One Battle Out of Many Abated

It's 3:30 am. Slightly more than the usual insomnia. [Note: One conflicting aspect of the Personal Expression Age in regards to social media is the tendency and temptation for us to head for the immediate gratification of posting to a public site such as Facebook or Tumblr rather than our own blog or website, which is obviously a more permanent, and financially lucrative, place to sit one's deepest innermost thoughts and feelings. It's a phenomenon that I've just recently been observing, having noticed that over the last four years -- since the advent of social media gone mainstream -- there is direct correlation between how little I post to these Diaries on a regular basis now, compared to the seven years prior, and how much more time I dedicate to being actively engaged on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr. This is something we should explore in more detail later....]

So rather than "writing" -- that sacred act once studied and revered of sitting down to participate in the art and craft of honing one's ideas with the written word into something potentially coherent, permanent and hopefully even beautiful and admired for all the world to see for an eternity, something that I'd made a daily habit out of for more than twenty-five years, I opted instead for the more ephemeral and much simpler and easier (though perhaps more immediately gratifying) act of a lazy status update on Facebook. This is a trend, perhaps even a habit now, that I fully intend to break in this new year. The point was a simple yet major one. A very recent and profound victory over and breakthrough in my battle with ADD.

[I do believe in sharing, that it's important to "share", which is one of the primary benefits of the Age of Personal Expression, this new loving embrace for public sharing.... but for artists a balance must still be found between the two: this temptation to share instantly through social media, and the more tasteful and permanent art of writing. One cannot suddenly abandon one's occupation of the art and craft of fine writing and letters and replace it with social media posts that are not only inherently temporary but also obligated by necessity to be limited in scope and depth just because it happens to be easier and more instantly gratifying. Unless of course they want to and choose to. That's their choice. I know many a fine writer who has drifted off into these uncharted shallow rocks never to be heard from again except in little blurps and bleeps on Facebook or Twitter, their wit and wisdom once preserved for the ages now reduced to mere one or two sentence anecdotes, sarcastic comments or the occasional angry rant. As a fan of fine writing I've found the trend to be saddening. ...

Nonetheless, last night at least, I caved once more. There is something very appealing about that instant read that one feels they receive when posting to a social network that now feels lost even when posting to a popular blog, which theoretically and realistically is just as public as any social network. The irony is that feeling is the same feeling we used to get when we first started posting here over ten years ago. There were no social networks. So the idea of posting one's innermost secrets online in general -- knowing that within minutes or hours others would be reading them, was completely enticing, exciting and exhilarating. Just as posting to a social network like Facebook is today. And with instant links and feeds from one's blog to every social network out there available, there really is no reason why we should feel so torn and tempted. Perhaps it's the instantaneous part of it that is so tempting. Or perhaps it's the more engaging aspect of it.... Depending on what one posts, one can literally almost guarantee themselves some kind of response if that's what they're after. Frankly my honest appraisal of this strange phenomenon is that it just comes down to pure laziness. Status updates on social networks are like blowing bubbles. Here now, gone tomorrow. Or like thoughts never revealed in our roaming mind... Here. Gone. What? So there exists no need to perfect them or hone them in. The growing trend in communication amongst ourselves as a society is to focus far less on how we say things and rather just on getting them out, regardless of merit, form or function. This may not necessarily be a good thing. Let's end this train of thought now and venture out toward the open sea where we originally were headed.]

Where were we? Insomnia. Yes. In case that wasn't already obvious. But perhaps this time of day or night is best for this type of post. For any other ADD/ADHD folk out there, I am happy and relieved to report that after decades of struggling, maddening frustration and trying everything out there and then some (including brain mapping and even low frequency electromagnetic brain zapping therapy) I believe we've finally found something that actually works. Lo and behold it turned out to be the oldest, most obvious and commonly used treatment. Just took a while to get the nerve to try it. Anyone else out there still challenged by it, just know that it is real, it's not in your imagination, you're not crazy, it is indeed physical /chemical /biological and not just "all in your mind" as many people try to get you to believe; AND better still there may be a chance there's a solution out there for you out of the many that are becoming available. Keep trying. Don't give up. Believe in yourself. There's light at the end of the tunnel. -Fishy

And thus was the post. Which yielded a string of inquiries as to just what treatment was I referring to specifically. It wasn't something I had planned on revealing publicly truth be told. But if the sharing aspect of the Personal Expression Age cannot be fully expressed and utilised as we originally predicted it would be to yield full-on democratic revolutions of entire nation-states then it really doesn't hold much value at all. So privacy be damned we must at least attempt to embrace this growing trend honestly openly enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. So I replied.

OK peeps, I wasn't going to actually mention what was working for me personally, because I think it's such a physically personal thing, dependent on each individual's own biology, that I don't necessarily think what works for one person is guaranteed to work for another. Plus, there is so much controversy regarding meds for this condition, especially certain ones. But for me, it was Ritalin. But only 5mg doses. What they call "a children's dose". Old school. It's only been a week, but the difference has been intensely noticeable. First recommended by doctors when I was diagnosed at 4, my parents absolutely refused to put me on it. And ever since I've tried every other med and therapy that exists in my refusal to try that one. What changed? A close family member, Beaver actually, I found out was going through the same exact search attempting to deal with the same symptoms. Granted he had never been diagnosed with ADD when we were children, but after relaying a series of symptoms to his doctor it was suggested that he take the standard ADHD written test and sure enough he scored something like an 87 out of 100 on it. Damn close to my 93. [Being an avid and proud skeptic, not only did I insist on taking the test several times in different versions, I also demanded that my wife and several other friends and family members take it as well to see if "everyone" would have the same score if given the same test. I was quite surprised to see that after taking the test on two different occasions, Princess Little Tree scored less than 10 both times. This strange fact helped verify for us that perhaps there was some validity to the test after all and it wasn't just an over generalisation trap where all who took it would appear to have this popular new dis-ease.]

After a year of trying everything under the sun Beav's doctor finally said "we could always go old school and try a children's dose of Ritalin." His desperate reply, "Well it can't be worse than all the other things we've tried... fine." After a few months of surprised success and regular use he suddenly remembered ME, thank you (what took you so long?), and realised "Holy crap I have to tell Fishy about this! He has this a lot worse than I do! I wonder if he's ever tried this one." I resisted at first, knowing all about it, what it is, what it does, knowing that like most other amphetimines it could make me pass out in ten minutes OR worse cause me massive anxiety...

(Though we've still not discovered the genetic abnormality nor even the chemical problem in the human brain of those with ADHD, one very strange characteristic of those who are challenged with it is that speed for lack of a better word, or stimulants of any kind, work in the reverse on them. Thus coffee or tea or diet pills or amphetamines of any kind will usually make someone with ADHD feel sleepy rather than wired. And sure enough any sort of downers such as barbiturates or tranquillisers will make an ADHD person feel more alert, talkative and motivated. I have personally suffered but also benefited from this weird reality since I can remember. If I drink a cup of tea I fall asleep. If I drink a cup of coffee I begin to yawn and feel tired. If i take a valium I feel like I just took speed. It's crazy weird. But after a few years of dealing with it, one starts getting the hang of how to use it to one's advantage or else I assume one would just off themselves. Because frankly it's a terribly confusing and frustrating way to live. If you've ever noticed this about yourself there's a good chance you've got either ADD or ADHD and it just hasn't been diagnosed yet. Now you know.)

Regardless of all this, I have still always resisted taking uppers of any kind. But Beaver sounded so encouraged and relieved from the agonising ADD symptoms he was experiencing that I just decided I had to try it. For the last few years especially, life has been more than challenging. It's been downright excruciating. I usually refrain from talking or writing about it publicly because number one it's extremely personal, and number two I don't wish to influence people in any way one way or another toward believing anything limiting about themselves. But yes if I was to be totally open and brutally honest with the world about this subject, I would admit that I took pain killers for years on a daily basis starting at the age of around 16 in order to manage my attention in order to just do the normal things in life that everyone else seems to have no problem with. This eventually led to a nearly fatal mental and physical breakdown in 2008 that was officially dubbed "exhaustion" to the public and I ended up in a rehab and then my parents' home to slowly detox and rebuild my health.

The only problem was that I was then faced with having to deal with living daily life with a severely screwed up brain and nervous system (that's in essence how ADHD feels) without pain killers, and as any doctor or patient will attest, nothing treats ADHD better than opiates. That particular combination of chemicals known as opioids just happens to work the best for people who struggle with the host of symptoms lodged under the ADHD mantle. Late 2008 early 2009 was the worst six months of my life. I was happy to not be always on the chase for pills, but the truth is that in this day and age with online pharmacies so prevalent it was never really a hassle finding or buying them. So it wasn't like I ever labeled myself an addict. And strangely enough neither did any of the doctors who began treating me. They instead said that I was one of those rare cases of someone who lucked into finding the exact drug that worked best for what they had and I was self medicating with it. It just happened to be illegal to self medicate your ADHD with pain killers. At least now it is. This I predict, and so do many professionals in the psychiatric industry, is going to change sooner than later. There is after all a reason why so many tens of millions of people reach for pain killers and once found find themselves more adept, more efficient, more functional and more productive with even small doses.

