Leaving Australia Before the After: Carol Ann

I had been in San Francisco in 1968 in between living in the country town of Glen Ellen and going to Los Angles and now once again in early 1969 being back. In my sixty-eight years so far, I have seen no place like the San Francisco of the late 1960s. A couple of years can influence our life-long thinking. We all do it. We all slip into bubbles of the past. I can put on an Internet radio broadcast and listen to Janis Joplin, Country Joe and The Fish or any of the singers and groups I saw in person in San Francisco. I vaguely recall being at a Janis Joplin concert then driving home in an altered state to Glen Ellen (50 miles about an hour and a half over the Golden Gate Bridge then through the countryside) with a carload of people in an altered state. How do some of us get through life is always a mystery and others who ‘do it right’ flounder and die so easily?

San Francisco of 1968 – 1969 to me was so free and I suppose to a twenty-year old me very innocent. I had long hair to the middle of my back. I often had a long cape though I do not know where I got it from; I had a cape made by a girlfriend for an art opening of my brother in New York City in 1973 and again when I lived in China in 2011 – 2014 I had a cape made and I wore it for several winters. It is too warm in Australia in the winter to wear it but I have been seen with it on.

But 1968 – 1969 was wonderful to be free in. I had few possessions, and I did not want anything. The older I get the more I want. I have been amongst the poverty in India, China, Guatemala, Ecuador, Viet Nam, Cambodia and so many other third-world spots but only in 1968 – 1969 San Francisco was I content with having nothing like a billion others in the world. Now at 68 years old I just want more and even though our house is paid off and we have lump sums here and there I worry about money all the time. How does one become free in old age as they were when they were twenty?

I would spend days on the streets or in Golden Gate Park just being alive. Janis Joplin or some later to be famous person or group would entertain us all. There was no thought of the future only the wonders of the moment. My goal in life is to return to the mindset of freedom as I did almost fifty years ago.

Within a few weeks of arriving in San Francisco, Carol Ann, her baby and I were living in the woods of Big Sur. I do not remember why, but we were no longer living in a house. We were homeless.

Before long we were headed toward Canada and some commune that we had heard about. A spot where life was going to be beautiful – how could we resist? We started hitchhiking north and after a couple of days, we had only gotten as far as Salem, Oregon. We had no money left and we had found the going thus far quite unpleasant. I had long hair and Carol Ann looked every part the flower-child- hippie, which in 1969 was not welcomed in some parts of the States. In the town of Mt. Shasta there were signs in restaurants saying that longhaired people were not allowed on the premises. I had experienced discrimination before, back in 1965 to 1968 traveling around the Southern United States. I had been threatened on numerous occasions and only because I had long hair. I was shot at once in Georgia; threatened in a series of other Southern States and once had a judge give me six-months in a federal prison (my stowing away on a ship bound for England from New Orleans as described earlier in my tales) with the comment “well at least you will get a haircut out of this”.

45 years later I watch Desiree’s life on Facebook. She did not turn out like her mother, and I once told her I would send what I had written about her mother to her, but I decided not to many years ago as she probably has quite a different mental history of her mother. We were ‘friends’ for a long time, but in 2019 or 2020 she either ‘defriended’ me or closed her account. I never saw or heard from her again. (it is now July 2025 - never heard from Desiree again)

One can always be discriminated against. Discrimination happens when we are in the wrong place at the wrong time or really, we are in the right place at the wrong time or in the wrong place at the right time. (I so easily get confused when there is more than one way of looking at things.) As a young person in Clifton Park being a white protestant is about the only thing one could be. Anything else and you would be discriminated against back in the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, now it is different as Clifton Park is home for many people of many backgrounds though predominately it is still white protestant. I have been discriminated against because I was a single parent in South Australia, because I had long hair in Mississippi, Louisiana, California, and many other places because of beliefs, life styles, friends, and lovers. One does not need to be black, gay, Jewish, short, fat, or any of a thousand variations to be discriminated against – just being is enough. What is holding back humanity from evolving and fixing all the problems of the world is discrimination. I am a vegetarian, a sometime astrologer, with an incurable disease, an unfinished PhD thesis, a 98- year-old father, and two children that suddenly are no longer teenagers. I have a wife, though I am against marriage. I am a dual citizen, soon to be 56, barely employed and I have a mishmash belief system that is a combination of everything that makes sense to me. Out of all that no matter where I am I am out of place all the time and I have become so use to being discriminated against that I even discriminate against myself if no one is around, just to stay humbly in practice.

We got as far as Salem, Oregon after sleeping in a car the night before, somewhere between northern California and Salem. When we
got to Salem, we had only a few dollars left which was enough for one night at a very run-down hotel. In the lobby of the hotel there was a sign for ‘apple pickers wanted’. Early the next morning we were off picking apples with a truck full of Mexicans. We were the only English-speaking workers in the orchards aside of some bossy white man.

Desiree would be in a clearing between trees and Carol Ann would often be crying as she picked apples asking how our life got to this point. My argument was that it would change – we had just started our twenties and of course, eventually we would make enough money to be on our way to a wonderful commune in Canada. We just had to get past this moment. There have been so many times in my life that I have said, “if only I could get past this moment everything will be fine”. I would have said this at least once per month for the past fifty-plus years, though I tend to accept the moment more now knowing it will be whatever it will be and that when I am past it there will be just another moment and set of things to deal with. This was the spring of 1969 when the number one song on radio was ‘Eve of destruction’ by Barry McGuire a very negative song that informed us that life would soon end for us all.

The eastern world, it is exploding Violence  flarin', bullets loadin'
 You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'
 You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'
 And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin'

But you tell me
   Over and over and over again, my friend Ah, you don't believe
   We're on the eve of destruction.

Don't you understand what I'm tryin' to say Can't you feel the fears I'm  feelin' today?
   If the button is pushed, there's no runnin' away There'll be no one to save,  with the world in a grave [Take a look around ya boy, it's bound to scare ya  boy]
   And you tell me
   Over and over and over again, my friend Ah, you don't believe
   We're on the eve of destruction.

