24 - 1972 - Freedom (hello world)

"hello, world", was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial:[3]

 main( ) {          printf("hello, world");  }  

1972

In the spring of 1972, Betty Wise and I went to “Mar Y Sol” (Party of the Sun): ‘The First International Puerto Rico Pop Festival’ (and the only). Having missed Woodstock or perhaps it missed me, I thought a three-day festival in Puerto Rico would make up for it. However, it was quite disappointing. There were a few good acts: Emerson, Lake & Palmer, B.B. King, the Allman Brothers, Dr. John and Alice Cooper threw buckets of blood or some red stuff at the audience. Betty and I stayed with a friend of hers who was a doctor trying to revamp the career of some once-famous local movie star. She looked very old to me at the time, though she no doubt was younger at the time than I am now. I do not see myself at 57 years old as being much older than I was when I was in the 1970s. Except of course, I do not have quite the same mindset as I did thirty years ago, and I am slower and not anywhere near as experimental or daring as I was in those years.

The once-was-actress was a bit overweight and constantly high on cocaine and speed, and she seemed quite nuts. Betty and the doctor said she was very famous and all she needed was exposure. It was their hope that she would appear on stage at the concert, but I do not think it ever happened or at least I did not see her there. We had all stayed at the doctor’s large expensive apartment then I went off by myself to the concert. I do not recall exactly what happened, but Betty and I were not getting along soon after we arrived in San Juan. My last day in Puerto Rico I took a few hits of LSD and wandered around San Juan, a brave thing to do as I was hallucinating heavily and could not sort out what I was doing so I spent my “peaking” hours on the drug sitting along a beach too afraid to move. I found my way to the airport in the evening and flew back to The City. Within a week, Betty and I were through with our relationship, and I packed a bag and began hitch hiking out of New York. My intention was to go back to the Order in San Francisco via New Orleans then Mexico.

By the time I got to Tennessee, I was hungry, tired and a bit depressed. I slept under a freeway bridge the night before I arrived in Nashville. Whether I knew that Randy was at the Nashville Centre I am not sure. I knew there was an Order centre there and as I was on my way back to the Order’s headquarters in San Francisco, I had hoped to collect enough money to take a bus the rest of the way. I had been feeling for a few months that I was to go back to the Order. I believe that is what Betty and I ended our relationship over. It was her contention that I used the Order as a surrogate parent, because of a combination of feeling guilty for leaving the Adsit’s a few years earlier and because I was having problems with dealing with being adopted. I rejected her views, attempting to persuade her that it was my mission to be in the Order and of course it was true that I had been chosen. My Order “mission” did not coincide with any worldview of Betty’s and I was on my way to save the planet. A couple of weeks after I left, Betty was riding her bike through the streets and was run over by a bus so I never had a chance to tell her later on in the mid- 1970s that I was back in the Order and it was indeed a fact that I was fulfilling my destiny on this planet. I never was able to tell her that I later left the Order and maybe she was right.

The issue with the dead is that arguments, agreements and change of mind and change of heart never are dealt with. Because life is only for the living it must be true that life sucks. I often try to think what it would be like to be dead, try to make my mind blank, go limp, be aware that no one is aware of me. To be nothing in the midst of a vacuum though it is not the same as being dead
because I would be aware of imagining what it would be like to be dead.

I stayed at the Nashville Centre where Randy was the head. I explained my intentions of going back to the Order via New Orleans then Mexico. The first day Randy assured me going back to the Order was the correct course of action. The second day Randy said, “Wait for me I am going with you”. He put some things in a bag, and we took a bus to New Orleans. Years later, I would hear in the Order that they believed Randy took money from them but whether he did, or did not, I do not know but I do know that he did not have much with him when we went to New Orleans. We got there with not enough money to get a place to stay and slept our first night in our sleeping bags on the lawn of Tulane University. When we awoke, next morning, students were walking past us and even with my so far rough way of living life I did not like where I was. Sleeping on the lawns of a university seemed like a joke. I never finished high school, I had gone to Lane Community College for one semester, and all my hopes of ever putting an education together had been dashed over and over. Nevertheless, life goes on and on and education is forever or as forever as we are alive then maybe we continue to learn or maybe we do not. I never went near Tulane College again, but I have managed to get myself a bit more education since then; like a PhD – thank you very much and not one of those on-line or through the post ones either. A real one from a real school; The University of South Australia. Maybe my story should be called ‘The Journey: from idiot to Saint Terrell to Dr. Terrell. I know it is not the same as getting a PhD from the likes of the ‘University of Metaphysics’ an online site where one can grab a degree: Bachelors, Masters, even a PhD. Damn! Oh and a teacher’s degree; not a certificate, an actual degree.