There are details to the story that should stay private. For now. Let us agree that it is challenging to wake up one day and realise that the rest of your life you are going to spend with your chest on fire with anxiety, that you can't focus your attention on anything for more than a second or two, that you are unable to finish anything that you start, that you feel a constant state of fear inside you that literally stings, so much so that you find it excruciating to do the simplest things like go out socially or even answer the phone, let alone have a job or take a shower, that you have a supernatural long term memory but you cannot remember why you entered a room or picked up your phone or a notebook, that you never know what day it is or what the date is, you don't know your age or anyone's age for that matter because there's "that thing with numbers...." Worst of all, you're always in pain. Life. Just. Seems. And feels. Unbearably painful. At least in the mind and body you are in. And God knows you've tried everything that exists or has ever existed on planet earth or anywhere else in the known universe to help or heal, but so far nothing has.

For me now it's been more than four years of regular visits to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, naturopaths, chiropractors, specialists, healers, gurus, psychics, mediums, soul readers, you name it. If it exists we've tried it. All in our quest to "find out how to fix Fishy." Princess Little Tree often recounts how crazy, courageous and resilient I am all at the same time because I often appear more like a lab rat than a human in just the sheer amount of medications that have been shoved into my body over the last four years in our attempt to help find a solution. Doctors have been stymied but vigilant. And slowly we've found some even ground to rest on. Things have gotten increasingly better. Though I do long to help others, and I think most people would attest to agreeing with that statement, the exact combination of medications that they now use to treat my specific condition I would prefer to keep private except for what's already been mentioned. It's been a long and very hard road. Not just for me but for the entire family. I believe Princess Little Tree has probably suffered the most second only to me. She had no idea when we got engaged that it would be this difficult. Frankly neither did I. But that's the negative spin. The positive spin is that it appears at least this week that we've turned a new corner and won a major victory here.

After hearing from Beav regarding his success with Ritalin, I talked to my doctor in New York and he was like "Hey, you're talking about a very small nearly negligible dose there... It's less than what we would usually give children. And you usually fall asleep with medications like that. Or they exacerbate your anxiety. But at this point I don't know what else to do for you and I know you're struggling bad right now Fishy. I'm willing to try it if you are." So we did. Worry Fear Anxiety Nervousness all preceded that first morning about one week ago. "Here we go," my wife's and my own eyes said to one another as I took the first dose on the first morning, ready for the worst. What would it be this time? A freakout? A massive anxiety attack? I pass out for hours with her hovering over me checking to see if I'm still breathing? An emergency 911 call, paramedics gathered around my bed while I lay there with my hand on my chest gasping for air? All possibilities and former experiences since this adventure first began four years ago.

But instead I felt intensely focused, motivated, energised and in control of my attention for the first time since I used to use Vicodin for the same purpose. After a 30 year battle, including years of self-medicating with both natural and unnatural, legal and illegal substances, ingesting things, not ingesting things, fasting, cleansing, vegan, non-vegan, and every spiritual religious pseudo-spiritual new age practice or self help course ever invented for spies like us I finally know what it's like to actually feel focused and not totally freaking distracted and unable to control my mind for more than two seconds. I've worked harder and smarter in the last five days than I have in years. The caveat: Ritalin IS speed. There's no getting around that reality. There are side effects. Like last night's insomnia. (I took my second dose too late in the day.) AND you are going to encounter the usual cadre of well-meaning but ignorant know-it-alls who for some reason misperceive that you've solicited their advice as they recount how unhealthy it is and how easy it would be for you to go au natural etc.

But the real message of this ramble is this: Only YOU know YOU and what you've been through. And only YOU know what's worked for you and what hasn't. It's really nobody else's business. And if they are all up on your shit for feeling better, it's most likely they who need some healing of their own. God only knows you've already tried anything and everything they'll good-naturedly offer you. I moved the majority of this post to the Transcendence Diaries in order to add more details and finish this just for the sake of privacy. Today I have tried to share more openly than I ever have before regarding my own personal experiences with these things, for I know how frustrating it can be for others after years of struggling with it myself. What has worked for me may not necessarily work for someone else. But it just might. You never know till you try. For now, I'm quite surprised that we found something that seems to help. It's one battle out of many that we are currently facing for some reason slightly ameliorated for the time being. And that's a damn good thing.

Does America Really Want to Succeed Economically?

Someone posted a rant on Facebook today about "America's fascist corporations" and how they're greedily destroying the middle class and that by doing this they are destroying their only marketplace and are going to lose all these awesome potential consumers they need in order to exist... I found the short sighted nature of the comment sad. Passion is such a powerful and valuable force. But only when it is aimed at and used for the right causes and concerns. Not when it's just random bitching because you're broke and angry. And especially not when it's ignorant passion of the masses.

That concept -- of losing the great consumer middle class -- used to be a valid one and a real concern for big business, but pre-globalisation. Unfortunately now the United States is no longer the largest economy in the world, nor even the primary target market for the attention of many of the world's largest companies. Things have changed. The Pan-Asian Pacific and Chindia now hold that coveted spot. Apple for example, an American company, claims to make more money from China than any other country, including their homebase, the U.S.

Worse, the majority of their products are made in China, hence God only knows how many people they employee in other countries besides the United States. AND they are NOT required to pay any corporate income taxes on the income they earn in countries other than the US. They can exist here. House their HQ here. Enjoy the glitz and glam, press and prestige, and freedom and liberty of being a "United States company", but their focus isn't on the American market anymore.

If our concern is truly to boost the American economy -- as opposed to just ranting against "fascist corporations" (of which I and many others I know happen to own a few of) -- we need to start INNOVATING again, educating and training better; not just better, but INTENSELY, COMPETITIVELY. Most importantly we need to make the business environment here more friendly, as so many other countries are actively doing -- both to boost our economy in order to increase available money to be spent (imagine the US becoming a primary target market again...) AND to make our citizens not only viable employees but INDISPENSABLE employees that no company can go without.

Until then we will continue this downward economic trend into mediocrity, with angry poor people complaining that it's the "big fascist corporations' fault". Can't blame business for being business. THAT's what made America great and rich and powerful and prosperous in the first place way back when. No one was complaining back when we were kicking butt. Let's do it again. I believe we can. But we need to decide if that's what we really want. In the current political and social climate we are in today, I am not so sure.

Today I reviewed the incoming Obama corporate tax rates and dividend tax rates and capital gains rates AND the increases he wants to add, and frankly if Americans accept these new rates it deserves to fail economically. The incoming and proposed rates are so damn anti-business that it's almost as if the current administration WANTS the country to fail economically. If we're going to start getting real we need to accept that this is a world market now. A GLOBAL economy and global business market. Anyone who wants to succeed -- especially nations, states, countries, whatever you want to call them -- needs to compete fiercely and fearlessly, tooth and nail. They need to claw their way to the top.

Things aren't going to change all of a sudden with the wave of a magic wand. We need to compete. We need to bring corporate taxes DOWN to encourage big companies to do more business HERE. We need to encourage wealthy people to keep their money here and spend their money here and invest their money here. Not in China, or India, or Dubai, or anywhere else. Between the peoples' obsession with maintaining the status quo with entitlement spending and defense spending, and earmarks and other pork, and with the national debt now hitting the GDP (which is one of the most frightening aspects of the current state we are in) and so many people's casual attitude toward it, and now with all these rates increasing, not to mention a growing trend in unfriendly business regulations on the rise, I am sincerely concerned for our welfare over the next two to four years and even well into the future.

More later, so much more.. Especially regarding the unprecedented power that these two behemoth corporations that call themselves political parties, namely the Democratic and Republican, have over all of the above... THAT seems to be the main block in the artery of our economic health.

Bummed

[Bummer Warning] Talking with The Poet... Texting actually. I never talk on the phone truth be told. Which is fine it seems because no one else i know does either. We were discussing our recent ASCAP royalty checks. Fucked up and low-balled as usual. Music is the greatest art form in the world to be a part of but it's the worst f*^king business. I love making music more than anything else i can think of. Nothing gives me more pure unadulterated joy than the simple act of making music, whether alone w just a guitar or piano, or with the band; whether writing and recording new songs and albums, or performing live. There's nothing like it. But financially it's a nearly thankless career choice.

We made more $ last year than any other year in the last 25 years of our career and it's still not enough to make a decent living. Added all up it seems like a large amount. But considering how hard you work and how much money you spend it's just peanuts compared to so many other careers. Not much else to say. Just bummed. Has to be a better way than this. How much longer can or will Princess Little Tree hang on under these circumstances? I know she had no idea it would be this hard. Frankly neither did I. You would think by now... After all the... But it's just seems to be an all or nothing kind of business. You're either making big bank or barely getting by, and nothing really in between. Bummed.

- Posted by The Ambassador using blogpress on an iPhone

God Conscious or Mere Energetic?

The question is, if one accepts the premise of the existence of a divine force in the universe, does "God" have the capacity to possess intentions, or even understand them..., or is HeSheIt just a powerful force that happened to have been the impetus for creation And continues to be? It occurred to me a few hours ago while in the middle of a few seconds of prayer. What if what we call God, what we innately and internally feel as God, is not as much a rational thinking source of intelligence capable of granting favors based on people's prayers and intentions as much as it is just a force or energy source that one can harness towards the achievement of said prayers or intentions...?

