"It's not all that bad - being
a parent, actually it is really almost quite easily accomplished. Just put Them
out in the garden and water Them once in awhile and They'll grow up just
fine".
I believed that once. Don't any
more.
Last night when the policeman
knocked on the door, or did he ring our doorbell? It was so confusing at that
moment. Two am - dog barking, head-butting the door. My girlfriend pushing me
out of bed as she escapes under our sandalwoodstainedsatinsheets.
Dreams dissolving into
dissolution. My son says, 'I didn't do it! Sorry dad', as He goes off to His
room followed by two 'friends' I have never seen before -
One of which could possibly be
a female. Perhaps they both were.
Why is my life like
this?
Back in '78 - 1978 that is. I
lived with Lynn and her eight year old daughter. Lynn and I weren't really
lovers. Oh, maybe on the odd occasion when snow had newly fallen fresh and we
didn't have a date we would pretend we were each other with someone different,
wanting us more than we really did each other, but that was not usual. All I
ever wanted in life was to live in a world of usuals. I never have. We lived in
a small house in the country not far on a clear day from Baltimore to Washington
DC Leos, pretending we were in a mansion, or just a small weekend retreat in
some foreign alps. I was kind of happy. Maybe Lynn was too. Her daughter was,
she wasn't an adult. How could she be unhappy? Use to tell Lynn that some day I
too would have children. I would be a single parent...the only way to pretend
the world is different than it is is to do it alone with no one there saying it
isn't. Lynn wasn't happy being a single parent but I would be. I had a feeling.
It would be great. me and my Children. Having a wonderful time frolicking
through life. I would live in a two-story house somewhere in New England with
two children, a story for each child that I would change as they got older and I
would write novels as snow climaxed outside. Somewhere this story changed when
without me paying close enough attention it changed and I didn't with it. Now I
have been a single father living in a foreign country with no nearby alps for
fifteen, longer than would have been if I had not done them here, years, while
too poor to buy paper to write novels to my two Children reading them if there
was snow to read them against down here in Australia.
Lynn committed suicide in 1984.
Me in Australia her Maryland. Never got to tell her the joys of parenting single
handed. Two hands tied behind my back too. Dreaming of developing my beingness
in lightly falling snow that never here has known.
It
keeps happening. The noise and clutter. All my Son wants to do is to beautiful
the neighbourhood - the ugliness of suburbia is just too much for him. A few
cans of spray paint can do wonders for these parts. I decide I will learn to
understand. my Children. My my my how will I ever understand? Home from the
library. Arms full of books, articles, magazines. Graffiti. Hip-Hop.
When
my son first said he was into Hip-Hop. He was eleven. Year six. We were living
in Victor Harbor. A tourist destination when there is nowhere else to go. After
fifteen years in Australia I am beginning to think that most of this big island
is a destination. It was originally a destination for convicts...excuse me, that
is my Americanised colonial self perceiving deceptive perceptions... of course
before it was a destination it was home to non-convicts, the real owners of this
land. Such intruders we whites were. I was a convict of mis-guided love, and now
I am imprisoned, gently raising my children on this island floating out of
Dreamtime. Kangaroos. They use to hop across the back of our farm when we lived
in Mt. Compass before starting over again in Victor Harbor. We would go out to
the paddock and watch our dog chase them. Hip-hop. Hip-hop. Sacha was not into
kangaroos suddenly. It was Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop is a culture: rap music, graffiti,
skate-boarding and anti: Anti-everything. I wanted to know more. Did my Honours
thesis on 'Graffiti as text'. Read. Talked. Observed. Even did some
myself.
my Children Graffitied
the face of time.
This
is going to be longer than I had expected it would be should be could be. I
started writing this in 1978 when I didn't have children - just the imagination
of how easy it would be. Having children. Well credit to where credit is due. Of
course I wouldn't have the children like in those comedy films that come out
every so often. Arnold what's-his-name having a baby.
