30 - 1978 freedom again‌

1978

In early 1978, I left the Order or perhaps the Order left me. The Towson Centre closed and there was an abstraction of what would become of us.
Most left the Order though two or three stayed and went to other Centres. I did not officially leave the Order but received a new classification. There was something about being on a ‘mission’ where brothers and sisters would live on their own but continue as brothers and sisters. So off we were sent. During the last week of life in the Order, I took all the Order material I could get my hands on. I still have, more than forty-five years later, all the Esoteric Council Reports and a copy of the Order’s second level teaching, ‘Order of the Golden Dawn’ as well as exercises for priests; levels one and two. In all that time I have never sat down and read much of the material but I drag it around the planet thinking someday I will look it over to try and discover why my thinking is the way it is and whether it is because of the Order’s influence or drugs or my astrological chart or it is just is. Now in March 2015 I have finally unpacked these books and folders and have a box next to me now to start looking through here in Adelaide, South Australia; 47-years later. Hey, I was born in 1947 and my house address is 147 Perseverance Road so that all put together says something.

I moved into a small apartment on top of a corner deli in Towson. I only had a couple of changes of clothes to my name but I had my job at Shepherd Pratt Hospital and the apartment I rented was furnished. I lived there for a couple of months. My girlfriend at the time was Beverly as I had broken up with Dorrie. I think I was in love with Beverly.

However, I slept with a few other women during the time I was with her and I know she slept with others too so I suppose we had a bit of an open relationship. I met Beverly through the Order, the same way I met most of my women. She would come to service on Sunday and she was interested in the Order’s teachings. One Sunday afternoon we were discussing the Order’s teachings, I was in my clerics, and she was in a summer dress that left little to the imagination of what was beyond the thin material. I took her to my room in the Order house, locked the door and that was it. I truly did want to tell people about the Order and share my spirituality but I think I was addicted to sex and that would often overpower my will to continue with postulating (prostituting) about spiritual matters. I was kicked out of my Towson apartment by the owner because I had too many females visiting and staying overnight. It made no sense to me. What was wrong with having visitors but the old lady owner seemed agitated by the visitors. I paid my rent but I think I was not to have anyone staying overnight though I have no idea why.

I moved to downtown Baltimore and began doing picture-poems again. I remember living in Baltimore as a happy time in my life. Brother Tom lived across the street from me and he illustrated my story, Tree. I visited Tom a lot and we drank; smoked pot and I think took LSD together and painted. Tom was a real artist in that he could paint pictures of what he saw, I only did my washes, and colour splashes for my picture-poems. Tom had sex with my girlfriend Beverly and though I never said anything I was upset about it.

I worked the night shift at Shepherd Pratt Hospital so that I could continue to attend Towson State University. Because I worked nights, I would drink a lot of alcohol and take sleeping pills so I could sleep during the day. I got the pills from the hospital. It was quite an easy task taking a couple of pills sometime during the night from one of the patient’s drawers in the nursing station. I think I was a bit addicted to them for a while along with drinking a lot. Brandy was cheap, so I would down a full bottle, and then sometime in the afternoon I would pass out and awake in time to get myself off to work. I would have to take some ‘uppers’ to get myself going to work the night shift. I liked working nights as everyone was asleep, including, often, the women I worked with. There were three of us staff on my ward, two rather old black women and me.
We would do rounds of the ward to be sure the kids were asleep and not doing anything foolish like trying to kill themselves. There were very few instances on our shift. We had a couple of kids who tried to kill themselves, one by hanging and one by slicing his wrists and a few attempted escapes. We had a locked ward because we had the alleged difficult adolescents. I thought they were good kids who for the most part just wanted someone to talk with. It seemed many of the kids were in because their parents had found that they had used drugs,
primarily marijuana. There was several staff who got stoned regularly including Kathy, who was my occasional sex partner. We were not really lovers; it was just sex after work sometimes when no one else was available.
Daniel’s girlfriend, Lynn, who joined the Order after falling in love with Daniel, was sent to Boston as a novice, then left after a month. She wanted to move to the country with her eight-year- old daughter, Tracy. I had enough of city living and after a binge of drinking, smoking pot and taking LSD as well as various prescription medications I ‘liberated’ from the medicine cabinets at the hospital I told Daniel I was looking into moving out of town.

