for my move here? nah. Prob not. But how they did that I have no fucking clue.
Hi Juliet,
You came to me in a dream last night. well, better put, we met up in a dream last night, I will scribble madly without editing.
Did you know that today was my birthday? no I’m sure you didn’t but it is and last night/this morning I was awoken by the first time you came to me in the dream by how vivid it was. as if we were in another universe. Like the one you had where we were at the university/college campus under the stars… remember?
This was so vivid that I awoke and thought wow this is awesome Juliet is coming for my birthday. we were building a fort together outdoors with my boys in the band. and then we had to do our own radio show. I mean it was like you were right there. it was so real. you have a lot of young boy energy, I assume you can feel that. a lot of tom boy in you. yes? you know, I was always so obsessed with my obsession of you since junior high as the archetypal woman that I never even noticed that before this dream. And then I was looking at you in the dream and I was seeing it and of course now that I am awake I can really see it. a lot of male energy.
We had a lot of fun in the dream and felt a very strong loving trusting vibe to one another. Again, other worldly, magnificent, close, brother/sisterly, completely unconditional and trusting. And we were very happy to be joined up doing our thing there. it was not a lovey dovey sexual kind of thing at all. which of course continues to daunt my weak and feeble mind because that is the only way I seem to be able to relate to girls until after I sleep with them, in which case then I can easily look at them from a friends only perspective. Haha! oh my God did I just write that?! classic. But true most of the time. unless I am not attracted to them. and in this case I cannot even say that I am attracted to Juliet. I just want to sit and stare in her eyes for hours all the time — those eyes of hers — it is as if I am peering into the soul of myself or someone very dear to me, like family or something…. and I long to listen to her speak, as strange as that sounds, because she says such amazingly transcendent things; like a guy, I mean, not to be sexist, but she speaks and writes like a guy, like some fifty year old award winning novelist guy; or like you would want a girl to, but have her still stay a girl; there are many so many examples of these julietisms. Once when she compared life to a shot of cognac after a yoga class, and in that moment I wanted to grab her and stare in her eyes for an hour and then make love to her all day and just stare in her eyes and hold her and bond with her and I don’t know, just get to know her more and get to know the possibilities of what we could be I guess. I wanted to glance at her from afar glancing at me from afar. And then both of us letting out smiles that we were there, together, lucky to know one another and to appreciate one another for who we were. Things like that.
So I don’t know if you can call that attraction. I think it is more like admiration. I even try sometimes to look at her from that perspective. I try to imagine kissing her, caressing her, making love to her… I mean, I’m a guy, I try to look at all women from that perspective. Especially with someone I love as dearly as Juliet. But with her, I cannot. Not really. I guess there is a part of me that feels that it is off limits, one because she has a boyfriend, and two because she has already indicated that it wouldn’t be appropriate, and three because it would be a waste of my time to guide my own mind in that direction if that isn’t the direction our relationship is intended to go into. so yes, just us hanging out enjoying being together, like both of us very happy that we happened to be there, in the company of one another in this dream, like so many others. felt cosmic. Very cosmic. Answers? Prob no answer. just is.