Yeah! Right! Let's be realistic. Some woman would
have the baby for me. I would get her pregnant in the normal in the back seat of
my Chevy, underneath a voyeur moon in Scorpio. A beautiful act in itself. I wish
I was Mosses or Noah or one of those people who God told to populate the earth.
Solomon. No wonder he was so wise. What a guy. Seven hundred wives as well as
300 concubines Why hasn't Hollywood done a movie on him. Speilberg's 'King
Solomon' see randy Soloy seduce one-thousand pin-up broads. Nakedly. Then wham.
Christianity comes along. Guilt. Guilt.
And
more guilt. One woman. One man. Or burn in indignation.. Wow! So I wrote that
first few lines at the beginning of this chapter long ago. Kept adding to it.
Then one day I had some children. A wife. Actually the wife came first, then the
child then I moved to this foreign shadow. The wife was foreign to begin with,
she was just returning to her shadow with me in chains crawling behind.
Suddenly, I was divorced. It was like having a toothache in the middle of the
night and even though I pulled the tooth ou sometimes it still hurts. I couldn't
leave the foreign shadow. My family and friends were dying one by one in
America. I was dying one by one in Australia. I was very very poor, not very
smart and losing my clinically classical Neanderthal mind. I had two children -
babies actually, in the year of their Lord, 1984. I had no friends. The
wonderful South Australia Family courts said, "here, hear, have a couple kids,
just don't leave town with them. Don't you leave either". I threw away all that
I had written about the joys of parenting except for the first few lines. Now I
will start all over again. About being a single father. Or single mother,
grandfather, aunt, uncle, grandmother - I am them all - unto to myself, unto
THEM - my father my dead mother, my dead brother, grandfather, aunt, uncle,
grandmother. I have changed attitudes, switched gears, toward raising children.
I hope by writing this I will realise what that changed attitude and in what
gear it is. And my children will not be dented in their attitudes toward life
needing perpetual undenting by future new-age therapists in the future, as they
laboriously try to explain:
"Dad? Well he just kept slipping further and further
away from reality. Spinningly. We tried to pull him
back. So did his girlfriend. Then she slipped and fell too. But we were worried
that we would become sucked into the same vortex, so we sent him to the 'Jimi
Hendrix Nursing Home for Lost Shadows'."
NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today, my son is preparing himself on the other side
of me - - upThere in the sTaTes. Middle of the night here when I will hear, if
my listeners are listening, whether he pitched the bronze medal
game or slipped across someone's
fallen karma and along with Australia came in fourth.
I
often come in fourth especially when there are only two places. I create two
more losing places just as a protest against bronze medal winning life
styles.
Wouldn't you?
Hip-Hop. Graffiti. Fences. Next He will say He sprays
the morning sky. "It's all Your father's fault". Lying is part of a post-modern
continuum anyway. Creative story telling that only disintegrates if found to be
untrue. Lying. Words tossed against the canvas of life. Some red here. Read
between the red lines so well read. A bit of a collage there. Meaning
constructed up in the middle lower. Frameless. Hang it in the museum of the
subconscious for unconscious masturbating Freudians to sneer at. Legends. Myths.
Dream Times. "And this mountain fell in love with this river and they had this
island." "The great One took a handful of stars threw them at the East Wind."
'Burp!' "Jonah spent three days inside of the whale." 'Fart!' Eve shafted Adam.
My son has painted all the suburbia trains and buses in Adelaide. "When my
Children first came to this suburb, back in the old days...there was no visible
graffiti. Then the cans appeared. Messages. Meanings. Graf-gods blessed the
suburbs. But then the evil forces of the unhappy adult authorities looked upon
the suburbs.
The
wars began..."
I had a room in heAven
once
But I left the door open
and all the bugs got in.
In my room in heAven now
the door is closed.
My room in heAven
has been given to a
stranger.
One who will keep out the
bugs
I once let in.
So I tell my children
"Close the door
Keep out
the bugs"
Just in case
they ever get a room
in heAven.