Many people are raised with an assumption that not only a God exists but that God is capable of hearing -- and sometimes even psychically knowing -- our innermost desires through our prayers. I must confess that at one point a few months back I had this thought that occurred to me that I should start praying out loud so that God and angels could actually hear me; it just occurred to me in the moment that with all the psychic noise being generated around the universe through potentially billions of sentient beings all praying at the same time that one would have a better of chance of being heard. And besides, what if God isn't even capable of hearing our thoughts? But only what we speak out loud? I mean where and when do we get this idea that God can just hear us if we pray silently in our minds? I figured either way it can't hurt.

Then this morning while engaged in a few moments of quiet prayer this thought came to mind: what if God is less a conscious favor giver than more of a force that we can harness. We already know through countless academic and scientific studies that prayer has proven to be effective in helping us achieve certain goals or intentions. Reports of miracle healings and the like are numerous. But what if the real mechanism at play is not so much that some intelligent being in another dimension is listening to every prayer that people are uttering in every moment and choosing which ones to honor or not, but rather that there's this energy force somewhere out there -- perhaps even in plain sight, like the Higgs Field for example -- that we latch onto through focusing our consciousness on a particular goal or intention.

As comforting as it feels to imagine a conscious kind and loving GodForce whose sole mission in life is to honor our every whim and prayer because HeSheIt has so much love for us, this second theory would make more sense in lieu of all we've learned over the last few years regarding conscious creation through vibration and or vibrational energy, something that is gaining more and more credence and scientific evidence in recent years specifically in the arena of particle physics.

Something to think about. Plenty of implications to still explore...

The Moment Fishy Became a Writer...

Heard a more than decent song this evening during the ending credits roll of an old TV show I am currently having a mild obsession with, a little something called The Riches starring Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard. Yes you read that right. Turns out the pair teamed for a one hour drama for the FX network back in '06 to '08. Though it only ran 10 episodes per season and only lasted for a season and a half. Seek it out if you're a fan of either actor. They're both better great at what they do in it. Minnie really shines. That's a different story though.

The song started off with the lyrics "the fox... the fox..." I liked it immediately. Wanted to know who sang it. Sitting right there while the credits rolled, I picked up my phone (at this point it doesn't even matter what phone we use. They all do the same thing give or take...) and Googled "Who sings the song with lyrics the fox ... The Riches..." Within less than a minute I discovered the song was by the band Nada Surf, one of the few acts on planet earth I've never explored, let alone purchased an album by. With this new found information I then headed to YouTube and ran a search for the song. At least five uploads were available, whether I wanted to hear the original or the band performing it live in concert, there it was. I selected the one that seemed to appear the "most legit" and clicked play, placed my phone in my shirt pocket and went about my business of locking up the house for the evening -- all the while this fresh new great song accompanying my every move, the music emanating clearly and cleanly from somewhere within the confines of my clothing. Like a walking jukebox.

When it was over, I hit play again to grab another listen. I also added it to my Favorites Playlist, which not only acts as my own personal music collection now, say goodbye to needing iTunes, but also alerts roughly fifteen-thousand of my closest friends on Facebook and Twitter about the song's awesomeness and a link where it can easily be found. For free. And again it hit me. Walking around the house to turn off all the lights, the music still blaring out of my pocket, I casually asked my beautiful wife, "Babe we just heard that song on a TV show and had no idea who it was. How long did it take me to find that out?"

"A minute... Less than a minute" she replied as she let Alistair out for the night.

"Exactly. And how long did it take me to find it so we could listen to it?"

"Another minute...."

"And how much did it cost us?"

"Zero," said she, letting said dog back in the house.

"Yep. The business has changed, changed forever. For better or worse the glory days as we used to know them are truly over for us in this business."

"You keep saying that honey. What are you going to do about it?"

"Less than five minutes after hearing a song we like on TV and we're listening to it. And we're not paying a dime for it. I know I keep saying it lately. I just can't fully believe it..."

"Maybe you don't want to believe it..."

"Maybe... I hadn't thought about it like that... But if 2012 was about anything, it was all about my denial of how quickly the music business has changed... and how nearly every single one of our income streams has dried up in the last few years. I mean, we worked harder in the last two years at making it than I ever have in my entire life..."
She smiled at me and patted my chest, implying I just might be overstating things a bit.

"Okay perhaps I'm exaggerating... the truth is I've been working like this non-stop for the last twenty years is more like it... But we REALLY kicked into high gear this year, and we achieved incredible things! Bigger and better and faster and more than at any other time in my career. And yeah we made great money from it... But it's not enough. And no wonder. Look how different things are. It's one thing reading about these changes in Billboard every week. It's another thing to actually see myself doing it... participating in the exact activities that are tearing apart the whole freaking system."

"Well it's become real to you now. You've switched roles with the audience and now you are seeing things how they see things."

"Exactly. And it freaking SUCKS. I don't want to be doing this. Listen to this!" I exclaimed pointing to the music playing in my pocket. This is insane. These guys aren't going to to get a fucking dime from my standing here listening to their music. And that sucks for them. And their label. And the producer if he's getting points on the record. It's all so wrong..."

"Well you could always stop doing it. But you won't. No one will. Like you said, the business has changed... So have you as a music fan, just like everybody else. You want it now and if you don't have to pay for it you won't argue with anyone about it."

"Yes. Exactly. That's the thing. See? I don't MIND paying for music. God knows. How many songs or albums do I buy each month?"

"More than you should. More than we can afford. Especially if you're only going to listen to the song a few times and never listen to it again. Which is what you usually do when you find a song you like. You'll probably never go seek out this song again to listen to it now that you've heard it a few times. That's why people don't want to buy music anymore. It's not rocket science."

"That IS the flipping point, isn't it? The only difference between now and before is that unless a person wanted to sit around and make mix tapes or burn CDs from their friends, which was a royal pain in the ass, people were forced into buying music if we liked it. Now we don't have to. And that's that."

"Honey I'm tired..."

"I know. Me too. What I'm trying to say is that this my love is why I need to start writing," I said, giving her a hug before she went upstairs to prepare for bed. "More than ever before I now understand that it's time for me to seriously become that rockstar turned writer we keep talking about."

"You already seriously are that rockstar turned writer we keep talking about Baby Joon," she said, her eyes drooping but still looking into mine. "You just need to finish one of the ten thousand books you have started. No amount of writing in the world, no matter how good it is, is going to help us if you never release any of it."

"I know honey. I get it. I more than get it. It just keeps hitting me in different ways all of a sudden. I mean here again tonight it just really hit me. I need to shift gears fast and start actively focusing on the writing. Like a job."

"No different than you already do babe. You already ARE a writer. You write more than most writers. AND you can still do your music. But what I don't like is we keep talking about it and not doing anything about it. I think you're afraid that it's going to affect your music career. But I don't think it will. If anything it will help...."

"Yeah I get that too actually.... you know what it is babe? I always saw me becoming "the writer" later... Like after the rockstar thing was over... you know, when I was older and married and had kids and all that. more like a retirement thing..."

"Honey you are older. I hate to tell you. And you're already a writer... What are you waiting for?"

"Nothing I guess. I already told you my plan. The first book, When I Was Twenty-One will be completed and released by the end of January. For sure. And while we continue to work on the We Are the Revolution book, I can easily get the Casanova Diaries finished. That one's already done. I just need to edit it. It'll be easy. I can do this honey."

"I have no doubt you can do it. I just want to see you START. And I'm not talking about making your little notes all over scraps of paper that just pile up all over the house... You have to approach it like any other job. The same way you approach your music when you want to get a new album recorded. You've got to actually sit and work at it till you finish. And you can still make time for your music. What do you do all day anyway?"

"Write or work on music...." I smiled. "I know, I know. I know what to do. You want to know what my biggest fear is?... Okay, two biggest fears actually..."

"One, what if I am not meant to stop music right now? What if now is not that time?"

"We aren't talking about you quitting music honey. We're talking about you working on only one book at a time instead of twenty and releasing them. And continuing to work at your regular job too. Just stop working on so many things at once and focus on one book and get it out."

"And what if people don't buy it? I mean what if people don't buy me as a writer? What if I'm fooling myself?"

"Well you're never going to know until you try honey. Talking to me about it isn't going to get you there..."

"I know. It's the new year. Plan B is working incredibly so far. You know I haven't missed one day of studying Farsi in three weeks? You hear how good I'm getting?"

"Honey! I was going to tell you that when I came in this morning. I was laughing so hard! You have to be careful with some of the words you are learning. Some of them aren't polite if you mispronounce them. This morning you were saying a bad word instead of "bowl" but I didn't want to interrupt you..."

"No. Babe don't do that! If you hear me pronouncing a word wrong, tell me. You know how hard it is to try to learn this freaking language? There's no english alphabet. I have to stare at the pictures of objects and just keep hitting repeat over and over trying to learn and memorize it like that because I can't read the freaking letters... It's like music."

"Well you're good at it. You're great at it. You're doing it honey. I am really impressed."

"I am getting good huh?"

"Yes my love. I'm proud of you. You have no idea how much it warms my heart seeing you practice so hard everyday.... Thank you honey."

"No thank you for being so patient. I told you I would learn your native language. It just took me a lot longer than I thought. But it's working out now with my new plan. I'm actually doing it."

"So now just apply your plan B to your writing. Schedule a time of day you're going to do it and do it. You're good at that."

"I think I'm actually horrible at it."

"Not really. Not compared to everyone else. When you set your mind to something you go after it more than anyone I've ever seen. You know this. We've talked about it. You're going to be teaching me Farsi soon! You just need to approach completing the books the same way you're doing with learning Farsi or your music..."

