16. Eileen

I kept track of Robin Harper (appearing later – in 1973 of this short story) from when we first got together in New Orleans in 1973 until the end of the 1990s. Just recently I received an email that she had died, and I had no way to think about that. Rita, my first girlfriend, and I were on and off for a couple of decades as we lived in different places. Eileen, however, was the first female I travelled and lived in different cities with.

Christmas 1967 New Orleans

Soon after meeting Eileen we decided to go to California. I do realize that we, as a composite us, is a difficult to define placement of egos and decision creating apparatus when viewed in retrospect. Which part of the ‘we’ is the official initiator of the composite we? I suppose in this case, there were reasons for both of us to go to California. Eileen was from Orange Grove in Southern California and wanted to return to California. I had wanted to go to San Francisco ever since seeing an article about the hippy movement when I was in jail. I had missed the summer of love, but I was not going to miss much more of all the free loving and music and getting high good times that was being portrayed as happening on the West Coast. So, at some point Eileen and I decided to make the trip across the States. I do not have much recollection of Christmas 1967 but I believe we were in New Orleans.

1968

We had planned only to pass through New Orleans but as fate or whatever it is that guides us would have it we stayed for longer than we had planned. We were going to California with another couple. I do not remember anything about them. No doubt we were sharing the cost of travel and there was nothing more to it. We were on a freeway not far from New Orleans when, with me driving, Eileen’s Volkswagen had a blowout. One moment we were cruising along the freeway smoking marijuana and listening to music and the next moment, we were rolling over and over. I have no idea how we survived the roll over. The other couple had some bruises and Eileen and I were fine, apart from being stunned. The car was towed away, and we were able to get a bus to New Orleans. We stayed in New Orleans for a week whilst sorting out the insurance. Eileen and I then flew to LA. It is an interesting fact of life that we get from point to point, even going through incredible dramas and traumas and then in the future we look back and how we did it is totally forgotten. It is not because I have gotten too old to remember things but that there are events from my past that I remember experiencing but I do not recall the details. Perhaps the brain can only hold so much or we filter out the periphery bits only to remember the main event.

Though this is not always true as I remember many bits and pieces, but I have no idea what those bits and pieces belong to or why they stay as images in my mind. There seems to be spare nuts, bolts, plugs, adjectives, prepositional phrases and moans as well as strokes and smiles that I glimpse and when I try to grasp them or put them into context, I discover with dismay that they have no attachable parts. Much of what I have written in this short biography of a life that I worked so hard to escape; first Clifton Park, then a few assorted relationships, and at times my own self, and groups, then finally Australia, is from notebooks, diaries and letters with samplings and threads of actual memories21. However, I did have an accident and I did stay in New Orleans with Eileen.

Now in March 2015 I am finally temporarily settled in one place. Narda and I have belongings that have been in storage from upstate New York to New York City to China to being in storage in several places in Adelaide, Australia for the past 15 years all in one place. I have boxes in the shed and in my study with letters and pictures that go back to the 1960s and even further; I have letters, photos and diaries of my father and mother going back to the 1920s. It is not the digital images that someday will disappear in the cloud or hard drives, which will survive, but the actual physical photos and letters that will be here in the future.

Memory is such a strange thing. My father is ninety-nine years old, and he recalls so much from the past but he does not remember who visited him ten minutes earlier. I am just the opposite I remember what I was doing ten minutes ago but at times, I only sense a faint shadow of an outline of a distant memory to guide me forward in my narrative. Yesterday my father was telling about when his family got their first telephone.

Not much to say; on the 21st “To Troy for Terry, 3 yrs old – baby”, and on the 28th, “Cloudy cold to Troy Got Terrell for good”. So, in fact I was not much more than an addition to the weather report that my father wrote. I have always been sort of nothing more than an addition to the weather report. I have my father’s diaries from the mid-1920s through the late 1990s and they are all pretty much the same, reports on the weather. I suppose to a farmer that is the essence of life. I was really “captured” on a ‘Cloudy cold day’. And I was raised as a cloudy and cold person.