These two girls at the door. Thirteen Fourteen. 'Is
he there?' He isn't. They leave. Girls don't visit my children too often. My
children say they'd be embarrassed to bring girls here. I think it's so cute.
Girls interested in my boys. I try to remember movies and television shows I've
seen. Doesn't the boy - dressed nicely - go to the girl's house and meet the
parents and ask to take the girl out. They say have her back by ten. Father
sternly looking at the boy - "keep your hands off her if ya know what's good for
ya matey". I rarely went on dates when I lived at home. Bowling sometimes. My
father would sit in the car. We lived in Clifton Park - Upstate New York,
population about twenty horny frustrated Christian children and a handful of
adult entities. No public transport so my father had to take us. I would sit in
the back seat feeling my date up and down all the way home. Presumably my father
had his eyes on the road. We can't do that here. The fact that our car doesn't
even always get us to where we are going or sometimes to there but not back is
not a fact to consider. I can imagine, though I shouldn't, taking one of my boys
on a date. Get half-way to where we are going, car breaking down. Broken. RAA
towing us home. Me explaining to the girl's parents that our car broke down them
not believing me thinking I'm some pervert making up that we were stranded on a
country road with their daughter late at night.
It's
all wrong. I want a proper life. A proper suburban car. A Volvo. Maybe a
four-wheel drive station wagon. Something foreign like me. Take my Children and
Their dates to nice places, with my Children dressed fashionably. Shoes not worn
- with toes trying to escape out the sides, like they do now. Sneakers. Good
ones. Like the ones in the commercials where the guy is jumping over buildings.
My Children jumping over their karma, their legacy - me. Pants that aren't worn
through to the knees. Up to date stuff. I'd take them to a nice restaurant not
drive-thru-eateries like we do most days NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today, where we try to get extra free
food on out of date vouchers. Maybe a movie. I would go to the library, read USA
NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today while they felt each other up in the darkness. Bowling would be o.k.
Miniature golf. Now my Children have no money for dates. I have none to give
Them. Can't drive Them anywhere anyway. I have been with my girlfriend for
almost a year. We haven't been on a date yet either. We met in the park she
bought some of my
Happy
Bi
rthD
ay picture
poems when I was trying to make money
as a street artist in Glenelg a resort along the coast to the left of Adelaide.
She came to my house a few weeks later. We ended up in bed. I still hope to go
on a date with her. I need to be a role model for my Boys. Teach Them about
dating and romance. I don't think I'm doing a good job of it so far. Time is
slipping by. I don't know anything to pass on about dating. And now in this
politically correct new age we live in I search for another proper political
movement to be correct in. Maybe the girls will do all the date teaching stuff,
I hope so, it would get me off the hook. Two girls at the door - I wonder what
they would think of our house that I have yet to clean this week. It's Thursday
already. It is good my sons aren't home. Always so much to do. We will all die
of embarrassment...
11
MAY 1998 12:28:43 PM 650 pages later and still going strong. available end of
2001 somewhere.
Leigh Neuage 6th July 1983 - 16th August 2003 every place I go I go with you ~ thanks for being always with me always. I only wish I could be with you. Everyday is more difficult than the one before. 03 September 2010.
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rcrd[13] = " home";
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ROMANTIC POEM OF THE WEEK |WEEKLY|About Me|picture poems / baseball|Robert|neuageVIEW |kids|Tree|home /PhD Thesis/ALL|Try This|
Please
note: this is an autobiographical fiction with some truths and some not-truths
as it is an assignment in autobiographical prose fiction. Any part that
resembles any particular person, event or situation is but coincidental. It has
been submitted as part of a Masters Degree at Deakin University, Geelong,
Victoria. 1997. Last fiddled with - July 19, 1998 :Hackham South
Australia
NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today working on picture poem links starting around "better" (19 September 2014). Picture poems are the digital format of work I did as a street artist in New Orleans in the 1970s, as well as New York City, Honolulu, San Francisco and Adelaide South Australia. Follow @neuage
.