"I know. I will. I am. I don't have a choice at this point. I know it. I have to..."

"Honey I'm going to go upstairs now. Can you make sure all the doors are locked? I'll see you upstairs."

"Okay. Yeah...."

For the next hour it's all I thought about. While getting ready for bed. I made over $9,000 from my music in the first quarter of this year. Just from radio airplay. It was a good year. But it cost three times that to get a song high enough in the charts to where you're making that kind of money. That's the catch 22 of the whole damn thing. This is nothing compared to five years ago. Because sales are now almost entirely out of the picture.

But the thing I keep thinking about is all these new indie bands that come out every month. They get a hit song in a movie or a TV show and then Bam! THEY do get sales. So sales haven't dried up completely. Not for everyone. Frankly I think the conversation should be more about what leads to sales than how they've dried up. Because they've clearly not dried up for everyone. And sure I may not be buying as much music as I used to, but I'm still buying a ton of it. And so are others obviously. That's really the key to it... How to stay in that top bracket of the rare few who actually still sell a ton of songs or albums... Second quarter pay outs are going to come any week. And they should be even bigger than first quarter. Thank God. But it's the sales we are after. How to compel people to not just want to go on YouTube or Pandora and listen for free or play the songs on the radio...

Don't get me wrong. There is NOTHING like having a hit song on the radio or in Billboard. But there is a very broadly drawn and large line in the sand between those who actually sell music and those who don't. And that's where we are waning now that the industry has changed. And I refuse to believe that it's because we aren't good enough. I went down the path a hundred times over the last twenty years. Until I finally realized through just sheer quantity and quality of fan feedback that it's bullshit. It's an excuse we tell ourselves because we don't know what the hell we're doing wrong. So we start questioning the merit of what we do, regardless of how much we like it or think it's great.

Frankly I think the missing piece, the thing we're doing wrong, is not touring regularly. Not that any of the Top 40 artists tour very often. Most of them are singles oriented. They DON'T tour. They do these big shows here and there. Morning TV, late night, festivals. We're getting close to being able to do that now. But we're not there yet. We need one more big hit. The other thing is that we're a band. We're not a Top 40 artist. And bands notoriously tour their asses off. So that's something else to think about. What's the resistance? Okay well we know what the resistance is... We don't have enough money to tour or better put we don't make enough money from touring to support a real tour. At least not yet.

But what if while I'm taking the time to finish writing one of these books in order to get more money coming in, we continue to work on the album, promoting and marketing, and if there's a God in heaven or a sliver of luck anywhere near me with this, something will pop that will lead us into an opportunity to tour as we used to. It only takes one. We already know that from past experience, time and time again. What I'm hearing is that I'm just being impatient. Spoiled by how things used to be. The new album has only been out for less two months. There's plenty of time for it to continue to rise in the charts AND for a song or two or three to get picked up for something that can lead to enough money to support a tour. And demand one. That's the other thing. The demand... It ain't easy. There's no way around that. But it's fun. Hell, I don't even believe it's fun any more. It's more scary than fun. But it's my life. That, really, in the end, is what it's all about.

Okay, so that's what we're going to do. Here it is 2:44 am and I'm writing in the Diaries. So maybe that's something that needs to change. The Diaries are free. Like the music now is. (insert loud laugh here!) We need to turn our attention and the writing towards other things that are NOT free. Other vehicles. We'll see. This isn't going to work. There's no way I'm going to be able to maintain the Diaries AND make music full time AND finish a few books. It's impossible. Unless I start writing super short blog posts. Which actually might not be such a bad idea. And with that, let us end. Tomorrow we apply Plan B to the writing too. We will add it to the schedule. And we'll play it by ear with what happens to the Diaries... Until then.

Learning Farsi

Farsi study time. Everyday now since about two weeks ago for at least an hour I've been diligently pursuing mastery over this damn language. With an alphabet that looks as beautiful as the world's finest art, it is hard to fathom, ironically, just how utterly displeasing the sound of the Farsi language is. Worse yet, it is as displeasing to the mouth and tongue to speak as it is to listen to. It's truly unlike any other language I have endeavored to learn. Not only is it extremely difficult to speak physically, in terms of forming the words properly -- plenty of glottel stops and gutteral formations in the mouth and back of the throat, but it's also completely grammatically confusing. More on that later. 

We're at the deep in point now and I have to note: attempting to learn a foreign language withOUT learning to read and write it's alphabet may just be impossible. (UnLESS u just immerse yourself in that country for six months and r forced to that is.) Other than that this is getting harder by the day but I trudge onwards.
I make occasional updates to social media regarding this new endeavor. Freinds have offered a variety of potential solutions to this quandary. Everything from alternate language programs to memory improvement courses. Rosetta Stone is the best program for learning a foreign language out there second only to formal classes IMO. It's just the first time I've attempted to master one with a totally different alphabet. And because I'm NOT in a class (as I've been in the prior four I've learned) and perhaps due to some slight laziness and fear on my part I am focusing on just speaking rather than reading. A side advantage of doing it this way is that you r forced to hone your listening and memory skills razor sharp. Because you can't read the letters right in front of you -- as one would with french or spanish for example. That's a plus for the old brain for sure. But at this point where I've "milestoned" into Unit 2 and the sentences I'm learning are becoming longer and longer it is obviously becoming increasingly difficult to do it all by ear without being able to read even one letter that's staring me in the face. Of course it would be the same if I were learning Japanese like James or Russian or any others... (I think u already know I took the easy road to start and learned all the "regular alphabet" languages first way back when (except Romanian -- the secret-closet stepchild of the 5 romance languages, because I just feel no desire to learn it). But I've run out of those now. So... all that's left are "different alphabet" languages for me.

As I'm writing all this to you (pardon it's length) I'm just realizing that I'm really cutting myself short by having chosen this method. I can feel the limiting belief operating :: learning that alphabet is going to be too flipping hard! I'm going to seriously consider discreating this idea and perhaps go back to square one and take on learning to read and write. Sheesh these r just beliefs. Why struggle if you don't have to right?

And I'll tell you -- on another note -- two other things that have occurred to me, 1, connecting with others through social media like Facebook about what's really going on as opposed to just jokes and links and pix an bs can be very helpful to us in a variety of different areas of our lives. You guys here have taught me plenty and inspired me. And 2, staying in touch w fellow Avatars has a similar effect on us but just amplified by a google. We create a no bs allowed zone so to speak. Because you and Dan and Annie r in this loop it's forced me to really look at what's going on. Not just w this but you know, all around I think it's very helpful and beneficial to us all to be connected potentially on a daily basis.

Goodbye 2012 You Miserable Bitch

Goodbye 2012 you wicked evil ugly wench.
Goodbye to your financial woes and economic crises.
Goodbye to never having enough money.
Goodbye to your ugly wars and ruthless invasions.
Good bye to your mass shootings assassinations and virgin suicides.
Goodbye to your vile hate-speech bigotry racism and Islamaphobia.
Goodbye to your war on terror war on drugs and war on anything not heterosexual or in the missionary position.
Goodbye to your partisan bickering and political gridlock.
Goodbye to your over the top hyped up and dumbed down gorno journalism.
Goodbye tsunamis and earthquakes tornadoes and hurricanes.
Goodbye to your heartless wrath of wicked lies rumors and tabloid gossip.
Goodbye betrayal and backstabbing.
Goodbye to your duplicity and deceit, to your mendacity selfishness and greed.
Goodbye banal contrived predictable and repetitive trash TV.
Goodbye to your shitty music.
Goodbye to your false gods and celebrity whores.
Goodbye to your strawmen and false flags.
Goodbye to your nuclear reactors oil spills and fracking mishaps and goodbye to your payoffs.
Goodbye to your sickness disease and plagues.
Goodbye to your famines and droughts.
Goodbye to your murderous heart and treachery.
Goodbye to your silly vampires wearwolves serial killers and zombies.
Goodbye to your Mexican gun running torture and bloodletting.
Goodbye to your Jersey shore and shahs of sunset boulevard.
Goodbye to your unreal and desperate housewives.
Goodbye to your exploitation of mafia boss madmen.
Goodbye to your wretched and wanton singing and dancing competitions.
Goodbye to your coiffed out idiot fools dressed as anchors.
Goodbye to your worthless opinion disguised as news.
Goodbye to your violence.
Goodbye to your smells.
Goodbye to your malfeasance.
Goodbye to your military juntas and puppet regimes.
Goodbye to your forced abortions.
Goodbye to your glad handling.
Goodbye to smiling the enemy in the face for more loans.
Goodbye to your petty land grabs civilian casualties and unnecessary brutality.
Goodbye to your security checkpoints and occupation walls.
Goodbye to your Britneys Lindsays Gagas and Kardashians.
Goodbye to your bachelors and bachelorettes.
Goodbye to your vulgarity.
Goodbye to your Hannitys and O'Reillys to your Coulters and Crowleys to your Limbaughs and Becks. Goodbye to your unfair and unbalanced Mormons and morons.
Goodbye to your filthy riches and health care scams.
Goodbye to your entitlement reforms.
Goodbye to your endless pointless pompous Primaries, and to your insufferable presidential election. Goodbye to your pretending to be Christian Muslim Hindu or Jew.
Goodbye to your GMOs and poison foods.
Goodbye to your soldiers of fortune and terrorist thugs.
Goodbye to your crooked banks and skyrocketing health insurance costs.
Goodbye to corporate corruption and deadly pharmaceutical side effects.
Goodbye to your trading guns for money and lives for oil.
Goodbye to your pirates and genocides.
Goodbye to your executive orders petty squabbles and filibusters.
Goodbye to your phony dramas your hype over nothing and your ignorance of the facts.
Goodbye to your baby killing and child murdering.
Goodbye to your friends who are only there when they need you.
Goodbye to your calls for austerity when your pockets are full.
Goodbye to your high unemployment budget deficits and national debt.
Goodbye to your bloody battles and civil wars.
Goodbye to fake boobs phony YouTube views and Honey Boo Boos.
Goodbye to cynicism being cool and cruelty being acceptable.
Goodbye to violence deceit and revenge as entertainment.
Goodbye to the ends that justify your means and goodbye to your meanness.
Goodbye to your secret invasions and collateral damage.
Goodbye to your threats of war and unilateral actions.
Goodbye to your midnight raids heartless sanctions and drone strikes.
Goodbye to your citizens united and tea parties.
Goodbye to your voter ID laws campaign finance coffers and earmarks galore.
Goodbye to calling bribes and blackmail lobbying.
Goodbye to holding Congress hostage.
Goodbye Grover and goodbye Elmo.
Goodbye to governance by the lowest common denominator.
Goodbye to your Mayan prophecies doom prepping and profiteering.from the end of the world.
Goodbye to your unexpected deaths unsuspecting victims and unwarranted suffering.
Goodbye to your unwelcomed pain mourning grieving loss and sorrow.
Goodbye to your cancer stroke and heart disease.
Goodbye to your smoking guns and rocket launches.
Goodbye to your inane press conferences and goodbye to your conspiracies.
Goodbye to your lack of loyalty and trustworthiness.
Goodbye to your deregulation blues and corporate bullying and bulldozing.
Goodbye to your union bashing freedom bashing teacher bashing and worker bashing.
Goodbye to your aches and pains and goodbye to your buzz killing.
Goodbye to your gray skies without silver linings and your miserable rain on our parade.
Goodbye to the bitterness hate resentment discontent and sadness you inspired.
Goodbye to your confusion lack of direction and confidence and fuck you for taking it out on us.
Goodbye and good riddance 2012. You will not be missed. May you return to the hell from whence you came and never return, leaving not a trace of your memory in our hearts and minds.