Yeah, my blood's so mad feels like coagulatin' I'm sitting here just  contemplatin'
   I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation. Handful of senators don't  pass legislation And marches alone can't bring integration When human respect  is disintegratin'
   This whole crazy world is just too frustratin'

And you tell me
   Over and over and over again, my friend Ah, you don't believe
   We're on the eve of destruction.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China Then take a look around to  Selma, Alabama You may leave here for 4 days in space
   But when you return, it's the same old place
   The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace You can bury your dead,  but don't leave a trace Hate your next-door neighbor, but don't forget to say  grace
   And, tell me over and over and over and over again, my friend
   You don't believe We're on the eve Of destruction
   Mm, no no, you don't believe We're on the eve
   of destruction.
   P. F. Sloan in 1965

Fifty-years later what has changed? Except of course we are still here.
Only a couple of years earlier the ‘summer of love’ blossomed in a bright and happy consciousness and within us who were there – so we believed. We all believed that the world had changed because of the new consciousness that was spreading out over the world from San Francisco.

Decades later, I would discover that few had ever heard of the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco where the hippy movement began. In Australia, no one seems to have ever heard of it, but to many people it was the beginning of the hippie movement. The hippies settled in an area of San Francisco next to Golden Gate Park, around the intersection of Height Street and Ashbury Street and this became known as the “Height–Ashbury” area. The low rent drew many hippies to the area from San Francisco and eventually from other parts of the States and then from various Western-enriched places of the world. Haight-Ashbury was nicknamed the “Hashbury” as so many drugs, such as hashish, flowed into the district.

Before the 60’s, the Height–Ashbury was a normal neighborhood in San Francisco. During the hippie movement, the area was transformed with many houses painted with various colours with many basing their colour schemes around a flower motif.

It is part of our genetic code to believe that our perceptions are everyone else’s. That what we believe should be what others believe. Having grown up in a family of missionaries in Clifton Park, New York I was thoroughly instilled with the fact that it was our duty as white Christians to make everyone in the world a white Christian too. At least they should aspire to attach themselves to a white Christian in such a way that they would feel, perhaps through osmosis, that they too were a white Christian.
Humans also believe that others should know the same people as us. I am still surprised when someone has not heard of Bob Dylan. When I was in Korea last week (July, 2003) I mentioned to someone that I was going to meet with an ex-student of mine whose surname is Kim. I was informed that fifty percent of the population has that same surname – that is only relevant here in the fact that I had a fifty percent chance of someone responding to my question of ‘do you know Kim?’ I was very tempted to yell out ‘hey Kim’ whilst on the subway to see if half of the people would turn around but being a quiet American at the time when 97.5 percent of the Korean population dislikes Americans because of its aggressive roles into Korea’s and most other countries lives I chose not to. The point being that if I had any readers who have not heard of Haight-Ashbury I would understand except that my readers will be my sons who I am writing this story about how we got to Australia and how I finally got out and what happened in those formative years of childhood in hopes they understand why they think and act the way they do and life seems like a run on sentence. And I have told both of you about Haight- Ashbury but in the classic chaotic formative years of your growing up you may have missed some part of my explanation, or in fact like all youth you may not have been listening to your dad when he was talking.

Eventually we earned enough money to go somewhere else, but we did not go to Canada.

We had enough money to get to the nearest town that was not as bad as Salem, Oregon, which was not at all friendly to us. It could have been the association by name that the city of Salem was like it was. It was not the same Salem as where the good Christians burnt women at the stake because of the Protestants and the Catholic Church’s fear of women. The fine white Christians folk of Salem did not like hippies, and we were told that our type of people would do better in the nearby city of Eugene. We had made enough money picking apples after a couple of weeks to escape Salem. We had also gotten as much money as we could from the local welfare office. We took a bus to Eugene. We travelled with very few possessions. (In contrast Narda and I arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, July 2014 with a shipping container of crap from where we were living in China and most of that crap we had shipped to China from New York City three years earlier.

And some of that crap we had sent from Australia to New York twelve years earlier. In other words, having everything that I owned on my back and going from city to city is unimaginable anymore.) Carol Ann and I had the clothes we had on and a blanket for the baby and a few changes of clothes for her. I now take more stuff when I go for an overnight stay to a local city (at this time in my life the nearest cities, both some three-hours away, are Montreal and New York City) than the three of us owned for our total worldly possessions.
I liked Eugene from the moment I got there. It was 1969 and people everywhere in Eugene seemed genuinely friendly. It seems strange, or now in my world, normal, that Randy would be living in Eugene and that I would visit him there in 2004. I will visit again at the end of 2016 or start of 2017.

He makes a living selling items on E-Bay. There was no problem with having long hair or dressing in what then was referred to as “hippy attire”. I went to the University of Oregon my first day there and walked around the campus thinking someday I would like to go to a university.

The University of Oregon has few memories for me except that one could buy their marijuana there with ease. Bags of pot sold for ten dollars, and no one seemed to mind. I remember the cafeteria being the place where longhaired people like me would be set up with their pot business. LSD and other drugs were openly sold too.

Carol Ann was unhappy our first days in Eugene. We had found a little house to rent, and it had minimum furniture. She cried every day more than when she did when we were picking apples. How could I tell her, that if we could just get through the next few moments, maybe even decades, that I would be a college professor and we would have some money, maybe even some respect? We spent a month in that place then found a house that we both agreed would suit us. It was on Friendly Street. It was a two-family dwelling, and we had the back half. There were two bedrooms upstairs and on the first level were a living room and a kitchen.

Whether it was because we lived there 34-years ago, or my memory is failing, or it is a repressed memory I don’t know but I do know that I remember little of the house, but I remember enough of it to remember it as a good time in my life. I only recall two events from when we lived there.

Above is me at our home on Friendly Street, Eugene, Oregon with my father’s car behind me.
Memory is really an interesting phenomenon. We or at least I do – how can anyone really know how another person remembers something? Remember things in an unpredictable manner or it is what I do – it is how my brain has always worked. When brain scans become more efficient coupled when nanotechnology-robotics bringing us those molecular robots that can travel through the brain then I will be able to see how my thinking is different than someone else’s based on the virtual architectural modelling that the future scans and robots will produce. In high school I could remember anything and everything until about eighth grade then memory became a hit and miss thing. I could associate my changing memory patterns with my visits to Greenwich Village in New York City and a few experiments with mind altering substances but that is just one possible answer.
Another more realistic solution to changing memory is that the planet Saturn was transiting through my fourth house in opposition to my planets in Leo. Sun, Venus, Pluto and Saturn and Squaring my Jupiter. The fourth house is the house of the home. I began studying astrology about the same time as I was in 9th – 11th grade. It is difficult to separate those years of school as I was between all three grades by the time I got to eleventh year. I don’t think I am stupid or slow of mind. There is, as of today a process that I have spent my entire life trying to understand. There is a separate me – maybe the real me that inhabits this body that guides me
and that me is often in conflict with the external conscious ego me until I just say “stuff it” and let the other me take the necessary steps to get to the next position of my life. But with Saturn tweaking the major planets of my life to try and discipline me there has to be a point where I would rebel. And my life has been a series of rebellions and anyone who lives their life without rebellion is not living their life.

