27 - 1975 - Syracuse

1975 - Syracuse

Syracuse was boring but I had that one memorable incidence. When I cannot sleep at night, two or three o’clock in the morning I lay awake thinking over my life. I do not think about regrets. I have none too few regrets. I lie. I have heaps of regrets, and I feel them now as they threaten to sink me in despair, so I write to keep myself from falling into eternal darkness that constantly threatens to engulf me these past sixteen months. I even have taken to making bets with myself on how much
longer I will be able to hang on before I give in to the inevitable.

But that is not what I think about in the early hours of the morning. I think about categories, placements – such as the order of things. One of those order of things is bigness. For example, what is the biggest, the dumbest, the most embarrassing moment of my life? And time after time it is that evening in Syracuse that is at the top. Higher up even than super gluing my front two teeth on to my plate, and though it should be on par with my track meet caper it surpasses that in moments that should never have happened. Another horrendous moment in my meaningless trek through life on this planet was when I discovered that I had VD (venereal disease) one Sunday morning in Baltimore, Maryland an hour before I was to give the Sunday sermon. And there are no comparisons to the times I have whispered the wrong girl’s name at the worst possible moment or sent the same love poem to more than one female only to have addressed it to one name and written to another name on the poem. And my indiscretion in Montbéliard, France, embarrassing as it was, held nothing to my indiscretion in Syracuse. My haemorrhoids suddenly making their presence known when I was reeling in a girl at a fancy dinner was bad but most of these events were not consciously my fault. Though of course I would not consider that my Syracuse event as being very conscious. Sometimes I believe my life is just one string of embarrassments. Perhaps I should take a course in being assertively in control of my life so I would not do so many stupid things. Maybe I should be a comedian and tell events from my life I am sure they would get a laugh. Decades after some events I still don’t laugh. But maybe a cabaret of washed up stupid drunk businesspeople and desperate housewives would find me funny.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, which my life really is, the twilight of one hell of a stupid journey, it is all too late to change. If someone asked me what I would do if I could do it all again, I would hit them and I am not a violent person. I would not want to do this life again and anyone that looks at the world today and has any degree of hope left has no sense of reality whatsoever.

At the time, it was not funny. But this is the story – exactly how it occurred.

Our resident priest had performed a marriage at noon and the brothers of our centre along with the local Christian Community that was affiliated with the Syracuse Order Centre were invited to an afternoon celebration of the marriage. I had been at the Syracuse Centre for just a couple of weeks at the time. A girl who was a member of the Christian community and who was thinking of joining the Order was at the afternoon wedding celebration. I had drunk a few glasses of wine and I was chatting with this girl on the sofa next to me.
Everyone else was standing about talking but for some reason I went off on to a very strange tangent. The girl and I, and I remember this clearly to this day, began kissing. Not only did we not know each other, never having seen one another before this particular afternoon, but also, I was a brother in a Holy Order at a religious  (my invisible mate there on the left in front – now visible)
function. She stopped me as I slid my hand under her blouse and began to feel her breasts. I told her that it was OK that I had put a veil around us so no one could see us. She did not believe me at first but I convinced her that it was true and I had her blouse unbutton when Daniel, standing in front of me, very assertively asked what I thought it was I was doing. It was then that both the girl and I realized that I did not have the power either to make the two of us invisible or to put a veil around us so no one could see us. She quickly buttoned up her blouse, I got into her car and went to her house, we had sex, and she drove me back to the Order house. No one ever said anything about the incident and I do not know if anyone other than Daniel ever knew. The girl continued to go to the Order house for Sunday services and for weekly spiritual classes, some of which I taught. We never had any contact again and outside of social and Order greetings, we never communicated again.

I do not remember her name but the event has always made me question any hint of sanity that I may have thought I had possessed when I was in the Order. I had also told her that she would not become pregnant because I had control of that so using a condom was out of the question. It is true that in my life I have come up with some very off the wall ways to bed a woman, like most men have, and I am sure most women have done peculiar things to bed a man but I have only actually believed I could make myself invisible once. I wonder what we would all act like if it were not for social conditioning and social controls. Would we just have sex with whoever was in front of us whenever the desire arose? I have thought at times that it would be quite good, though I do not think that now. In thought I was almost perverted in Syracuse. I would have incredible sexual fantasies as I went through the day.