Selling Out or Buying In? Or How I Lost My Soul And Made a Fortune in the Process

I just listened to the last but unreleased Broken Spectacles album, the one called Aftermath. The one that took us two years to make, a year and half of which was building the recording studio. Recording the album probably only took us a few months at the most. I hadn’t heard it in 15 years. The Grey Wolf just sent it to me. All I could do was cry cry cry… I had totally forgotten how quirky weird and special we were. Broken Spectacles is the real name of the band that I have been referring to as Shattered for the last fifteen years in these Transcendence Diaries and other places.

What a sad beautiful trip that just was. Grey Wolf aka Donnie J Groovemaster Jam, has just recently unearthed a treasure trove of master tapes from those six years and had them digitally remastered. He sent me one CD of the “old stuff” and one CD of the never released last album we recorded called Aftermath. We may need to change that title since it’s a Stones album already. I don’t believe we knew that at the time. Grey Wolf burned the CDs all wrong so it’s just ONE big hour long song per CD, which is classic Groover. He’s going to do it over again he tells me. That I assume will take another fifteen years. I have a lot of the old songs already mastered and ready to go, but only the ones that I wrote, for the Spectacularly Broken compilation album… But now I am rethinking the idea and wanting to do a WHOLE Spectacles compilation instead of just Ed Hale songs… Would take all four guys agreeing to that… That’s the problem. Bands are tricky.

Today I only listened to Aftermath… The first song that came on was called “LOVE”. Fans won’t even know the song because Aftermath was never released and unlike most of the songs on the album, we never played the song “Love” live, not even once. That one was a Toad song. We all contributed to each others songs, adding various instruments as we saw fit and vocal harmonies along with background vox. By the time we got to Aftermath we had been together for five years. So Toad and I were still working together very closely, but not writing together as much as did in the beginning. More like coming in with completed songs and then just assisting each other with suggestions and musical additions. There are some horn and string parts I added to this one along with my usual backgrounds and harmonies, but for the most part it was all Toad. And it was utterly transcendent. I couldn’t believe it. What i was hearing. Now. Fifteen years later. It felt like a different life. A lifetime ago. Truly.

In that moment it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. Reminded me of George Harrison. I didn’t remember it at first. Couldn’t place it. I didn’t understand why it was there. It wasn’t part of the album was it? Wouldn’t I remember that? Turns out that it was. I had just suppressed the memory I assume. And for good reason. There was always a tense and bitter but beneficial competitiveness between Toad and I by the time we got to the recording of this album. Who was the better writer? Who was the better singer? Who got more girls? Who got more press? Who got more positive reviews? Who knew more? Who played their instrument the best? Who played the most instruments? Who wrote more songs? Who was deeper? Who sang more like John Lennon? Who was as multi-talented as Paul? On and on. (Funny right? I know… But bands are like that when they first start out… It’s cute when you think about it…)

I cannot help but think that one of the reasons why Broken Spectacles was so good was due to this very intense but loving competitiveness between the two of us. Always pushing ourselves more, to be the best we could be in order to outdo the other. But we were also best friends, beyond brothers. With an infinite love between us, one that I have still not to this day experienced with any other man, perhaps not even any other human being. A lot of water has passed under that bridge.

Listening to it this time, anew, I was flabbergasted by its beauty. Astounded. Couldn’t stop crying. And then in comes Coon’s “KALEIDOSCOPE” with the most amazing triple lead guitar harmonies “Freebird” style ending. And on and on it went… “AINT IT HARD”!!! Another masterpiece. “Nature Boy”, “Wrong Again”, “I Want Blood”, “Going Nowhere”, “Aftermath”, “Your Face Ain’t That Pretty”… Every guy was doing such a good job at what they were trying to do. I was so impressed with the musicality of it all. Couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps I had somehow sold my soul over the last fifteen years since those days… Just to get more success and make more money. We now don’t make anything like this kind of music I was hearing from this strange glorious mess of an album.

Princess Little Tree couldn’t believe that it was us she was hearing. She had never heard the band before. Only knew the Transcendence and the Ed Hale solo stuff. Had only heard me talk about Broken Spectacles. All the stories… She was impressed by the variety of vocals. Had never heard Toad or Coon sing. Never heard all three of us sing together before, one of the things that really stood out about that band, three lead singers, oftentimes singing at the same time in all the songs. It was special. But here’s the coup de grace… the last song Grey Wolf put on the album for some reason was “AND I GO”. A mega monstrous masterpiece, an epic anthemic musical gift from God the likes of which I’d never heard before or since. Like a thunder bolt straight out of heaven into your ears and your soul. I could not believe what I was hearing. What a freaking masterpiece. Of course it’s a Toad song too. I always hated being in a band with him. As much as I loved it. (to be fair he claims the same thing and for the same reasons… just goes to show…) I was such a shite singer back then compared to now (which isn’t saying much I know). But holy crap what a monstrously gorgeous song that is. Toad could die tomorrow and his legacy will forever remain top tier due to the four songs he contributed to this album. Same with Coon. His are equally epic and brilliant.

I could not stop crying. First just sobs like with the other songs… Little baby tears. And then by the time we get to the “I want you to go deep…” breakdown of this song, I was full on sobbing like a baby, like a mental patient, face all scrunched up. Tears shooting out of my eyes. I seriously don’t think I can ever listen to that song again. It’s just too good. It’s frightening how good it is. I have no idea what happened to me, but it was one of the most cathartic events of my life. Cathartic in how emotional I felt, how completely moved in so many ways… Up, down, sad, happy, amazed, traumatized, relieved, proud, regretful… over the top emotion anguish and expression. I couldn’t help but feel this deep sadness and fear that over the last few years I had just completely sold out as an artist. Compared to what I was hearing on this album, recorded when we were just kids, but so unique and special.

I so wish I could post this song for everyone to hear… the whole album. But it’s all up to Grey Wolf at this point. And getting an agreement from all the members of the band. I don’t actually have a real copy of this album. Haven’t had one in over 15 years. If ANY of YOU have a copy of THAT album in any form let me know. Perhaps we can speed this process up. Also — if ANY of YOU have high quality PHOTOS to use as artwork for the release, let someone know. Once we schedule this, we can commission someone to do the artwork. We will need REAL PHOTOS to scan. I have no idea if I have any pro-grade or high quality ones really. Just scanned in low quality ones. But that’s what we need here to take it to the next phase.

I believe that more than anything what affected me most about hearing this album from start to finish like this for the first time in so many years was that number one, what I was listening to was old. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, so like seeing someone you love, like a family member, for the first time in over a decade, that’s just going to get to you regardless. Number two though, as a work of art it’s absolutely BRILLIANT. It’s big brash experimental avant garde. Epic and all over the place stylistically… And yet it has a very distinct sound all its own due to the fact that the same four guys recorded it in the same six month period using all the same gear and in the same two rooms. It has a mythic quality to it. We were peaking artistically as individuals and as a group when we recorded it (but then again when are we NOT peaking. I have yet to experience “writer’s block” or any “down time” as an artist… I guess that’s lucky. Or maybe that’s just how it is for all artists…) What it’s not is commercial. It’s entirely NOT commercial.