Time to burn the incense and get a real degree.

Chuck away my degree from the University of South Australia – a real university – that took seven years to achieve and get one of these online certificates.

It was only a few days after arriving in New Orleans that I went past Jackson Square where artists sold portraits of the passing tourists and other types of pictures. I had gotten a job at a restaurant during evenings and with my first pay check I bought some artist boards and water paint. My first day sitting along the fence of Jackson Square I sold the five picture-poems I had painted, each for five dollars. A few weeks after starting I was a daily regular along the fence and even got a license from the city council to be a street artist. The rest of 1972, I lived in New Orleans. I even got a “real” job. I became a cook at a restaurant in the evening and sold my picture-poems during the day.

Sometime during the summer, Randy and I hitched hiked to a pop festival in Colorado. It was a very quick decision. I was living with a girl in a small apartment, and I do not know where Randy was living but one night Randy and I were drinking in a bar, and someone was telling us about this festival. We were all drinking shots of tequila, you know where you put some salt on your hand, take a shot then lick the salt. By closing time, Randy and I were very drunk and after smoking some dope decided to go to the concert in Colorado.

The girl I was living with was asleep, so I packed my bag, grabbed my sleeping bag and met up with Randy. We had lived together for a few months so I knew I would be in the shits when I got back…but what the hell? We got a ride out of town and somewhere in the Louisiana countryside Randy and I slept amongst trees until morning, and we started hitch hiking again. We got rides through Texas and made our way north to Denver. In Denver we followed many people headed to somewhere in the mountains for the pop festival we were going to. By going on this trip I had lost my job
at the restaurant because I did not show up the next day for work and I had not thought of telling anyone. It had not really registered with us until we awoke in the Louisiana countryside too far along the way to want to turn back.

I do not recall very much about the festival.

I do not even recall any musical groups, but I do know there were a lot of people amongst the woods and there was a lot of LSD. I remember waking up one morning; we slept outside in our sleeping bags, and a girl I had met the night before put LSD in my mouth and I went back to sleep waking a while later tripping. I also remember having sex with several females during my few days there.

Sex was once so different than it is now. There was no concern about disease, this being about a decade earlier than the change in behaviour because of AIDS. I never worried about pregnancy. When one is young, I was twenty-five; making love is a social act of appreciation and fulfilment. I loved making love with different women. It was exciting and adventuresome. There was no game playing or courting bullshit. It just was making love and there was no other agenda. There was no getting to know one another or promises of the future, nor jealousy, possessiveness or even asking of names. We did not need to know nationality, race (though that was an obvious one), age (though we were within our own age ranges), social standings, political beliefs (though with everyone getting stoned and engaging in free love we would have shared some portion of a similar world view), spiritual standings, backgrounds or anything else. There was purity in two humans sitting next to each other, smoking a joint together, then kissing and continuing with touching until we were satisfied with knowing each other’s body fully. I do not think the same way now, and at age fifty-seven I would not fancy sex with anyone other than the person I am with now. I say that a lot don’t I? Hell, I am now 74 and still one on one is tops.

Now I am more interested in getting to know how someone thinks and to get to know someone fully takes many years if not decades whereas to get to know someone’s body only takes a short period. I am happy to know someone now instead of just the body. At the end of the day, it is good that I had the experiences I had and even though I cannot remember the individuals of passing moments, I know that I knew people in ways I would never know them again. Of course, these females would also be in their mid-sixties now, pushing seventy and beyond and I wonder, just for a fleeting moment whether they remember a moment of passion and touching with me some four decades earlier. Everyone has a past and most people never reveal much of what they have done to anyone – but I know some people’s pasts, whether they wish to journey back or not. It does not really matter anymore; we are where we are at this moment and no longer where we were at another moment long ago except in a passing, fleeting memory type of way. If we take other lifetimes into account, we could have had thousands and thousands of lovers, many marriages, sex as various genders and on and on, so to have put any more into sex than the moment’s interaction is quite stupid.

