Went to an art gallery exhibit opening in the lower east side tonight a little earlier. I was shocked how out of place I felt there. all the punks with their piercings all over their bodies and the graffiti all over everyfuckingthing. Hung out for a while and spent my time in the cab wondering if I had just gotten too old for the lower east side artist thing, but from what I could remember I never felt comfortable in those seedy kind of struggling artist environments. Even when I was one of those struggling artists myself. was it just that it brings up money issues for me? am I that much of a snob now? I'm a singer in a rock band and I swear to God I have always had a fucking hard time in the east village. I don't know. maybe its not the lower east side as much as its just dirt and grime and poverty and graffiti that turns me off. I just like when shit is going on. Real shit. not beginning shit. and the vibe I get there is that people are just starting out in their careers rather than kicking ass in them. even though all the clubs we play are there, so who the fuck am I to say anything.

Anyway I cruised uptown where I instantly feel more comfortable. Upper east side. The polar opposite of the lower east side.  it is 10 pm on a Friday night. I am in a place called merchants. A New York landmark restaurant, that has a wood paneled bar and cigar lounge downstairs with a fireplace. Nice scene. There are only five effing places in the entire city where cigar smokers can smoke now since some character called mayor Bloomberg took over, and manhattanites are pissed. This place is packed. Must be a hundred people packed into a four hundred square foot bar. Everyone is screaming about Bloomberg like he's a Nazi.

For me I could care less; I'm here, out of the cold, in front of the fire, smoking a delicious cigar and drinking a brandy, God is there anything better than cognac and a cigar? and amongst all of these Friday night parties and revelers I have the fucking laptop on my lap madly typing at ten o'clock at night. hilarious. People must think I am such a freak. But there is just so much work that I can never keep up! I am really freaking out. I think actually what I am feeling is that I am having a nervous breakdown from the pressure of trying to get it all done and keep up. but I only need one thing to break and then I'm home-free.

Trying to wake up earlier everyday. Forcing myself. Having been used to waking up between 10 and noon for the last ten years or so, I have just found it so hard here with all the work there is to do now. in the middle of so many different projects, never feeling as though I have enough time to accomplish everything that I need to in order to achieve my goals. I have taken it upon myself to force myself awake by eight-thirty no matter what. No matter what time I go to sleep. Which is difficult because I am still on a very late schedule. My body doesn’t fall asleep till 3 or 4.

But this is ridiculous. This is just too much work for any one person. Right now I am trying to juggle five major projects: running the bands record company – and at this I am every department right now, pres, shipping, secretary, thank God I am not in graphics or web design or press, for those departments we have other people, but everything else I run, then of course there is the TV show that came out of nowhere, then there is this infomercial project for the vitamin company, which could lead to huge money, still trading stocks in my “spare time” to get more cash coming in, also trying to record the two new albums with the band – and saying two new albums is just me falling into the limited reality that seems so real to me at this time when in reality it is more like four that I have been working on, full complete albums with songs and titles etc, but again just always so used to working within these limitations.... of what people say you can and cannot do and what is possible and what is not possible and what is normal and what is not normal; still doing the real estate investment project with Sam, Boo, and Raphael – if I don't do the real estate investment I am going to wake up and find myself still renting here a year later and quite frankly to go from owning five homes to none is fucking driving me crazy --- every month that you write a rent check to someone else it sends shivers right through your whole body – the most maddening part is that I have spent every cent of my profit on all these different artistic projects and none of them have paid off as big as if I would have just reinvested the money into other areas like more real estate or what have you.

[one could argue this. I can hear Little Tree or my mom even telling me how lucky I am that I have been able to achieve so much artistically and that the reward of being able to do my art is enough and I shouldn’t always be looking for material gain all the time. but I swear once you taste money, that's it, its like a drug, you just always thirst for it from that point on, so I'm just trying to juggle it all at the same time, by the way I know I am rambling but these are diaries; this isn't prose or anything, just getting it all out]; still having to attend to the stock market everyday in order to make extra money on the side since no one project is making enough to give me what I am used to so I use stock trading as a way to make extra cash till one of these things pays off big – but the problem again is that I always take any profits I make and throw them into my art in some way, reinvest it back into recording a new CD or promotion or paying one of the record company staff,

[one thing I have noticed is that the last electronic check deposit we received to the record company  about  40% of it was from digital downloads from itunes and other services, rather than just from record store sales. This is great info. Number one it means that we are losing less from people stealing music online, and number two it means that the retail reps and the distributor reps could be working so much harder to get more sales. I mean if itunes downloads are already almost 40% of gross revenues? Then that means that someone in retail is not doing their job because those sales should be more like only a 1 to 2 % percentage from what I understand.]

So yes sales are always up for our band and we are psyched about that but no one sees any real money from it yet, but I am also in the process of signing a bunch of other acts that I am very excited about – this feels like the right thing to do and really motivates me, now of course this is on top of still writing the Transcendence Diaries everyday --- which have now maxed out over 1000 pages posted online – still not sure of the exact why of this particular project, song writing which I must admit has been nill at best, completely negligent in that area the last few weeks – only thing I am working on is this one piece called Tress which is actually based on a famous poem some lady wrote that I saw hanging in someone's bathroom, but a good song nonetheless.

Enough projects? Hell yes. too many. And because I currently – and I hate to even write this for fear of making it even more true than it already is – find myself having no assistant or secretary I am forced to do all the other little things myself as well, like paying bills and typing and errands all of that and frankly that's what kills a person, that's what breaks the entrepreneurial spirit more than anything else, is having to do all of those little scheduled tasks – but I created it quite deliberately and am convinced that the good in it is that I am learning discipline from it, which is something I have had never had. again, only one thing needs to break and then I'm home free. I know that much because I've been through this already. Biggest probs? Not enough sleep. No free time. no down time. always stressed. Not enough money. haven't unpacked yet. still living out of boxes in my apartment. Its me and fifty-five boxes of basic necessities all in 400 sq ft. very funny. And I haven't done the dishes since I moved in three months ago so the kitchen smells pretty bad. I'm not sure what's in the sink at this point. 

O.k. enough complaining. I complain so much that I annoy myself. My friends joke that I'm the only person they know who sits there and complains about how much he complains.