Moving as all hell. But just not commercial in any way. And see that’s the thing… We used to not give a shit about being commercial. That was never our aim. Never the goal. I mean, I honestly don’t think we even thought about it. And the music shows that. It’s extraordinarily amateurish in many ways. But you can’t help but be blown away by how mammoth and ambitious it sounds as well. Walls of noise really in some parts… On the one hand Broken Spectacles had some of the most exciting and advanced musicianship you could hear anywhere. On the other hand it had a very weak sort of chock full of mistakes sound to it as well… go figure. But that was us.

A few years after The Specs broke up I reverted to my real name, Ed Hale, laid Eddie Darling down for good and formed the band Transcendence with Infinito; first time I played with anyone besides the other three guys in the Specs in seven or eight years. We’ve recorded and released nine albums since then. Right out of the gate we experienced a ton more press, airplay, sales and critical acclaim than we ever did back in The Specs. For many reasons. Older, wiser, more experience, more money. But more than anything else I think it was because I understood that making music for me at least couldn’t just be about doing whatever the hell I wanted anymore. It had to include a measure of financial return to it or I was going to be forced to stop doing it full time. Besides, I wanted to make money with it. I wanted to experience what we call success, in the traditional sense. And we did. Thank God. I haven’t sat down and counted, but off the top of my head we’ve charted about ten songs on one chart or another over the last ten years. Sold a hell of lot of albums. That number would be triple that if I weren’t always trying to reach so much artistically… I know that. But still, we do make music that is commercially viable for the most part, at least compared to what we were doing in Broken Spectacles.

What I notice from a lot of my peers from that original music scene down in Miami when we all started out as teenagers and others I connect with all over the world still is that they’re all still making the same kind of music that they made way back when. They do what they do and they don’t change. And that’s a big problem. They expect that the industry is going to come to them. That the listeners are going to come to them. But it doesn’t work that way. Not even a little. Sure you can innovate here and there. But it has to be within the confines of what is happening within the music business and what is happening in pop culture now. There is a flow to it all. A flow of what’s hip cool popular modern happening. That’s popular culture.

Every now and then we get lucky and we may happen to be at the front end of that curve when the music is about to take a hard right or left… The way Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Smashing Pumpkins were when hair metal was at it’s peak and everyone was desperate for it to die. Or the way that Radiohead and Muse and Travis and Ours and Mercury Rev were when we were all looking for grunge to die off. But hell, who can really say that Nirvana innovated that sound when we all know they really didn’t? They became the poster child for it for a while. (which sucked for some of the better bands, no need to name names…) But it wasn’t just ONE band or artist that did it. It was a wave of them.

And what I find today amongst many of my peers in rock is that they aren’t on the cusp of any wave at all. They aren’t even riding a wave. They’re just making the same old music that they’ve always made. Expecting people to like it. That’s music making as a hobby. Not music making to be a professional. You try to explain to them that they need to focus on using sounds that are modern or current or contemporary, their drum sounds, their guitar sounds, the way their voice is recorded… even the arrangement of the song itself… and they either argue the merits of what they’re doing or they just go blank and don’t understand. And yet we can’t argue with reality. With results. If you’re not experiencing the kind of success and popularity that you desire, then SOMETHING is wrong, or at least “not right” about what you’re currently doing.

I can’t sit here and say that I completely changed spots and switched to totally making commercial music all of a sudden once we formed Transcendence. I didn’t. Especially considering that the original idea for the group was to create a world music meets modern rock sound that no one had ever heard before and have me sing in four or five different languages sometimes within the same song. That first album, Rise and Shine, was phenomenally eccentric. I know that. And hell, most of the guys in Transcendence are still pissed at me for how much I’ve switched genres over the years with the release of every new album, and how much I’ve focused on “creating art” or making artistic statements over the years. In fact, The ex Norwegian sent me a Fb post TODAY admonishing me to “PLEASE not worry about creating art” and just this once try to make all these songs commercially viable so we can make some money. He’s referring to real money. Big money. Not $1 or 200,000 a year money. But $1 to 10,000,000 a year money. I want the same thing. We all do.

We came damn close on the last solo album. But then I flipped it all around with the next two releases that we did with the group, All Your Heroes Become Villains and The Great Mistake. Both evidently were on the extreme and eccentric side compared to the solo album. At least that’s what we were told. But to everyone’s defense, I have to admit if backed into a corner that I did have major concepts and agendas when making the All Your Heroes album. Super focused. Hyper-focused. I mean, it was meant to be a giant concept… high art… an amalgam of statements all tied together to create one bigger statement. Something final and permanent. A mark. A sculpture. Solid and lasting like a castle or a mansion. ONE big piece. NOT merely a collection of songs. There’s a difference.

Contrast that with what constitutes hit songs in today’s market, or in any age’s market… What happens in those cases? The hit songs end up eventually losing their original home, whatever album they happened to be released on, people forget, and that album goes out of print. The song may last forever, eventually gaining the moniker of “classic”. But the album that it came from is lost forever to most people. THAT is exactly the opposite of what we’ve set out to do in Transcendence. Every album (except perhaps for The Great Mistake, which really is just a collection of songs…) was created as one cohesive work of art, to stay together and last forever. Pink Floyd is a great example of this. Animals, Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall… albums. Permanent cohesive entities in their own right over and above the hit singles they may or may not have had. Zeppelin, same thing. People say the album is dead ALL the time. They’re wrong. (To a certain degree anyway. Save for another post…)

I can’t complain that All Your Heroes wasn’t accepted as a huge commercial success compared to our previous one. It is dark and moody and insanely complex, wildy emotive and overly noisy in some areas, and more than anything it’s entirely dependent on being an ALBUM. It’s not really singles based at all. Hell, all the songs ram into each other and then flow into another song. I don’t think there’s ANY empty space on the whole album. I know. I think we all know. It wasn’t created to be a commercial thing… But the important thing is that I can die happy with it as an artist. Over the last two years since the release of that album I have felt very very good about it. I will die with a smile on my face when remembering it, when contemplating what we intended versus the final result.

And therein lies the eternal struggle. There’s a balance there that we constantly have to be considering when creating. Do we sell out with a song or two? And still try to preserve a great album in the process? Do we sell out entirely, just create the whole album as one sixty minute collection of unrelated mainstream pleasing current sounding tasty pieces of ear candy? How far can we swim out into the popular music sea once we jump overboard before we get lost and are unable to ever return to the comfort and safety of the artists’ artist boat?

And vice versa, how far off into left field can we ride that beast of innovation and experimentation and doing whatever the hell we want to before we are lost forever to the popular music loving masses? Some say it’s ALL selling out as soon as you begin to contemplate such matters. I say bullshit. If you don’t ever think about your art, about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, the possibilities, the various different styles and arrangements and directions you’ve got before you, then you’re just winging it. I’ve been there before, when you’re young you think you’re just going to wing it. I know that terrain well. Did it for years in the Specs. Refused to think about what we were doing. It ALL had to come spontaneously, like magic. No thought about the expression. It had to flow out naturally. It’s an artistic mindset. But it’s only ONE mindset. In a world where there are infinite mindsets one can occupy. One day I just decided to deliberately occupy a different mindset and see what would come of it.

Ballad On Third Avenue was not the most successful album we ever released contrary to what most people believe. Sleep With You was a much bigger seller (so too in fact was Nothing Is Cohesive – which also still to date is by far the most critically acclaimed album any of us have ever been associated with) and had several big hits at Alternative Rock radio. But Ballad did have one thing that none of the other albums had up to that point: a verifiable Billboard Top30 hit song. Two of them. All the other hits were on different charts or specialty charts or college radio charts or made it to the Top 100 but just never got into Billboard’s Top40, let alone the Top25 like “Scene in San Francisco” and “New Orleans Dreams” did. That was something different. And it made a HUGE difference. Worlds of difference. In many different areas of our lives. For one thing we made a lot of money. And that was a very good thing. The songs still bring in a lot of money.

But it also had its challenges. The cons. Creating those songs was not just “hey let’s just create whatever we want to and see how people like it” as in times past. The songs were run by a seemingly endless string of consultants and then remixed and remixed again until every last one of them at every level of the industry was satisfied with how each song sounded. See, this is something that I NEVER would have done fifteen years ago when we were in Broken Spectacles. We were offered it sooooo many times. And every time we fought it and instead just created total chaos and confusion. I’ll never forget Toad telling the head of A&R at Island Records to “fuck off! We don’t need your advice about OUR music!” That’s how we did things…. We thought we held the whole world in our hands. And to a certain degree we did. Creatively we were an amazing unit. But we were young and green and stupid. We’d make sure we were always tripping on something whenever we had a meeting or a showcase with any major record label executives. Just to show them how little we cared. We weren’t going to change anything for anyone regardless how “big” or wealthy they were.

We had the opportunity to work with two of the biggest producers in the business. No need to name them here because it’s common knowledge. But in both cases, looking back, these were men who absolutely dwarfed us in terms of their experience and achievements in the music business. And in their abilities as musicians. And in both cases we played the fool every day we showed up. We KNEW what we wanted to do, knew what we wanted to sound like; we knew what was best. Or so we thought. So… why bother to have producers then? Well that’s the million dollar question isn’t it? We’d get excited to be working with a big name… And then when push came to shove and we got in the studio we always thought we knew best and fought with them. We were real shits.