One of three photos I have with me in it between the years 1966 and 1973. How things have changed with us all uploading photos of every aspect of our life all the time. For example, with transit Saturn squares, oppositions, and conjuncts to my natal Saturn.

Like everything in life, this is not a straightforward exercise. I have my Natal Saturn exactly conjunct Pluto, both at 13 Degrees Leo 08 minutes; and both are conjunct my Venus and Sun – meaning of course that Saturn/Pluto = Sun/Venus and Jupiter/Venus, a real mess in anyone’s thinking and all this is square Jupiter in my first house so what happens in my life covers many areas.
Waxing square, 13 Scorpio; November 1954 (not exactly sure but was probably getting ‘saved’ by Billy Graham); September 1984 (separation)
Opposition, 13 Aquarius; February 1963 (started running away to NYC and getting high); September – November 1992, my father at age 87 came to Australia for a visit and my two sons and him and I drove around Australia for a few weeks in a camper van)

Waning square, 13 Taurus; May 1970 – ‘brought into illumination’ whilst in the Holy Order of Mans in Honolulu; June 1999, Leigh chasing his baseball career, having played in Under-18 year-old World Series in Edmonton, Canada; Sacha living in Gold Coast, Queensland; me breaking up with Chris
– over and over.

Conjunction 13 Leo; September 1976 – in Holy Order of Mans, living in Towson, Maryland – trying to attend Towson State University, several illicit girlfriends and huge upheavals in my life. July 2006 – as I am writing this Sunday, February 12, 2006, I only know I am supposed to be in Adelaide, South Australia at that time. Transit Saturn is in trine to my Venus, Saturn/Pluto, and Sun while I am writing this as a rewrite for an e-book: June 2016. And with Secondary Progressed Mercury sitting on my natal Jupiter this year why would I not write and try to publish?

This is why I am writing this; so that I can unravel my life. In hopes to be able to tell my children “this is why we lived the life we lived – we had these experiences based on my guidance of our life because my experiences in life have taught me that this is the way to go. My decision-making processes were a result of what I have to say in this short explanation of my life and the events and situations that made me act the way I did and of course still do. If I take all the religions – spiritual mumbo jumbos – philosophies and books I have read; cult groups I have joined, and people I have listened to – and even the ones I did not listen to but somehow their rambles penetrated my mind in some way or another and put them into a blender along with my own observations and takes on “the-way-it- is” and put it on high speed – actually that is what I did – then that is who I am now at this age which is about four decades later than when I began “the
change”, Saturn opposite to what it is now, to become me. I still have a bloody long way to go before I am actually in fact me. The result will be my physical death, which is really a downer but then it could be an upper. Either way, it will be different than what I have experienced thus far.

Unfortunately, like everyone else, all 32-billion or so humans who have died before me, I will not be able to communicate what it is like to be dead when I die. When we finally get to that place of whom we came into this life to be then we must leave; that so gives me the shits, let me tell you. The lessons have been had: though not necessarily learnt and we may get stuck with coming back again and again or going to some lesser planet over and over until we get to that point of being who we are supposed to be based on a plan that many have tried to explain and many have started religions over and fought many wars over to make others understand ‘the plan’ but at the end of the day no one really knows nothing about nothing. What I suppose is important is to have a plan for today and maybe extend it into tomorrow.

Well actually of the two events one is so minor it is almost not worth telling but it has more to do than the actual event which is what everything seems to do. The first event was the visit of my parents. My parents in 1969 were sixty-four years old. Of course, I mean my adopted parents. I would not discover anything about my birth family until the late 1980s and would not meet my blood sister until 1992 – when I was 45 years old. Two years later my adopted brother who I grew up with and hated then idolized died of AIDS.
My blood brother I would not meet until 2002 and my grandmother I met in 1992 but I will have to return to her later as she is a major reason my life has been the way it has been. In fact, my father is now 98 (my adopted father in 2003) and my grandmother is 94 (in 2003). I tell anyone who will listen (all three of them) that my father is older than my grandmother and ask them how that could be – few can figure it out, which just goes to show how stupid humans are after all. I have always found that what is significant to us is so insignificant to someone else.

Much of what I have to say concerns my parents – especially my father. Parents are such a major influence on us and at the same time such a pain in the ass. Parents have this incredible overall belief system – that what they believe is the same thing that their children should believe. The reason to have off springs – or to adopt some un-expecting orphan, as was my case – is to have someone carry on our belief system, our worldview – whatever it is. My parents adopted me to convert me and raise me as a good Christian that would carry on their wondrous works and beliefs in this life and finally meet up with them in Heaven – where the streets are lined with gold (this is the westernized capitalistic Billy Graham version of Heaven).

Oh Billy – we tried to think you were an OK fellow but now we discover you said nasty things about Jewish people and had meetings with Tricky Dick – President Nixon to the retarded, about ‘the Jewish Problem’. Billy said he didn’t say negative things about Jewish folks with Nixon but then decades later there were those transcripts of Billy saying exactly that. It was in 1994 when H. R. Haldeman published his White House diaries. He revealed a conversation between Billy and Tricky Dick (remember the poster from the election for 1972 “don’t change dicks in the middle of a screw.

Vote for Nixon in ’72”?) in 1972 about how to deal with the problem of the “satanic Jews” whom Graham felt maintained a “total Jewish domination of the media.” Billy denied it all but now he can be heard ranting about this in the Nixon tapes for early 1972. So, at the end of the day one hypocrite is the same as any other. David Firestone published an article on this in the March 17, 2002, New York Times. “Billy Graham Responds to Lingering Anger Over 1972 Remarks on Jews.” You can find it online – I did.