Randy went to California, and I went back to New Orleans, and I found another job at another restaurant, continued with selling picture-poems in Jackson Square, and moved in with another girl because the girl friend I had before getting drunk with Randy and hitch hiking to Colorado was angry with me. She did not know what had happened to me. She got up in the morning to find I was gone and a note that I was gone to a pop festival in Colorado. I think her name was Mandy or Missy as far as I remember so far away and long ago. Our relationship had only lasted for a couple of months. I did not like her too much any way, as she was very possessive and bossy, so it was not a great loss breaking up with her. We were on the way out before I had left for Colorado. Mandy or Missy, I had a girlfriend by each one of those names about the same time and love is such a muddled thing at the best of time, when the faces and the bodies merge and the names and specifics of one becomes fused with another in the fleeting touches in the storms of youth.

She had a cat that she took to cat shows; I believe it was a long hair Persian purebred thing that I never cared for. One day it shit in my good boots and I rubbed its face in it and it just so happened to be hours before Missy-Mandy was going to present it at a cat show. She could not get the shit out of its hair in time to take it to the show, so I was in her bad books for that. I am not sure whose apartment it was but I think it was mine. I moved so many times, usually after a relationship ended that I lost track of which homes were mine and whether the female moved in with me or I moved in with them.

The way I think it works is that because I have Aquarius on my fourth house which rules one’s home life and Aires on my seventh house cusp with the ruling planets Mars and Uranus conjunct at 25- and 27-degrees Gemini in my eighth house that there is this link between losing homes and losing women. Mars conjunct Uranus in Gemini in the 8th – wow.

Indonesian National horoscope has this aspect; August 17, 1945, after the Japanese surrender at 10 AM. I have noted that there will be some planet moving through these degrees of a mutable sign whenever this happens. However, since I stopped believing in astrology, I have not had this problem of losing homes and losing women at the same time. I have in the more recent years lost women and lost houses not at the same time so I have broken the pattern.

Perhaps the way life works is that when we change our beliefs different events manifest.

If I no longer believe there is an afterlife, then I suppose one no longer exists. When I believed that there was a God then the two of us worked together now that I am not too sure, I am going solo, and I reckon I am doing a lot better for it too. For example, look at the world, it has gone to shit, look at my life – I am doing well. Therefore, I conclude I am doing better than God. Or perhaps I am that part of God that is doing well, and the rest of the world is our manic-depressed God having a
melt-down.

I loved being a street artist. We used to have competitions, those of us who were males and sold our pictures along the fence. Most of the artists were portrait artists and they would beat me in our contest. The contest was simple; ever who had sex with the most females in a day, from the passing tourism trade was the winner. One overweight person, who most of us did not like was far more successful than the rest of us together. One day he bragged he had taken ten women home in the day. It was amazing to watch him. He would entice a young female to have her portrait done, he would make them look so beautiful, and at the end, the two of them would walk off toward his apartment, a block away from the fence at Jackson Square and he would come back alone. I do not recall how many I was able to snare in a day but in my defence, I had a different product. I was selling poems, which of course was a good hook in its own way, I was often told how sensitive and romantic I was. Nothing could compare with portraits though, it is intimate, and one can use so many lines. I did have some success with my astrology as I would always find that if I did a female’s chart whom I fancied I would be able to share with her the amazing compatibility of our charts and that seemed to bind a lot of women with me.

The downside was that it was difficult to untangle with someone when you led her to believe that there were romantic aspects and it would be good to “exercise them”. I got myself into some real problematic issues with it but I also had some very good, howbeit, very short, relationships based on my ‘inner knowledge’. I never have worked out whether women are incredibly gullible or they wanted to get laid, and the sexual event horizon would have been penetrated whether there were good lines involved or not. No doubt it is just the sexual games between the genders when the females action coincides with the male’s just because of social protocol. I was always hoping to find a social setting where the females pursed males, or at least me, as vigorously as males, or at least I, did them.

I rented a large house at the end of Bourbon Street on the corner with Esplanade Avenue, which cuts the French Quarter apart from the next section of the city. It was the oldest house in the Quarter.
The outside had not been painted for so long that there was not a chip of paint left, and all the raw wood made the house look haunted. There were several bedrooms and a large living room, kitchen and dining room. Soon the house filled with so many people that I could not keep track of who lived there and who was visiting. I was the only one who paid rent because no one else seemed to ever have any money. I was able to sell enough of my picture- poems to pay the rent and keep food in the house.