I would entertain ideas of total sexual freedom where everyone was promiscuous, when I would be able to make love right on the street corner or on the bus with a woman I would see. It is part of forced celibacy and is evident in the Catholic Church. Some priests who have taken vows of celibacy are being found to be paedophiles, gay, or having illicit affairs now in the 2000s. I personally have met people abused by priests when they were children and there are stories in the news about it constantly. Celibacy is an unnatural act and to make people celibate is a crime against human nature. I was 27 and under a vow of celibacy and all I could think of was sex. I only had the one afternoon sexual event during my year in the celibate Brown Brothers but I was so obsessed by thoughts of sex that I barely could function at times. Decades later; 1984 to 1995, I would be celibate for a decade (except for two one-night stands; once in London on New Year’s 1985 and once in a small town in France in April 1992) – I will tell all in book 2) by choice.
During those years without I did not fret about a lack of sex, I chose not to tangle. I just was not interested because I had enough in my life to keep me occupied.

For the week of August 7, 1975, as Brother Terrell Adsit, I gave my full paycheck of $31.92 to the Holy Order of Mans. The Syracuse branch of the Order was not making a lot of money off of me. I worked at Loretto Geriatric Center as something to do with nursing or caring or something. Maybe I was an orderly – one of those thankless people who clean up people. The concept of aging was as foreign as one could imagine. I was knee deep in the beliefs of the Order concerning aging – it was just part of our journey through creation. I was close to 28 years old with an emotional and philosophical mindset of a fifteen-year-old. I had very little concerns for getting old as I believed by the time I got old, like past thirty-five, we would be living in a new and glorious age.

Now, close to 45-years later I cannot imagine what I must have been thinking. We age so rapidly. It is as if when we hit forty that our world suddenly begins to spin faster and the years go by at the rate of two to one, until we get to sixty then the years go by three or four to one as time is so clearly rapidly running out. @74 I say (often) “shit…this is quick”.

When I was growing up it was like living on a distant planet. Perhaps it was equal to living on Saturn. Saturn takes 28 of our earth years to equal one year and there was a sense that we would never reach adulthood or at least get to be a teenager. Now it is like living on Mercury and every time I wake up I am suddenly older.

I used to like to make a happy atmosphere at the nursing home so I would make people look as good as they could. I almost got myself fired one day because I put makeup on some old women who
were too old to do anything for themselves. I was told I had made them look like clowns, but I was new at the makeup thing, and I had not yet learnt that the beauty myth was just that, a myth.

For some reason I gradually made more money, perhaps I worked more hours, I do not recall. I am just now looking at my ‘money receipt book’ for that time. I was cleaning out a shed this week (July, 2004) in Adelaide and found it and I had kept this for all these years, and I would stop and count how many places I have moved since 1975 but I do not feel bored enough with life to do that. It would be like trying to count and remember how many girlfriends I have had since then – one of those impossible tasks.
November 8 - $70.62 November 15 – $98.80

November 24 - $50.04 oops must have stuffed up that week

And that was it for that. My pay-book continues with whatever I was doing in Baltimore for a job – which I totally have no recollection of.

Christmas 1975 New York City with Shelly Pashkin

December 28th in New York City - lunch with Robert (my brother) and to Washington Square rest of day with Shelly – train to Baltimore at 7 PM (I have looked up this person in several search engines, Shelly, and I found a deceased one or two but no one living in NYC in 1975. I have no memory of who she was or how we met – just this entrance in my journal for that year). I hate the fact that we cannot find someone from our past. Stuff the internet. It is rarely helpful. If only we had Facebook, Twitter, webpages, for the past two- thousand years. How good would that have been.
Can you imagine Jesus having Twitter? ‘Groped some whore at the well’, ‘Paul said piss off and they did’. Stuff like that.

28. 1976 HOOM still
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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.