Growing up in Upstate New York – in the village of Clifton Park, the county of Saratoga in the 1950s and early 1960s was a reality of sort but not the one I would want to pass onto my children.
Clifton Park in those days was a series of farms. We had a big old farmhouse and many areas of corn and vegetables. There was a main road in front of our
house that in my world was an escape route to Albany, the capital of New York State.

If I had a keyword for my life it would be “escape”. I am constantly a prisoner – but then we all are whether it is of where we live or who we are with or of our thinking. Until we break free of the big prison – our mind – we are prisoners. My main prisons in life have been Clifton Park, my parents, Christianity, my first wife, the Holy Order of Mans and of course Australia where I was a prisoner for 20 years plus. I have been in what the world terms ‘prison’ too. Six months in Florida for stowing away on a freighter headed for England and a few times in jail for minor things like vagrancy.
Clifton Park geographically is a rather larger area. But in my corner of Clifton Park – which I grew up believing was all there was of Clifton Park consisted of Route Nine which had a few farms along it – a petrol station (gas station in US slang) across the road from us (see the picture in the picture-poem at the beginning of this writing “snowmen dance only for those who believe”. That is a photo from our front yard with Route Nine in front and the petrol station across the road – from about 1956 – when I was nine years old), a petrol station next door to us and further down the road – headed to Saratoga – there was the corner of Route Nine and 146 (now the old 146). On that corner, there were two taverns/hotels and a deli or whatever New Yorkers called small stores in those days.

The above picture is a painting and paper cut-out of our house in Clifton Park by my brother 1965. It is on our wall with other paintings of my brother’s here in Adelaide, South Australia in 2015.

Not far from there was the Methodist church which I grew up with perfect attendance for some thirteen or more years and which still stands today – some 175 years after it was built. My father has gone to that church for the past 98 years. I went there with my father as recent as 2005 and nothing much has changed since the time I dreaded going there fifty years earlier. The sermons are even the same. The service I went with my father to in 2005, the preacher told us that if we forgot to forgive someone something or the other one time in our whole life that when we died we would burn in Hell for eternity. Blimey.

The above picture is a painting and paper cut-out of our house in Clifton Pak by my brother 1965. It is on our wall with other paintings of my brother’s here in Adelaide, South Australia in 2015.

Not far from there was the Methodist church which I grew up with perfect attendance for some thirteen or more years and which still stands today – some 175 years after it was built. My father has gone to that church for the past 98 years. I went there with my father as recent as 2005 and nothing much has changed since the time I dreaded going there fifty years earlier. The sermons are even the same. The service I went with my father to in 2005, the preacher told us that if we forgot to forgive someone something or the other one time in our whole life that when we died we would burn in Hell for eternity. Blimey. (I beleive now it has been sold to a Vietnam church group then that I think thatfell through - I can not find any mention of it on the internet so if you have been in the area let us know what happened to this church - thaniks mate)

What is different about Clifton Park now from when I lived there in the 1969s is that there are no farms left along Route Nine. Route Nine is no longer two-lanes but is four lanes. Where our corn patch once was there is the new Route 146 going from Mechanicville to Schenectady. In back of our farm when we “once were farmers” farming vegetables and farming Christians – there is now the Northway running from Albany to the Canadian border and it is three lanes going in each direction with a wide piece of land in between. Where our house once stood, are apartment buildings and behind that – where I grew up escaping my parents into forests of pine trees there are shopping centres. Clifton Park is now Exit-Number-Nine on the Northway and is known for its several large shopping centres and huge box stores each about the size of a city block and even now in late 2003 more shopping centres and department stores are being built. Clifton Park is an example of the ugly side of capitalism that in some way is the ugly side of Christianity. Of course of communism too as I saw for the past three years living there with consumerism and capitalism the reality and communism some forgotten dream.

My father would drop me off at a large church in Schenectady, a city that was quite active in the early 1960s but now in 2003 is a bit run down. Schenectady, as a social sleaze spot had its start in 1661 when Adrent Vancurler from Nijkirk in the Netherlands purchased land from the Mohawk Indians and built a settlement but the place was burnt to the ground three decades later when the colonist and the Indians began to disagree about
white expansionism or most likely over penis sizes between the Dutch and the Indians.

I did not have a chance to explore Schenectady last year – I had wanted to. To see what the place had become forty years after I had my good times there. I drove through it once in 2003 and it looked like a town that once had a life – once long ago. Of course, any town would probably look different from how it appeared at age 15 than what it would look like at age 55 especially if there had not been any visitations in between.
General Electric was one of the main employers. Thousands of people worked there – including my father. There was also a locomotive building industry which died sometime in the 1980s. Nevertheless, in the 1960s Schenectady was a good town. The main thorough way was State Street with many large department stores, restaurants, amusement centres, toyshops, record shops, and the one place I was headed for.

I would wave goodbye to my father and head toward the church to attend the youth meetings and the early evening service. I would be dropped off at 4 PM and I would be collected after nine PM. As soon as my father disappeared around the corner I would turn back to the street and head down State Street to the movie theatre. I never worried about my father coming back or even turning around to see if I was indeed continuing the trek into church. It would never have occurred to him that I would do anything but go to services. He had raised me to be a good Christian, to do all the right things that Christians do such as destroy other cultures in the name of Jesus.

This past year – from September 2002 until we left for our around the world trip in July 2003 was a good year with my father. Every evening we would go and visit him and have a cup of hot chocolate with him and an ice cream sandwich. I often thought that I would tell him what I did when I was dropped off at the church each Sunday afternoon – the church in Schenectady. I wanted to say, ‘Dad, did you know what I did every Sunday when you dropped me off at church?’ But I never did. Writing this now, here in Adelaide in August
2003 – I think I should have told him – he might have thought it was funny.

He went into a nursing home the day after we left New York and I am thinking I will tell him when I return next month. After all he is 98-years- old now and one is never too old to know the truth, then again maybe I will wait until he turns 100 and tell him what I did after he dropped me off at church in Schenectady on Sunday afternoon.