Several of my friends would come out with me in the morning when I set up and when I sold a few pictures, we would go to a restaurant and have breakfast. My friends consisted of a few people I would know for a long time. Dell was one of our early friends. (see Dell’s End at end of Part 2 or book 2 of reading this as an e-book) I met him when Randy was still in New Orleans. I had gone cold on Randy as a friend. It seemed we wanted the same females and there was a time when Randy began to sell picture-poems on the other side of the fence, which really pissed me off. Wanting or having the same females never bothered me except when we were pursing the same one for the same evening, afternoon, morning or whenever the moment was ripe for the fulfilment of desire.

Sex pursuits amongst the genders is just a weird thing. For most of our socialization in the Western world, it has been the male doing the pursing. Females would put themselves into position as the pursuant, but the males would be the active one to herd the females into bed. This has finally changed for the most part for good or bad. I think it is good as it cuts out the game playing more and intent is clearer. I have always preferred for the female to make the first move then I do not have to worry about mixed signals. Most males would agree then it is up to us to do the rejection scenario.

Young girls in the years following 2000 see making the first move and having many males as almost a sport. Casual sex is becoming equal. Maybe with the more openness that is emerging in society there will be more honesty in sexual interactions. Secret affairs will not be secret; if someone engages in sex with someone other than their daily partner the interaction will be accepted as a normal part of being human. I have known many women and of course, males, who have felt so guilty for having sex with someone other than their partner that they become ill over it. I have known married women who have had lots of affairs during their years of marriage.

What made it difficult was that some held onto Christian beliefs that were counterproductive to their production, believing they were condemned to spend eternity in hell for their actions but not worried enough to stop. I have known several women that have had either casual sex or relationships with married men and of course, the men have no idea. I believe it is the norm for people in long-term relationships to have some affairs or at least a few casual sexual encounters along the way and never to tell their partner. Saying all that, and not to sound like a goody goody, I have never had a second lover whilst in a relationship. As far as I know I have never fucked a married person or someone in a long- term relationship, well except for Lynn, in the mid- 1970s, but I thought she had ended her relationship with my best friend Daniel. It has nothing to do with morals. I have had my casual mashups. So few relationships lasted longer than a few weeks that I find it interesting to be fully involved with the person I am with. Whether the few people I have had a relationship of more than one year (three in total) went off with someone else during our relationship I do not know and I would not want to know.

At the end of 1972, I hitched hiked to New York with a couple of other people. I remember little of the journey except for being stuck along a freeway somewhere in Ohio with a couple of other people, a female and a male. Snow was falling and the temperature was well below freezing. We huddled together at a gas station for many hours before someone offered us a ride to Columbus. We spent the night on someone’s floor out of the cold but all of us were quite miserable. I went the rest of the way by myself and spent Christmas with my parents and brother in Clifton Park.

Christmas 1972 Clifton Park with parents and brother

Soon after Christmas, I headed south once again. My parents just freaked me out and any length of time with them becomes too much of any amount of time that could have been spent doing something else. Nineteen seventy-two had been such a full-on year. At the beginning of the year I thought I was headed back to the Holy Order of Mans. Here I was back with my parents. I looked at the next year, 1973, as a year with no plans.

Every year I planned what I was going to do and nothing came close to being as I thought it would be. My immediate thought was to go back to New Orleans and continue with my street art. The cold north was too difficult. By New Year’s I was in New Orleans, having hitched hiked during winter once again but I did not have the trouble getting rides as I did the month before when I got stuck in Ohio and several other states along the way.

I was also aware that I was twenty-five and there was the social conditioning form that expects people to have their shit somewhat together by the age of twenty-five. I have no idea why we are supposed to live our life to a formula of having accomplished certain things at a set time of a chronological age. For example, a male in Western society should be either retiring or contemplating retiring at the age of 55. I am now fifty-seven and a half and I think I have just started my career. Now I am 69 and still not retired – doing relief teaching in public schools in South Australia. Considering the millions of years of life on this planet and the 120,000 years (Taken from “Recent research suggests that modern humans (Homo sapiens) originated in Africa at least 120,000 years ago”. The International Academy of Science, http://www.science.edu, viewed Thursday, February 16, 2006.) that humans have evolved on this planet it is so ridiculous to put any value on fifty-five of those years. In other words, my life thus far represents .000004 percent of human-evolution. Shit, that is enough to make one not feel very significant.

25. 1973 New Orleans
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Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 78.