Those were big mistakes. Looking back I can see WHY we did what we did. Why we acted the way we did. Our biggest fear –though at the time it was probably unconscious to any of us — was to ever consider that we were sell outs or selling out in any way. Pandering to the mainstream masses for money or fame or popularity. It just wasn’t who we were> in fact it was the exact opposite of who we were. We knew that. Being in that band, at that time in music history, at that point in our lives, at that age, the mentality and the sentiment and the statement was as important as the music.

The reason you made music and the kind of music you created or DIDN”T create was as important as the music… It was an elitist purist idealist state of mindfulness. Beyond arrogant. With pride in that arrogance. Very similar to what Vancouver is expressing now. Poor bastard. His “I’ll only play with acoustic drums and never drum loops or samples or synth beats” when everyone in the industry does it for very specific reasons — they sound badass — is precisely what makes his music sound so dated and local. And he SO wants to be liked and wonders why he isn’t. It’s curious, intriguing, perplexing really.

But I can relate. Because I suffered the same mental illness back in the days of The Specs. Granted, in our defense, we were 18 years old at the time. Vancouver is like thirty-something so he really has no excuse. But still, I can relate. The key for me, what changed, was that eventually I realized that I really did want to make popular music. And money. And if it was “I” who was making it, in the end, I would still probably like it in the end. Or so I hoped. On top of that, when you make popular music, you can generate enough money that you can then afford to make more avant garde or eccentric music in addition to the more popular music that you’re also making.

If I was to be honest with myself I think that underneath it all, at least for me personally, was just a fear that perhaps I really couldn’t create popular music… I was so focused on innovating all the time… But innovating is easy. you’re not going up against anyone when you’re always innovating. You’re only competing with yourself. Against whatever YOU consider your last great work of art. And that’s a really groovy place to be. Honestly that’s the world I’d like to live in as an artist ALL the time… But I also recognize the benefits of competing for commercial viability too. They both have their merits. It’s fun to popular and famous and successful and have money. And the competitive nature of it compels us to higher levels of greatness.

In any case, after all I’ve been through as an artist over the last ten years, all the hard work to create great works of art that were also somehow commercial and popular, listening back to this simple yet profoundly complex and beautiful Broken Spectacles album Aftermath really got me. I haven’t cried like that in years. Decades. That was a different world back then. We hadn’t a care. We were happy to be one of the “most popular local bands in our town”. That seemed like a big deal at the time. Our eyes and our dreams were bigger than our potential perhaps, or bigger than our willingness to stretch and grow…. I was happy to hear what we had created back then. To hear how incredibly good and ambitious it was. Nope, it would never yield the kind of commercial success we’ve experienced over the last ten years as Ed Hale and the Transcendence. It would never be played on commercial radio stations. But we were very very proud. We walked around like roosters on ‘roids, heads cocked high. And for good reason. We were fucking great and we knew it. Just not commercially successful great. But there’s something to be said about that kind of attitude.

Unlike a lot of artists in popular music, I personally have no big dream to dominate in the realm of most chart toppers or most #1 records or hit albums, nor that nagging fear that I am losing my grip as a key player in the pop world who is always on the Hot 100 with a Top 40 song. I see that kind of success and the money from it as a tool that can be used to allow me to do both: create popular hit music AND more eccentric and innovative works of art. THAT is where my dreams and fantasies of domination lay. How deep, how relevant, how innovative, how prolific, how intelligent, how thought provoking, how moving, how much new ground can I break… That’s what keeps me up at night and gets me up in the morning. Not the stats or the numbers. But the hearts and souls and minds that are deeply moved, called to act. Like that. So it’s a balancing act. These next six to twelve months, recording these new albums… It’s going to be fun. Tricky, but in a fun way.

Alright, I’m out. 4800 words with no break. My fingers are killing me. More on this topic later for sure.

Implementing Plan B - Take Two

      It's time to implement Plan B. But first a little background...
      Yesterday I spent a little over an hour studying Farsi using Rosetta Stone. Though I am constantly learning the language from being married to Princess Little Tree now, this was the first time I had opened my Rosetta Stone Farsi pack in almost two years. One would think that once a purchase that expensive is made there would be no stopping you from making full use of it. But such is human nature. In business it is common knowledge that nearly 90% of all purchases are impulse buys (all except the very basic necessities) -- which makes it easy to sell almost anything to anyone (this is the key to success in sales); and furthermore that most people do not purchase things to use them half as much as they purchase them for the initial rush they get out of the purchasing process (another key to success in sales). Another well known fact in the world of business, sales and consumerism studies is that less than 10% of people who purchase any kind of non-essential luxury items, these might could include educational or improvement courses, books, magazine subscriptions, timeshare resorts, clothes and shoes, etc, actually use the items purchased; less than 1% make use of them more than once. No matter how much they spend. The cost of the item is never a factor.
     I heard these statistics early on in life and made a promise to myself that I would never fall into that 99% group who buy things and never use them. I've purchased every course Anthony Robbins has ever released (and countless others) and completed every course several times from start to finish. Some of those babies are 30 day courses. Not necessarily easy. At the age of 25 I set out to learn how to speak and understand as many languages as I could until I felt satisfied. When pressed, I consider the practical application of how many would be truly necessary or useful and a rough estimate for me personally usually comes to about ten when I consider every language that I currently am aware of and how many I have a desire to learn. As many already know (this is contextual), presently I am moderately proficient in five, including my native English. The reason? Because once I decide to take on learning a new language I continue with all of the steps in the system I designed many years ago to learn any foreign language proficiently. It's a simple system, but contains many steps, and usually take about one solid year, or two. It isn't easy. But I enjoy it. And that's what really counts.
     People who say they "can speak a foreign language" and then only know a few words is one of the few things I find un-pleasurable in my fellow human brethren. There is also that pesky habit some people have of jumping in at any opportunity they get when a foreign language is mentioned in casual conversation among a group of people just to announce that they "used to be able to speak that language" or "lived in that country and spoke that language" but they've "since forgotten it all now". Hey, we all have our pet peeves. That just happens to be one of mine. The reason I bring it up is because having learned these statistics about impulse consumerism early in life, I have always made it a habit to master as much of everything I set out to do, or at the very least attempt to. Unless upon further examination I decide to abort the mission because it no longer interests me or I decide it to be no longer useful. With learning foreign languages, once I established that goal, I created an efficient system with numerous steps based on research and studying the various methods that people have used throughout history. That system I have already written about and mapped out here in the Diaries. No need to go into it again here. But suffice it to say, it takes a lot of commitment, dedication, effort and hours; as anyone who has pursued the same goal can corroborate. At times in the past I have found it excruciatingly tedious to keep on once I commit. But I do it anyway.
      That is until the last two years. I have failed miserably in my quest to learn Farsi. I decided and committed to learning Farsi seven years ago. It is the first foreign language I ventured to learn that did not use what we commonly call the English alphabet. I put a few years into learning Hebrew as well, but never approached it wholeheartedly using my system. With Farsi, the process was going to be much more difficult than any other language I have attempted to learn thus far. Learning to speak and understand it is one thing. Learning to read and write in it is another entirely. The former being my goal, not the latter.
      Purchasing the Farsi set of language packs through Rosetta Stone I felt would offer considerable help in my goal -- normally I use Pimsleur's system in terms of the audio portion of it. I also make sure to take at least one-hundred and twenty hours in sit down classes with a teacher. That's how I usually begin. (Again, I've already written about all of this in prior posts years ago.) Being married to Princess Little Tree enables me to get the classes portion in on a 24/7/365 basis. And for the last seven years I have been attempting to slowly learn the language through audio and books and studying as I always do. But over the last three years I have fallen behind in many different pursuits I have committed to. Not just in my goal to learn Farsi. I almost completely stopped writing any and all the books I have been working on over the last twenty years. I stopped blogging daily in the Transcendence Diaries. I stopped going to the gym and working out. I don't even check email anymore. Which people still find impossible to believe. But on and on it goes.
      I have been pondering this odd shift in my behavior a lot over the last few months. Wondering why all of a sudden I became such a muggle, or slug, or buffer... terms that perhaps only a few might be familiar with. In other words, where the hell did my relentless ability to commit and follow-through beyond normal-human go? Well for one thing I got married. And in the process I not only adopted a wife and all the accompanying responsibilities that go with that, but two step daughters as well; in addition to the fact that I have way too many jobs and twice as many hobbies. We've also been living bi-coastally for three years (something I don't recommend unless you have the money to afford a decent sized full time staff to help with the sheer giant sized quantity of extra work involved in that sort of lifestyle), and along with all of that we've been actively trying to have children of our own.
      Making babies may be easy for some, especially when you're young, which is part of the problem with the rampant pandemic of unwanted pregnancies among the world's young people. But as women get older it becomes more and more difficult to accomplish such a seemingly natural task. Without getting too personal (one of the reasons I have not been regularly posting in the Transcendence Diaries on a daily basis as I used to do since I started it in 2002), let me just say that baby making turned into a full time job for us very soon after we made the decision to start our own family; it has included numerous doctors all over the country, more "procedures" than I can count, and more heartbreak than anyone should permit themselves to endure in one lifetime. Needless to say we have still not achieved success in our quest to have beaucoup offspring, but we've also not given up. I am still very confident that one day we will be proud parents and grandparents of a large brood of little Ambassadors and Little Trees.
      To get back to the point, I can now clearly see and understand why I have fallen behind in so many of the things that in times past used to be daily routine for me, such as blogging, writing, exercising and learning foreign languages. But that's just the "reason". Discovering the potential reason for something does not necessarily mean that one has to succumb to it. For me personally this just might be one of the single most important keys to success that I have learned. There may be a very good and valid reason why we are not able to do something; but that doesn't mean that we have to succumb to the limitations of that reason. We may just need to re-engineer our systems and shift a few things around.
     Welcome to Plan B. Once I felt comfortable that I had discovered the real foundational reasons behind my sudden lack of being able to accomplish as much as I was used to in the past, i.e. I inadvertently took on a variety of numerous other new duties and responsibilities, I spent the last two months analyzing what possible solutions there might be available to me to still be able to maintain my current lifestyle and all of its itinerant jobs and duties AND add the usual number of extracurricular activities I am normally accustomed to being able to accomplish. I've been thinking about the year I spent in military school. Greenwich Military Academy (not the real name for obvious reasons) taught me plenty. The majority of the stories and lessons from those days are in The Adventures of Fishy book. That one, though it was the very first book I started, is presently in position number 5 or 6 on the conveyor belt in terms of completing and releasing the books. For multiple reasons. Just an fyi for me as well as you whoever you are.
      The aspect of military school that I have found most useful over the last few months in attempting to find a solution to my current quandary was how regimented and disciplined every moment of every day was. We may have had a few hours off on Sundays; I don't remember now. But other than that, from 5 am all the way through till lights out at 10 pm during the other six days of the week, every single minute of every single hour was accounted for with a very set and specific task or duty. No, it did not suit the lifestyle of an artistic personality type such as mine, hence my only spending a year there; but it did show me the potential for how much we could accomplish in a day if we set our minds to it or were forced to. In my current case, I both desire to and thus have set my mind to it, AND am being forced to, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is because if I don't, I am never going to continue to grow into the person I have always hoped I would be and always known I could be. This is a change that needs to be implemented.
      From my current vantage point, how I see it is that I need to made a conscious decision what my top priorities are both short and long term and set aside time to partake in activities that will lead me towards achieving those goals on a regular basis, either daily, weekly, bi-weekly, three times a week perhaps, etc. We spend much of our time during each day doing things that are not necessary to our general advancement, nor that lead us towards any specific goal. Casual conversations. Group dynamic activities for the sake of the group. Herd activities so to speak. Some of it is sheer laziness. Some of it is resistance to change; or resistance to the seeming enormity of a project, i.e a project seems so damn big that we don't see how we'll ever complete it, so we never start it; or perhaps resistance to learning or attempting something new that we've never done before. There are a variety of reasons why we do things that don't serve our bigger picture goals, or don't do things that would. The key is to just START. Start to make the change.
       For me that change is two-fold: limiting the amount of time I spend doing things that do not serve, and this is most easily accomplished by filling our time up with doing things that do serve. If as soon as I wake up each day I jump right into 30 to 60 minutes of studying Farsi, I will eliminate the usual hour or so I spend drinking coffee and chatting or checking social networks etc. From there a work out. Then a shower. Then work. People have no idea how much work-work is now involved in being a rockstar/recording artist. It isn't like the old days, all sex drugs and rock'n'roll. Lord knows I wish it were. But it just isn't. Our job has changed tremendously. There is a huge amount of what one might call office work involved in the job now. There is still every bit the need for song writing, practicing your instrument, recording, rehearsing with the band, fashion and styling, making music videos, album production, schmoozing  marketing and promotion, etc. etc. There are just a boatload of other jobs and duties that have been added to our plate.
      Let us say we spend the better part of the work day -- post morning activities -- doing actual work-work. We can then take a break. For me a break, preferably in the form of a 30 minute nap, is imperative to my mental and emotional sanity. No sense in fighting it. If I push my way through, by jacking myself up on something to minimize the tired feeling, I still end up feeling like a nervous wreck by 6 or 7 pm. So I have come to honor my own body's need for dark quiet time to do nothing but relax and recharge.
      Just after break time, we jump to either a few hours of writing and working on one of the books, or blogging. Then a limited amount of family quality time. Limited being the operating word there. The need for quality family time is essential when you're an active member of a healthy functioning family. There's no getting around it. Dinner time and an hour or two after that should suffice. But if the fam wants to watch Glee or X-Factor, there should be absolutely no reason you (or I in this case) should feel obligated to do so too. It's an activity that does not serve. Perhaps the key is to make the family time we do spend with our loved ones as fulfilling and high quality as possible, limiting the hours, but not the quality. That still leaves plenty of hours left in the evening for studying and learning, reading or watching things that are both enjoyable and educational. If you dig learning, then anything educational is going to be enjoyable anyway. So that part is easy. And then once everyone goes to bed I find to be the best time to blog and/or write. That midnight to six am time period when all is quiet and the whole world is covered in darkness.
      Today is my second day on this new schedule. I am still working it out, working the kinks out. I spent a bit too much time learning Farsi and a bit too much time on this blog post. But that's okay. The key is that Plan B has officially started. Time for a work out and shower. I'll keep you posted.