He said that Lynn was looking for a place too so after contacting her we found ourselves a home in Lutherville-Timonium about half an hour north of Towson and Baltimore. The house we found was a two-bedroom cottage on a large estate. We rented from a middle-aged widower with two daughters and a son who lived in the main house on the property. The youngest daughter was Tracy’s age and they became best friends.

I am a bit of an avid reader given the time, place and opportunity – it does not have to be good literature or of any specific genre, colour, length or type. What I would like to see in my reading of other’s writing is where and in what condition was the writing written. No one does that. During a Steven King novel, why does he not tell us that he is writing in route to somewhere or the other? Maybe it is because most writers write in the same place or perhaps if they do write in different places they assume no one would care. I love following Steven King on Twitter. What a dude.

The more I think about that, that no one gives a shit, the more I realize no one would care where I am writing what I am writing. Of course, I
already assume that no one will care what I write to begin with or ever get to read what I am writing to formulize an opinion about whether he or she care where I wrote what I am writing anyway. I read magazines, books, comics, TV guides, newspapers, labels… I am an avid label reader and that would explain why no one cares to go shopping with me. At the groceries, I read labels not always because I am that specific about whether the ingredients belong in my body; caressing the cells giving fuel deprived mitochondria a needed boost or repairing the damaging I have done to my body over the decades, but because I am a reader. I read labels and advertisement in the most judgmental manner. What I purchase depends on whether I feel offended by an ad or just find the label in bad taste or with colours I do not like. As much as I enjoy reading, I enjoy writing and I will write anywhere anytime. In the height of my poetry writing days, I would constantly be taking breaks wherever I worked to go to the bathroom, toilet, loo (what does one call something that is different wherever they go?) to write a poem or I asa line to a story or novel. I have started so many novels that I have lost the plot to why I was ever trying to write anything at all and to add to my writing despair I have lost every snippet of story I have ever written. Here I am writing again though this time it is for my therapy. The idea is that if I write all about what I have done and thought I may be able to get a handle on what the hell I am doing on this shit-hole of a planet at this point in time of creation. Waiting for a plane from London to Singapore and my computer went flat an hour and half out of New Jersey too many hours ago. After buying an adaptor plug from US to British, I found I could plug it into a socket behind a ticket counter here at gate 11. I get to write and recharge my laptop so that I can write for another few moments on the next segment, fourteen-hour flight and I have something to do for twenty minutes or so.
Accordingly, I have 12 % left on my battery but at least I get to write and while away an hour amongst the throngs of passengers waiting to bring good cheer to someone for Christmas 2004. They are all stuck at Heathrow with nothing to do but not me I
am telling my thoughts and experiences to my laptop secretly here at the closed ticket counter.

I have gone back and forth with astrology for four decades and still I cannot decipher my own beliefs. From about 1966 until early 1980s, I believed that through astrology one could discover everything they wanted to know. I even became a bit of an expert, giving lecturers – casting charts – making decisions and teaching it. I believe now there is nothing to it more than superstitions and hopefulness that astrology provides a way to understand our miserable lives. Of course, I still look at my chart and use the many methods that I have learnt to try to make sense of ‘it all’ but nothing is clearer whether I use astrological techniques or not. I even did a chart for the moment I decided to write Leaving Australia, which is at the very beginning of this bit of a story. I was driving to the gym in one of Adelaide’s sprawling suburbs, Woodcroft, when I came up with the name. I had been planning for years to write about my life, with the hope of making sense of it. I wished to pass on to my two sons, stuff, so that if they grew up wondering why they were the way they were they could read why I am the way I am based on my experiences. And hopefully Sacha and Leigh would be able to explain something or the other in their mind and in that way find meaning in their lives. I have written so much more than what appears now or which indeed will be the end result. So much I wrote and put in a password-protected file on a password protected CD in a drawer somewhere in the world. There are thoughts, events, actions that transverse our life-horizons that should never be shared but must be written, so that at least we, ourselves, those parts of us that watch ourselves act out our life, are able to view and perhaps even to comment on; when we awake from a troubled dream and no one else is witness to our thoughts. I live my life as an observer of my life and I have written about stuff that I am afraid to be a witness of, as ‘events in written form’, thus, they must stay locked away. I had entertained the idea of deleting certain writings; ‘did I really have that thought?’ ‘Did I really do that?’ but I needed a concrete forum to formulate my own thesis of why I am a fallen angel in post- humanity in a potentially collapsing universe that is rapidly losing its spark to continue.