And most of all we were not allowed to go to the picture theatre because surely that is where the devil does His most sinister handiwork. If I made a list of the things my father in 98 years has never done it would include, no alcohol, never entered a picture theatre, and never smoked anything, no extramarital affairs, no playing cards, and a whole pile of other shit-not-done stuff. My brother and I use to question whether he even had sex, because we were both adopted and their particular take on what God wants is that sex is only to make children - anything else is a sin, therefore, it is logical to believe they never had sex. However, my brother believes he once heard my father say they tried to have children but never could. I think they were about forty when they first did the adoption ritual. My brother was first. He was gay and died of AIDS. My father went to New York City to see my brother on his dying bed. My father went by himself, he was 87 at the time. One of the subjects he would bring up the most this last year was about my brother. “How could he do that? Men getting on other men’s backs? We raised him right, how did he go so astray?” Tears would fill his eyes and we would try to comfort him.

One afternoon when my father was weeping about my brother burning in hell for climbing on a guy’s back or vice versa I am not sure the way it was and I am sure my father used only his Christian inspired imagination to visualise ‘the act’; Narda grasped his wrist and told him to let go, while she continued to hold on. She said “this is God holding onto Robert, even if he lets go”. Somehow my father accepted that and left it alone afterwards.

And gambling – my father was so afraid of gambling he would not allow us to have any games that had dice and of course no cards. I can go along
with the gambling thing though. I have seen what it has done to families. The most I gamble is to buy a dollar lottery ticket every few months. I figure if it is my lot in life to have money and the cosmos wants me to move out of the poverty cycle I have been in for so many decades (bloody Saturn conjunct Venus in my chart) then I will win someday.

He never let me read his astrology chart either. Astrology is one of those devil worshiping cult traps that sinners use to try and figure out what God is up to. Look at two examples of my astrological chart below. The one on the left is without the fixed stars included and the right has the fixed stars. When I was fully into trying to discover what a human was on about I also included all the midpoints between planets and signs as well as several ‘imaginary’ points and the nodes of the planets. Along with secondary progressions, transits, solar arc progressions, sidereal astrology and a host of other things it is impossible for an ‘astrologer’ not to find something to explain anything.

One Christmas, when I came up from my home in Baltimore to have Christmas with my parents in Clifton Park in about 1977, my brother and I were at the dining room table and my father was in the kitchen and I had just mentioned to Robert that he was going to have a difficult aspect to his Venus and my father heard me say that from the kitchen. He came running in saying that ‘this house is dedicated to Jesus Christ and there will not be devil talk in here’, this shit was followed by some long prayer. He would have been wiser to have looked at my astrological chart and say, “you must be joking, with that many points in a chart you can create any meaning you want”.

As an adolescent I use to have different methods to get money. I had two newspaper routes and because Clifton Park was so spread out it would take hours each evening to do my routes. In winter, cold, snow, and wind did not slow me down. I hated it but I persevered for several years. In spring, I sold seeds door-to-door. In summer I would mow lawns and in the fall I would rake leaves and I would shovel snow in the winter for the neighbours or my father. My parents were good about giving me pocket money and paying for whatever I needed.

When I got to Proctor’s Theatre (I don’t think they show movies anymore but instead stage Broadway shows, comedy acts & musical productions in 2 theatres) on State Street, Schenectady, I would take a deep breath. This is what I had waited all week for. As soon I paid for my ticket, I would buy a pack of cigarettes – there was no law about age then and a fourteen-year-old buying a pack of cigarettes must have been OK as I did it every Sunday. I do not recall any movie I saw on a Sunday. I had broken two rules already, going to a movie and buying cigarettes. The third rule to break was going beyond the most holy of what the devil would want any good Christian to do. It seems silly now to speak of it – forty years later everything has changed so much. Sex is not much to speak about anymore – which means kissing and touching is even less of an event. Today, sex is as common as shaking hands and with whoever happens to be available in the moment. Humans only care about their own release and enjoyment, and the other person does not matter. It just is not an issue anymore. Sometimes people will get into a bit of a relationship and do a one-on-one situation, just the two of them – no one else. It seems old fashioned and something to do once one is a bit on the old side. I am 55 – well until Sunday then I will be 56 – I am in one of those one-on-one relationships. I do not see any reason to change it; one-on-one relationships may even come back into fashion someday. There can be more depth in being with just one person. It is interesting getting to know someone – not all people but some are interesting enough to be with for more than a weekend. My last relationships were like that too, Chris N – lasted close to seven years then one evening my Chris said she needed to take a break from me – we never were in touch again. I think that is the most romantic way to end a relationship just a kiss goodbye and both realise that it is over and there is no reason to ever pursue each other again. Of course I felt sad, there were years of tears, lots of long-winded sad poems, but the years passed by, and I sort of recovered.

Just because I would have at least one half-hour meltdown a day for the first year after we stopped seeing each other does not diminish the fact that it was the most romantic way to end. The relationship I am in now I will make it to the finish line. It just makes sense to – nothing astrological to it – well we do have the best aspects to stay together but it just is the right thing to do currently; both in our own lives, and within the context of the life of this planet. It takes a lot of lovers and many decades to develop a sense that something like this is right.

But when one is young a different relationship every few days makes one well rounded.

The weekend my son’s mother “fell” pregnant, she was the fourth one that weekend I was able to love fully forever – or at least love for as long as it takes to fall in and out of love, or simply to get a release. Pleasure is its own reward. However, it was the fourth woman that weekend that made this story Leaving Australia possible. One out of four resulted in 21 years that would never have happened if what happened had not happened.

The visit of my parents, going back to 1969, Eugene, Oregon, was a worry from the day they informed me of their intention to stop in and say hello. My parents loved to travel. My childhood was filled with travel – not as much travel as my own children would experience but travel nonetheless, we did. My father was a bit of a history buff or at least of North American history. Every summer we were off to somewhere – camping in state parks and visiting where some president or leader was born. Of course, on Sunday, we stayed put and did not travel except to the nearest church. But they did not make long treks across country until both my brother and I were clear of their presence. We usually stayed along the east coast going as far as Florida some summers or as far as Ohio and a couple of times we wandered around Canada. My parents were in their mid-60s in 1969 – really quite young in the scheme of their lives or at least my father’s. Both my mothers died long ago, in twenty-year periods.