Initiating Plan B

It's 3:34 am saturday morning. At least where I am in the world right now. I add this last piece of relatively insignificant information because every time I spend extended periods of time on the west coast (of the United States) I just cannot fathom how people manage living here in regards to being three hours behind everything. I still cannot shake the feeling of being caught in a time warp. I've still not fallen asleep after an hour or so of laying here in between worlds and so decided to pick up the phone to do some writing. Went on FB for a minute to post a question -- Facebook is an amazing resource when you need a quick answer to almost anything -- and most of the status updates I saw are people who are a starting to wake up. To them it's Saturday. To me it's Friday night and I haven't even gone to sleep yet, let alone woken up inside of Saturday morning.

I don't think my mind or body will ever get used to the west coast time zone. I just don't feel comfortable in my skin here, being so far behind everyone and everything going on. If you want to watch the evening news on the west coast I've learned, say something like the McNeil Lehrer Report or Situation Room (I know, why bother with anything CNN at this point -- see an upcoming entry regarding the decline and fall of CNN in the near future) you have to stop what you're doing smack dab in the middle of the day and watch it at 3pm in the afternoon. Seriously. Right in the middle of your work day. It's so frustratingly off putting. If by chance you're working, and why wouldn't you be, and you must wait till the more traditional post work 6 or 7 pm end of day timeframe to watch the news, you're going to end up in the world of cable news gossip shows -- things like Anderson Pooper or Piers "I have no business being on a news network" Morgan. Because the networks are running live. Which I will readily admit is probably a good thing. They can't after all delay the news for west coasters. But certainly something could be done to accommodate the other half of the country... Like run the NEWS at night too; instead of these crap personality talk shows.

What the hell has happened to just good old fashioned traditional news reporting in this country? Why the fuck is it so hard to get some? Even if you are lucky enough to catch a more traditional or standard news show like the aforementioned Situation Room or OutFront or Shepard Smith et al., what you end up with is hearing about approximately three to five stories tops each accompanied by a cadre of so called panelists and non-experts, talking heads who spew opinion about other taking head's opinions. It's a televised gossip column is what it is; using news topics (occasionally important or worthy) as celebrity. And when one show is over the following show begins, albeit with another dolled up host (not anchor) who then proceeds to repeat the exact same three to five news items the show before it spent an hour reporting on. The actual news, the thousands and thousands of interesting and important news events that transpired all over the world that day go unreported. And with a station like CNN, which a decade ago used to be a real news network, or Headline news -- which used to be an even better more traditional news network, this mind numbing process repeats over and over again all day and night with only the talking head behind the desk changing. The news items don't. The same damn three to five pieces just get cycled and recycled over and over again until you think you've either lost your mind or are thoroughly convinced everyone else except you has.

I think the question that millions of people are asking right now, at least those who haven't allowed their brain or intelligence to fall into a deep hypnotic hibernation or permanent hypothermia, is what the hell happened to good old fashioned news reporting and journalism, i.e. a news anchor man (or woman) sitting behind a desk reporting the most important and or interesting global news events of the day, one after the other, without opinion or commentary or panelists or round tables or guest celebrity experts? As in one hour of watching the news would catch you up on at least fifteen to twenty different news worthy events of the day. At least.

Instead we are bombarded ad nauseum by overly dramatized and hyped up shock-talk radio like commentary and gossip on a handful of worn out stories that border on the inane and remind one more of a primetime sitcom about a bunch of uninformed high school kids who don't have anything better to do nor know any better than to ramble on for hours with their opinion about what they believe to be hot and trendy; as if switching to a different subject could mean the death of their reputation as one of the cool kids.

Ted Turner we all know you've drank more than your fair share of the sauce in your time and you've got the crazy eyes and complete disregard for propriety to show for it, but for the sake of all that is holy in the world of news journalism and arming an informed populace with the data they need to stay informed and actively engaged with the world they live in -- we need you to take back control of your brilliant little pet project that once served our needs so well in days gone by. My guess is that Ted can't watch more than three minutes of CNN now without throwing a shoe at the TV in between retching and cursing the day he sold out to Time Warner.

This post was supposed to be about implementing Plan B. but as we can all see I've instead gone ahead and written the piece about the myopic idiocy that is now called reporting the news. That's not a bad thing. I've already begun to implement plan B. I promise to return soon and fill you in on it. It's now past 5 am here on the west coast and I need to get some sleep.