Another night of tossing and turning and vivid dreaming... I cannot remember a night in months where I wasn't entirely awake during my sleep, watching myself dream, taking notes, making corrections.... it is not a good thing. I long for real sleep. Deep sleep. I dreamed of Juliet again. I have noticed that I dream of her often. I don't think that it is she that I am dreaming about specifically as much as just what she has come to represent momentarily in my subconscious mind.

Have noticed the death of Fishy has begun. A slow death. But he is happy to be finally departing. If I wasn't charting the course by continuing to write the diaries then I believe it would happen even faster. Can I make the transition to Tobias Guess completely and still write daily as I always have? Does Tobias write daily as Fishy always has? I remember that between the years 1996 to 2001 when I was at the peak of the Ambassador years that I wrote almost nothing at all. just made notes now and then to remind myself what I would write one day, mostly lists of achievements and accomplishments. Now it seems that my grandest achievements are in the words and dreams and not in actions.

There is so much about this character Fishy that I have now grown tired of. The whining, the sophomoric self obsession, the nagging suspicion that everything won't work out for the best, the underlying nihilism and existential screen that he places in front of everything. I must change. I must put him down for good and resurrect as a new me. The old me. The ambassador was a taste of Tobias Guess. A ghost. A remembrance of what would come, of what could come. I do find inside a subtle pleasure of accomplishment in being a writer. Certain passages leave me with an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction as I fall asleep after hours spent hunched over the laptop. But I never wanted to be a writer. and so I spend absolutely no time promoting myself as a writer or pursuing a career in it, much to the objection of my friends and family. If I am going to achieve something in this life, it will be in the real world and not in the imaginary world of the writer. No.... the writer and the writing is not how I wish to be remembered. Fishy created Fishy because his own life was not yet to the degree that he desired it to be. Tobias Guess on the other hand will rise from mediocrity like the Phoenix for no other reason but that he is that Phoenix.

But the question still remains. How then do I achieve the level of success, of luxury, of accomplishment, of style, of notoriety that befits Tobias Guess? Just as I one day awoke and realized that I was Fishy and that he was no longer merely a character in my mind, I wonder how I can best facilitate the same thing happening to me with Tobias. As I write this the answer is clear. The boy genius Fishy took notes of things. Fishy was and always will be a brilliant chronographer. Setting the details and the events he observed in the world to beautiful songs and thousands of pages of journal entries. But the masterful and magnanimous worldly king Tobias Guess will be and always has been the creator of these world events, rather than just the insightful observer of them.

In fact, I remember now that Tobias Guess was never written or designed as a writer. he has come to me now maybe ten times, in his sudden and brief visitations, and never once did we ever discuss his being a writer. he was always the brave adventurer and explorer. An inventor, a valiant warrior, a hero for the ages. Man’s man, ladies man, man about town, to steal a phrase. He was never a writer from what I can remember. But I can’t even go to a movie or a party without pulling out a notebook and taking notes on how I can use the events in some way for my work. How can I make my work larger than mere words or song? I must put the pen away. I must live with no record of observation. No record of having lived. That is the world of Tobias Guess. 

Of course I shudder to think how I am meant to achieve anything close to this in my day to day waking life. Fishy was the vehicle because he never found the worldly success that he desired for his own life. Tobias on the other hand was born into it. awoke into it. I have such a wall up around me as a person that I have always found any kind of self-promotion distasteful and horrifying. Attention has always frightened me and, how do you put this, been a bother I guess. Because the more attention one has from others the more one must pay attention to others; and I have never felt like I had the time for that because I have always been deathly afraid that it would take time away from my work. At the peak of the ambassador years, just when it appeared I was about to rise up to the level that I had always imagined Tobias Guess existed in, I abandoned my own name, and started releasing albums under the band name of Transcendence instead; I disappeared behind the veil of a pseudo-band and seriously felt for a brief time that I didn't exist at all, but was just ‘one of the guys.’ G2, one of my most trusted and loyal companions, protested immediately and vehemently. As he is the visual half of everything I create, he insists that I return to recognizing my own contribution to the work that I spend my entire waking life producing by at least acknowledging my own name, rather than hiding behind a generic band name, a name that neither of us even like too much.

But again it will all be dependent upon how willing I am to permit the action to take place around me rather than outside of me from a distance. The anonymity that my current life affords me is comfortable. I can write and say anything I want to and get away with it. And still be paid for it. But still.... as I write it, I am not falling for it. although if I were being paid better perhaps I would fall easier for it. So maybe it’s a good thing that I'm not.

One thing that I have noticed is that an important aspect of the metamorphosis is the new willingness to censure and edit my ideas. Whereas for years the work as it stood at the moment of creation was the most important thing to uphold as an artist, I have now begun to realize that I can easily facilitate the killing off of Fishy just by deleting whole passages that he writes the following day. it is a strange but powerful elixir. Because of this I cannot post daily diary entries anymore, but instead choose to hang onto them for weeks at a time, changing them, and helping to shape them into a more aligned representation of the new character that I so desperately need to become in order to survive with any semblance of sanity left. And if all of this seems quite insane already, I would be the first to admit that it is all the more insane to be living inside of it.

At some point it has to switch. Where or when is the switching point?

Current Spin: the mooney Suzuki, electric sweat. Awesome rock guitar! A feast!
Last screening: 8 ½ by Fellini. He was at his peak. Needless to say this is a must-see masterpiece if you don't already own it. Well now we understand Woody Allen a lot better.