My blood family has told me that my real mother died in 1972 and the second to my throne died in 1992 – luckily, I do not have another mother, or she would leave in 2012 – which according to the Mayan Indians is the end of the world. (My children’s grandfather; from the mother’s side, died last year, 2014 – strangely enough on the same day as my current wife of the past 12 years lost her father. So on the same day, within hours of one another, my first wife’s father died and my second wife’s father died. And this is why I don’t believe in coincidence.) See “2012” at http://www.greatdreams.com/2012.htm for a good ramble on this. Online as of Sunday, February 3, 2008) Oh hell, now I see the pattern; bloody
Mother-Earth will leave to complete the cycle. The longest cycle in Mayan cosmology is the 26,000-year cycle, which is the cycle of our solar system around the Pleiades star cluster. This cycle ends on December 22, 2012. When that old slut, Mother- Earth, will leave me, in the year 2012. Whatever is to happen in the next decade, linear time, as we know it is rumoured to end at that time and all the events happening between now and then will just hasten that moment. Of course, the world did not end December 22, 2012, but we are told there are reasons for that and the actual date is…

I really do not believe that is how it all will play out. I imagine what will happen will be that the American Fundamentalist Christians will push the government of the United States into a nuclear war, believing that they are fulfilling Biblical prophecy. It will not be the Christians who will do us in but the China-Walmart monster. Their atom-sized nanorobots will be released from one of the thousands of Walmart factories in China by a disgruntled sweatshop employee and grey goo will smoother all life on earth, then the Solar System, then the universe.

In 1969, my parents made a trip to California, and I was along the route. When they got to Eugene, I was happy to see them, why would I not be? These strange people, surely aliens, were my parents and everyone is proud of their parents no matter how bizarre they seem to be, compared to one’s seemingly normal life. As I was saying earlier, before I interrupted myself and went off on several tangents, I was living with Carol Ann and her baby at the time in Eugene. All I remember was that they would eat with us but they refused to sleep in our house even though we had an extra bedroom. My parents chose to sleep in their car instead. They often slept in the car as they had a station wagon and the back was set up for camping. Nevertheless, to sleep in the car after I had offered a bed in our house seemed quite strange. I even offered to sleep on the sofa downstairs.

It was such a contrast with my sons. When the three of us lived together, in Hackham then Christies Beach, South Australia, they would bring strays home, and I never said anything. I probably should but I did not exactly know what to say.

Especially after our experience in Montbéliard France in 1992 – I think that changed a lot with my children’s view of sex. (see book 2) They were eleven and eight years old at the time and I guess it was just all too strange, and I never really did explain what happened, of course, I have no idea what I would say except that it happened. Whatever impact it had on them I just never said anything when they brought girls home. I have no idea how old they were when they started doing horizontal tangos with their momentary vertical partners, but I think it would be about thirteen or fourteen. I even stopped saying hello by name to whomever was there after one time not knowing my youngest son had a playmate over, I waltzed into his room and saw he was laying down with someone – probably to take a nap after a hard day at school – and I said ‘hi Susan’ when in fact it was someone else. I did not do that on purpose as from the back she looked like Susan, well, the hair was the same – I didn’t see anything else as the sheet was covering the rest. I also found it difficult to go to the toilet at night and have some fifteen or sixteen-year-old girl in the bathroom brushing her teeth in pyjamas or something akin to pyjamas. This is true – many girls would actually bring their pyjamas with them and some even brought a pillow. I assume they told their parents they were staying overnight with a girlfriend when in fact they were spending the night with one of my sons. Parenting was always such a morally difficult event for me. I never really expected that one day I would be doing such a thing.

[End of writing this story to my two children, before such events that not only would forever change who my actual audience would be but change me, to be in part, the audience to this story. (August 15, 2003) Before the events of August 16 this was to be a ‘how I did my life’ not a ‘how I should have done my life’. However, like in any story, the moment we take our mind off it (the story) we are in danger of forgetting where we were at. Whatever distracted me from continuing what I was saying on 15 August kept me so distracted, that the next day, 16 August, I failed to write anymore on this story to my children, and it was months before I began again.

However, because I had written in different areas of the story at different times in various cities of the world, I have forgotten when I wrote some of these sections. This week will be my final edits before printing and giving one copy to Sacha and putting two copies in storage: one in Adelaide, the other in Jersey City. Almost six years later I am none the wiser for writing or reviewing my life. April 13, 2009. 16 Crescent Avenue Jersey City, NJ. It is a waste of time to review the past, to journal, to do anything but live in the moment and make an outline plan for future hopes, that could come close to actualizing as we hope or not come close; for example, as my life has. At the end of the day, it does not really matter if we become ‘better people’ because at some point in the aging process we become senile, lose our grip on reality (more than usual) and not only do we forget our past but no one else really cares and as time erases all human
presence on this planet the fact that I wrote this hardly is significant though it does give me something to do to fill this current moment.]

My father was not a good singer, off key and not always on the same words as everyone else.

When the ‘Onward Christian soldiers’ song was happening, my dad would sing extra loudly. It was so embarrassing being me sitting next to him being him. Because of my father’s bad singing, I never once sang in church. I now have a wife who is the church organist at the local Dutch Reformed Church on Route 146, Clifton Park (she was born in Holland so it makes sense for her to be their organist), I go on Sundays most of the time, and I will not sing one note. It is a carry-over from listening to my father and thinking that I too am a shit singer and there is no reason for others to know that. The only times I do not go to church is when I stay home and write this story. I have not suddenly changed my ways and become a Christian after decades of Christian abuse whilst trying to grow up. My mate gets paid and she must get up Sunday morning to work and by my going I feel I am supporting her in some small way. I tell her all the things I thought the minister said that were wrong or just plain stupid afterwards making the whole exercise quite ridiculous anyway. It probably all makes up for the fact that I did not go to church for three decades and I never took my children to church.

Tomorrow, Sunday, February 12, 2006, my wife is off to New York City, applying for a job, as head of music, at a school that is attached to a ‘gay- church’ in Greenwich Village.

The idea of writing a book is both disgusting and thrilling. There are so many millions of them.

The destruction of our planet so that another person can ramble on about himself or herself is quite grotesque. Hey, world look at me – I once existed and now I want others to know that too I always thought one of the worst things that could befall a human is to see a book they had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours of their life-writing end up for sale for 50 cents at the local supermarket. Of course, I suppose I would not mind that because that would mean that I got the bloody thing published to begin
with. As I soon will be 56, tomorrow in fact, and having yet to complete anything in life, having a book published would be quite thrilling. How this could happen is a mystery. The publishing market is under pressure because of the Internet and fewer people purchasing books at the same time more authors are turning out more books so my chances of publishing this is as remote as the chance of me finishing it are. Then again, I am writing this to tell my two sons why their life was the way it was when in essence I was sort of at the helm of our life in a foreign land as we wandered and tumbled and crashed from moment to moment. Whether either of you two will ever read this story is another question and I did say this before I knew the impossibilities of writing a book, ever happening. Perhaps I am only writing this to try and understand what happened myself.