I loved our little home. It was like playing family. Even though we each; Tracy, Lynn and I had our own room we functioned as a family. Lynn was a nurse and she worked a late shift so I cooked meals for Tracy and made sure she was asleep by whatever time her mother wanted her to be. Tracy was eight and her friend from the main house on the property was about the same age. Tracy and her friend went to a Catholic school and I would often pick them up after school. I had a few girl friends at the time. My favourite lovers at the time were Beverly and a woman I met in Washington D.C., Peggy, who I met whilst selling picture-poems in a park across from the Smithsonian Institute. And sometimes my sex- playmate from work, Kathy, would spend the night.
Lynn, who was never to be anything more than one who I shared the rent with, had broken up with Daniel and she was dating different males, usually doctor types from the hospital. One night neither of us had any one to sleep with so we slept together. Daniel found out and he was quite angry with me. He never seemed to be close to me after that, even decades later I think he still holds it against me.

Oh look....I am still listed in Lutherville Timonium as of July 2025 - I lived there last 47 years ago. Way to go internet.

Why is my life like this?

A particular slice of the final chapter, 11 MAY 1998 12:28:43 PM. Available end of 2001, somewhere.

Back in '78 - 1978 that is. I lived with Lynn and her eight-year-old daughter. Lynn and I were not really lovers. Oh, maybe on the odd occasion when snow had newly fallen fresh and we did not 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 D.C. Leos, pretending we were in a mansion, or just a small weekend retreat in some foreign Alps. I was somewhat happy. Maybe Lynn was too. Her daughter was, she was not 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 was not happy being a single parent but I would be. I had a feeling. It would be great. My Children and me, 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 did not 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 to read them if there was snow to read them against, down here in Australia.
Lynn committed suicide in 1984. Me in Australia her Maryland. I 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.

I worked nights at Shepherd Pratt Hospital, created picture-poems, displayed my pictures at art shows and painted large canvases. I managed to have my third near death car accident whilst there. My first had been when I rolled Eileen’s Volkswagen across a freeway outside of New Orleans on the way to California in 1968 and the second was a year later when I rolled a car on a curve in Utah. It was obvious that I was acquiring a taste for rolling vehicles and as I had not done it for a while the time was right to go for it again.

I would have another near-death accident in 2012 in Alabama and that is story is here (page 550).

I had bought a Volkswagen Van at the beginning of the summer so that I could carry my artwork to various places that I set up outdoors in. This near death car accident started off so innocently I could not know what was around the corner but then of course we would never have near death car accidents if we did know. Just like no one knows when they will have a near-death accident unless they had planned it, then I suppose it would not be an accident. Near-death and near-life is such a cosmic flirt. Tracy and her neighbour friend and I were making chocolate chip cookies. We were doing fine until I realized that I did not have any chocolate chips.
I was not sure about leaving two eight year olds alone but there was a shopping centre only ten minutes away, what could possibly go wrong in ten- minutes. Then again the whole universe may have come into being in a billionth of a second. What scientist never tells us of course is how long was this one-billionth of a second for the Big Bang? Is that in earth-time or cosmic time? Our home was on a large property off of a narrow winding thickly treed two- lane country road. Coming back to our home, with my bag of chocolate chips sitting on the seat next to me, I missed a curve or the curve missed me, and I flipped on to my side, sliding into one of the large trees that hugged the road. The tree, wanting to inspect the van I was in, pushed one-half of the front of the van back crushing the seat next to me on which sat my chocolate chips. Another foot more to my side and I would have been crushed. The van was on its side on the driver’s side and the other door was part of the newly sculptured creation designed for me. The scariest moment of my life was crawling through the van to climb out of the door at the back. Because I was on a sharp curve, I could only envision another vehicle coming around the corner and slamming into me as I was moving as fast as I could through the mangled van to get out.