Now in 2016 I will do this as an eBook and watch no one ever buy it. Why would they?

Still here in July 2025 no one has ever bought a copy even after having AI write me an introduction that goes like this, damn!

📰 Dr. Terrell Neuage’s Autobiographies Defy Publishing Norms with Free Online Access

In a move that has surprised readers and publishing insiders alike, South Australian–New York poet and digital artist Dr. Terrell Neuage has made his best-selling autobiographies, Leaving Australia, Before the After and its sequel Leaving Australia, After, freely available online—despite their continued commercial success on Amazon.

The books, which chronicle Neuage’s unconventional journey from cult brother and astrologer to tofu maker, single parent, and academic, have garnered widespread acclaim for their raw honesty and global scope. Their popularity has soared, breaking sales records on Amazon, yet Neuage has opted to offer them at no cost for those unable—or unwilling—to pay.

“It’s my gift to the world,” Neuage stated, underscoring his commitment to accessibility and generosity. While the books remain affordably priced on commercial platforms, the free digital editions reflect Neuage’s ethos of open sharing in the digital age.

Readers and fans have applauded the gesture, praising Neuage not only for his compelling storytelling but also for his rare act of literary generosity.

📚 Explore more at   neuage.org   © 2025 Dr. Terrell Neuage, Adelaide, Australia.
(I should have just said you fucking cheapskates but my shitty little thing so I can have enough money to go out for dinner - see, I can say that here because I know noone will see this - ever)
 

Even after writing this, I may not understand what happened and of course writing this will not prevent all this from happening again – what will prevent this from all happening again is the fact that I am too old to go through the past fifty or so years again. What will prevent anyone else from going through such a life? Maybe someone someday in a distant land will reads this and think, ‘what a messy life – I will not do what he did, and my life will come up peaches and cream’. I may read it myself in a future life and somewhere in my super- subconscious realize that to follow this person’s life would be a mistake. I may even get a subliminal chip implanted into my Over-Soul before I am cloned into one of the perfect future bodies that we will all incarnate into that will say over and over “I will not be like Saint Terrell – I will not think, act or do anything that he did’.

My life seems like a series of poorly written movie scripts. Just as I get use to one script – memorize the lines – laugh and have sex with the actors, go bowling with a director and get high with the set designer – I am tossed headfirst kicking and screaming into another movie. I have no idea who is writing these one act plays or why the script, setting,
and actors continue to change but it does. Sometimes, in the late afternoon just before the sunsets I believe in reincarnation. Moreover, the only answer I can come up with for my current life is that I have to re-enact what went on in hundreds of lifetimes with each character I was involved with from that time. In addition, because there are so many roles I have had before and so many people I have fought, loved, played with and had philosophical conversations with before I have but a short time to perform again with these people in this particularly short lifetime that I have been given to play with.

Some interaction roles are not very in depth or long this time. As luck would have it only two women got to do the mother thing again with me, and they both failed once again and in fact both are long dead. I have also managed to have two wives and two sons and that is the rest of my story.

* January 1969 car accident Pluto square Uranus Neptune opposite Moon
* April met Carol Ann t. Saturn entered 7th house t. Neptune opposite Moon
* December to Hawaii Jupiter conj. ascendant Saturn in 7th square M.C. Uranus conjunct Neptune Pluto square Mars

Eugene – Woodstock (almost) -To SF – airport – Hawaii – postcard of Sydney – seeds – Randy saving us

In August 1969 Carol Ann, Desiree and I headed east to spend time at Woodstock, New York. There were a lot of our favourite music groups and singers performing in a three-day festival. After Woodstock, we were going to go to visit my brother in New York City and then my parents in upstate New York and on the way back stop in Mokena, Illinois to visit Carol Ann’s parents.
Because we still did not have a car we had to hitchhike. I had not found any work in Eugene, and we were collecting welfare.

Soon after getting a ride on Interstate 70, we were dropped off at the exit at Glenwood Springs. We had heard that Aspen Colorado on Route 82 was a good town to go to, filled with hippies in the summer and rich skiers in the winter and since we
had been left off at the road that went to Aspen we decided to go there. In town, we went with several other people that were our age to the top of a mountain. It was such a beautiful place that we camped out for nearly two weeks. We would hitchhike into Aspen each day and purchase some food that we would take to our campsite, which was near a small lake. The lake was very cold, even in mid-August but we went in the water every day. It seemed to make more sense to just relax and get high and stay on a mountain for a week than to keep on hitchhiking back east. We had almost become stuck in Salt Lake City and having been stuck there already in the past I did not want anything to do with the people from there. We had only been traveling for three days when we gave up and thought that going to Woodstock would be a mistake. The thought of so many people – media rumoured that there could be as many as one hundred thousand people there – put us off. Having a baby in the midst of so many stoned people seemed like too much of an effort and traveling for another few days across the country and then hitchhiking all the way back was not good compared to spending the days getting high in the Colorado Mountains.

Of course, as it is so easy to live in regret over what we missed and what we should have done in our lives I can tell you that for many decades I had wished I had gone to the little rock-and-roll concert in that farm field in Woodstock, New York. That I was there with a half a million people getting high for three days is something I would like to tell about – but we can only do what we do and report what we have done. Of course, I could make up a story about how much fun being at Woodstock was but then what is the point? I was not there, you know that, and so do I and reality is one of those things I prize as having affinity with reality at times could be prized and if that makes sense please email me what it is that I was thinking when I wrote that.

We got back to our home in Eugene toward the end of the summer of 1969. For some reason we were no longer living on Friendly Street as we were sharing a large house with several people and we lived in the attic portion of the house. Again, I can
visualize this moment of life but how it came about is no longer available to me. Perhaps this is the way the mind really works; we have access only to that which we need and everything else is put in our mind because it is what someone else needs us to think.
Carol Ann had the dreams for weeks. She had many trips on LSD since we had met just five months earlier and there would be weeks, even months, when she was tripping every day and me along with her. It became just a natural thing to do. My favourite was to take a couple of hits of LSD soon after waking up in the morning then go back to sleep and wake up tripping – it made the whole day ‘so unreal’. Then Carol Ann started having dreams – it was soon after we returned to Eugene from our non- Woodstock non-adventure.
In her dream we were beside a pool of water. There were water lilies floating along the top of an ever-changing pool. The flowers, according to Carol Ann, would play with the water – merging, dancing – probably even fucking, she liked sex to almost an unnatural level – a musical, magical, multi- meaningful marvel meant just for her. There were fish of various colours and hybrid interacting with the musical, magical, multi-meaningful marvellous flowers that were just for Carol Ann alone.
However, none of that was the important part. So far it was just acid dreaming, but it was the next part that was strange and that would change our life.

There were Master Teachers hanging about the image. They were in white robes, healing and blessing us (Carol Ann included me in this vision of hers). We were being healed and blessed just as the sun set over this magical illusion. There was something about us two, we too would be healing and blessing – and that we had a mission given us so divine that in mere words could not be explained away.

The dreams were constant – like every night for weeks and they ended the same. There was a blazing sun, the final one, and we were there, alive, healed and blessed and radiating and glowing and shining and all sorts of cosmic grooviness was descending around us. Carol Ann was becoming desperate about her dreams and said we had to go to Hawaii to meet this teacher in a white robe and that we could not escape our fated mission or that if we did, we would be stuffed. In December we packed a few of our belongings and headed south to San Francisco. We had only a few dollars between us, money left from our monthly welfare check, but Carol Ann was not concerned, and she continued with her belief that we would be magically transported to wherever it was we were going. At the same time, we continued to take large doses of LSD and anything else we could get a hold of.

We had headed toward Woodstock in early August and we were back in Eugene by the end of August. I had begun college. Even though I did not do much with high school I had taken and barely passed my high school equivalency exam. I still have the certificate. I will one day put it in the same frame as my PhD. Passing was 65 and I had gotten a 66, proving that I was probably smarter than those who failed by getting less than 65. To continue collecting welfare I had to be getting some educational stuff happening in my life so I enrolled and was accepted at Lane Community College. I took a course in psychology and one in photography. I am not sure what else I took. I do remember the classes, especially the photography course. It would serve me well in the future that I could say I had taken college photography classes. I constantly find that each event in my life is a stepping stone to the next step which of course is true for everyone, but I seldom choose the stepping stones and usually I am pushed into the next thing.

Maybe I do have a soul that is directing me or else I am just quick on my feet to make each moment count toward the next.
This is one of my most constant theme questions. Some people live with their selections of what is next in life. I seldom have a clue. What is the difference between the apparently planned life and the stumbled forward life? Are they both really planned? It seems that whenever I plan something it does not work out and when I don’t plan something, and everything falls into place – well that is what happens – it all falls into place. You would think that we, as humans, would realise that we will be dead quite soon. So why do we follow any rules? Why not just do what we want? Somehow, we manage to get ourselves coned into doing the ‘right thing’.

It was the weekend when the Rolling Stones were doing their free concert at Altamont Speedway outside of San Francisco that Carol Ann and I headed south. We had missed Woodstock, and I did not want to miss this concert. My intention was to leave her at the airport and go on to the concert. The Rolling Stones set up the Altamont Concert as a free concert at the end of their North American tour.
Because they had not played at Woodstock, they were attempting to have a "Woodstock West". The concert was originally slated for San Francisco's Golden Gate Park but moved to Sears Point when it was realized that the attendance would be too large. It moved again to the site of the Altamont Speedway, with the speedway being contacted less than 24 hours before the concert. 100,000 people were expected but, on the day, more than 300,000 showed up.

We got several rides between Eugene and San Francisco, and it took two days. We did not stop though, and I think we slept in the backseat of our rides. One thing I do remember is that we had sex once during a ride at night. The driver, I think was an older male, but I doubt he had any idea. Carol Ann sat on my lap and Desiree was asleep on the seat next to us. I always remembered that because it was a bit like my evening rides to church meetings back in Clifton Park when I would sit in the back seat and carry on with a girl that went to the meetings with us. We never had sex in those days, but we did a lot of things under a blanket that were as close to sex as one could go in those days. Carol Ann and I had sex a lot – I think we were a bit obsessed with one another in that way and what has always amazed me is that she never got pregnant, perhaps it was because of so many drugs and my sperm count was down to zero. But we wanted to have a child together, a brother or sister for Desiree. We agreed that if she got pregnant that we would stop doing drugs and settle down somewhere but until then we were just going to get stoned constantly.

I do not know why I got stoned so much. Or why Carol Ann or anyone else did. Life was not bad, and I am sure if we stopped getting stoned that we could have gotten jobs and made something useful of our lives. I was not addicted to anything and now that I have not gotten high for a long time – many years to be exact and I have not taken LSD for more than thirty years – I have no idea what the attraction was. I feel no desire to get stoned anymore but that seems as strange to me as it was for me to have a desire to get stoned. Some of my friends from twenty and thirty years ago still get stoned, and I watch them, and I have no idea why they want to get high or why I do not want to get high. Maybe it is just growing up or old age or I got bored with being so stoned I could not make my mind work for any period that has gotten me off of the stoned path.

Carol Ann and her daughter were left at the San Francisco airport, and I went to a friend’s house on the other side of Golden Gate Bridge. She was still fixed on her idea of going to Hawaii and meeting a master teacher. I had not told Carol Ann where I was going because I did not want to continue with her. She was getting crazier and even though I was very much in love with her I did not want to see her again. She was having many bouts of tears then joy then tears and she would not stop taking drugs because they were always all around us. I do not ever remember paying for anything. There just seemed to be bags of LSD and a lot of marijuana around in the 1960s. We did not sell anything, and we did not buy anything. There were times when we would have a bag of LSD with a hundred tablets – and we would give them to others as well as take them like candy ourselves. I also wanted to continue with my studies at Lane Community College. This was going to be my big moment of getting back on track to collecting an education. But it was not to be. I tried again in the late 1970s at Towson State University in Towson, Maryland to get an education but I failed at that and it was not until 1991 that I would make the next shot at getting a proper university degree – third time lucky I suppose.

NEXT 21. Hawaii

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