Whether I was fortunate that no one was on the road at that moment is a philosophical question of life and death and when and how we die or suffer pain. Someone hitting me may have not killed me but instead I would have spent the rest of my life in a wheelchair. If that had happened I would not be sitting here, Wednesday, December 22, 2004, in my studio apartment, for a week, in Melbourne, a block away from my son, Sacha, writing this. I am actually acting out a moment I always wanted but until now, I have never experienced. From the time I was quite young, living in Clifton Park, I thought what I would like to do most in life, would be to be a writer. I would travel the world and write novels in hotels. I do not know where I got the original thought from but when I was seven or eight years old, I began to think that is how I would want to live my life. I have managed to live in many places and I have written snippets of poems and stories in various dwellings but it has taken until this day to be doing it my way. I am sitting at my window typing away at my laptop running a bath to soak in with my cell phone nearby and Sacha so close after all we have been through these past couple of decades, especially the tragic moments of August 2003. Oh yes, almost forgot.
Here in a fleeting spark of a temporary manifestation of my life’s goal, my wife, the second one, is in Adelaide with her family and I will fly over the day after Christmas. We are spending a few days on a houseboat with her sons floating down the Murray River and then on New Year’s Day we fly back to New York.
Sections of life – separated – mean little until how that section became manifest is revealed.
No one came around the corner that day. I was but a dozen feet from my driveway. Not seeing a car coming in either direction I ran home and telephoned Daniel to come help me and went back and waited at the Volkswagen Van until Daniel arrive ten minutes later. My van went to the dump and I bought some junky old Ford. I missed the van because it had taken me many places that summer I would not have been able to experience without.

Most Sundays for the months of July and August, I went to Washington D.C. and set up in the park across from the Smithsonian Institute. I had made large frames to hang my picture-poems on. I made the frames from seven-foot long, two by two wood boards nailed and hinged together. I put a wire mesh on my frame and using clothespins, I hung my pictures. I had hundreds of picture-poems all together with several boxes full sitting on a table nearby. It was a lot different from setting up in New Orleans. I was no longer in my early twenties. Now at the mature age of 31, reorganization of my self- perceived incredible talent was but a formality that the cosmos was waiting to bestow upon me. I knew that by the end of the summer of 1978 I would be rich and famous.
I met Peggy whilst sitting, waiting to be discovered. Sales were never as good as I would want them to have been. I would be lucky to sell enough to pay for my petrol there. Once again, I was working at a ‘straight’ job to support my art. I had worked at restaurants in New Orleans to support my art and now I was working at a psychiatric hospital to support my art again. I realized that it was the price all artists pay; to suffer the humility of not being famous. Having society caress, acclaim, support, and fuck me.

I saw Peggy at a distance walking rapidly along the footpath through the centre of the park. I was the only one who set up on Sundays in the park so there was no competition for attention. I had never enquired whether I could do what I did. One early Sunday morning in July I had all my picture- poems and frames in my van, of course this is before
I demolished the bloody thing, the thought entered my head to take the hour drive to D.C. to see if I could find a place like New Orleans’ Jackson Square to sell my crap. Selling picture-poems in New Orleans was one of my favourite things if not my favourite, of all time things that I have done. There surely was a way to replicate the experience in the North. I appeared at several outdoor art festivals but they were not the same. Driving through D.C. I saw the park that leads to the Capital. There were many people out so I thought I would set up and if anyone told me to leave then that was it. Until then I would be there in the Nation’s Capital, across from art museums and all the other shit that people from around the world go to D.C. to see. Peggy may or may not have bought something I do not remember. She stopped though and read my poems and that was something good in my world. Peggy asked if I wanted to go to a movie in the evening and soon after the movie began, we were mauling one another. I spent the night with her and we were in love for the summer. I neglected to tell her for quite some time that I was involved with Beverly back in Baltimore and that I shared a house with a woman whom I sometimes was a lover of and I had Kathy from work as a casual sexual-playmate on call. It was more than a month before she came to my home.
Peggy lived with her teenage daughter in Virginia, a couple of hours away. When I had a couple of days off from work, I would go and stay with her. When she finally did come to visit, she was upset that I was living with Lynn and her daughter. She did not believe me that we were merely friends and we never had sex, I rather neglected that we had a ‘bit of a moment’ once or actually on a few occasions, because in the scheme of things, it was not important – so I thought.

Our relationship lasted for a year until in June 1979 she said it was either Lynn or her and I chose Lynn. The reason I chose Lynn was that it was a good living arrangement. The other reason was that I had come to realize that I was in love with Beverly but I had not mentioned her during the year that Peggy and I were together. I am not sure why, perhaps I was doing one of those terrible human
things of cheating or lying or pretending or keeping my options open. Actually, it was the latter – I was not sure whom I wanted to be with. Both women wanted a long-term relationship and to have children with me. Because I could not make up my mind which one I wanted to spend life with or at least a more committed life than I was currently living, I left it up to the cosmos. Whichever one became pregnant would be the one. None of us used any protection so I was totally open to the universe making the choice of who I would share parenting with. In hindsight, another one of those shocking and irresponsible things I did in life.

I did not ever intend to get married but I was interested in having children. I wanted to be a single parent. Living with Lynn and Tracy I realized how much fun it was parenting. Lynn did not seem happy and in fact, she seemed very troubled and increasingly more depressed. I could not understand how she could be depressed. She was beautiful, she had a career, she had a great kid. She would commit suicide several years later but at the time, I did not see that anything was amiss, just that she seemed so unhappy most of the time. I thought that perhaps I was infertile, as no one ever got pregnant from me. The women that I had sex with did not use contraceptives or any form of birth control: Lynn, Kathy, Peggy, Beverly, and a few in between that I met at bars or discos and I never did either. This was all before we knew about AIDS. Also, I never had sex with someone that I did not think that I would want to have a child from.
I found you on Facebook fifty-years after we ran naked through a tropical sunset repeatingly loving in the surf declaring forever we should be lovers My memories are shattered by how you look now your red-neck beliefs feral looking children your criminal looking 4th husband your failed dieting attempts your 3rd world refugee living conditions your stupid shared videos of cats and dogsand your total lack of remembering who I am and our once long-ago freedom to quench our desires Written (contrived): 27/June/2016 Perseverance Road, Vista, South Australia

The problem with knowledge, perceptions, and ‘the way it is’, is that we cannot know more than what we know at the point of current knowledge, whether ours or someone else’s. If foolishness is for youth, then I have lived my life as a youth. Every move I make, in hindsight, could have been different, no doubt should have been different, but I would not have landed in this moment with this mindset if anything had been different. One different turn of the steering wheel, one missed train, an extra kiss – and it all would be different. No one is where he or she is for any other reason than that is where he or she is based on everything. We spend so much energy charting the importance of the moment when in fact it just is. It is not God or the cosmos or anything more than this is the moment we are living and the result is because of it not because it was to lead to anything of significance, except as a hindsight, that we wish we had done differently. What would be different if we did not have our body? Would we still make ‘mistakes’? Would we still plan the day – what day? And as men’s brain is in their penis – what then? What would men use to think with if they did not have a body with a penis?

From a book of thoughts – oh shit I will be honest – from my diary “The Kahlil Gibran Diary for 1978 with a selection for each week from THE PROPHET & his other writings” – I wrote on the inside back cover I wrote for 12/30/78.

“the end of another year no goals for the next
I could give a shit Nothing ever comes About that I want
It is just passing time From now on out
I wait for death
There’s never been anything else To wait for
Fuck the future
It no longer exists.”
What I find remarkable about that scribble is that I feel exactly, and would write it now, if I had not then, today Friday, December 15, 2006, 28 years later – oh yes that is another Saturn cycle so the Saturn return of my outlook on life then age 31 is the same at age 59 and four months. Somehow, I missed the bus or the train or something.

Christmas 1978 Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland with Lynn and Tracy

32. 1979

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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.