They lived near a telephone line that went through Clifton Park and Halfmoon and when the telephone line was being extended to their area, they were told that they could hook a telephone line from the main line if they would cut some posts for it. My father was very animated and detailed, spending about half an hour talking about how the neighbours would come to use their phone because they were the only ones with one. Finally, I asked him what year he was talking about, he said it was 1914, eighty years ago – he was nine-four years old. If we had the Internet back when I was younger, I would have started a blog and then I could go back and see what I was thinking and doing thirty or forty years earlier. It helps me a lot to piece together my life when I can assemble the pieces. Now there are just too many unassembled pieces. Of course, if I do not care I could hardly expect a reader to care, now, could I?

This is taking me much longer than I had anticipated. I was reading over some of my writing here and to my dismay discovered that I had written the same story in three places.

I thought I would just sit down and start typing and a few weeks later I would have a history of my life and then I would be able to see how things became the way they did and maybe I would be able to understand life or at least my own slice of life a bit more. Of course, this never happens and in fact, we will never fully understand our life until we die which seems too late. Too little too late. The only retrospect we can have of everything that has happened to us is to be able to disentangle ourselves fully from our self and if we are plugged into our body and into this life, we cannot do that. This makes living and understanding our life very difficult. Because no one has truly returned from the dead, we can never know what it is that happens next. Of course, we have a lot of stories of those who have returned. From the Jesus tale to all those who claim to channel the dead, but no one can really prove that someone is in fact a returnee from the dead. I have come across a lot of folks who claim to know all about “the other side” but then of course they want you to join their mindset or religious affiliation and of course there is some money – to them - involved. The fact is there may be nothing after life or there may be heaps but there has been no consistency throughout history of what it is like in the afterlife, whether it is a void or whether it is something else.

I remember the room we stayed in, in New Orleans clearly, but I do not remember anything else
except arriving in LA and having Eileen’s father collects us from the airport. After Eileen got into the car, he opened the trunk of his car to put our baggage in, I was in back with him, and he said to me that if I did not leave immediately, he would kill me. He had a wheel jack in his hand to lend persuasion to his argument. He offered to take me to a bus station and that was that. I remember that part very clearly. Eileen’s father was a builder or owned property that was having housing developments on it or something to do with the local raping of the land. I know that Eileen complained but he left me at the bus station and I took a bus to San Francisco. Eileen arrived two or three days later so we must have been able to communicate somehow.
When I got to San Francisco to my surprise and dismay, I had VD (venereal diseases; gonorrhea) and I knew I could have only gotten it from Eileen. In my naïve way I believed her when she proclaimed she must have gotten it before me – though I suppose that could be true, but we had been together for several months and I had not had it before. For some reason our relationship continued. I was in love with her or whatever my interpretation of love at the time was. My thoughts and emotions, in typical twenty-year-old fashion filled me with wanting to be only with her. I had not been with anyone else for a long time before her that I can remember now, and it was obvious it came from her. I would get VD from her several more times and as stupid as I was at the time, I believed her that she must not have cleared the virus and that is why I kept getting it. We even waited for the week to ten days after our penicillin shots before we would have sex again and I never thought of using condoms.

Now thirty-five years later a sane person would not consider sex without a condom because today’s diseases are so much more difficult to deal with than the ones of the 1960s.

After a week in San Francisco, Eileen bought a truck. She had received a few thousand dollars from her car accident so for a few weeks we were quite well off for California hippie types. We bought a 1954 Ford pickup truck, threw our belongings into the back, went over the Golden Gate Bridge, and headed to Sonoma County. We did not have any place specifically to go to, but we wanted to live in the country. Whilst camping at a state park in Sonoma Country another camper told us we could find a house to rent in Glen Ellen in the Sonoma County Wine Country.

I am not quite sure whether I go along with the concepts of synergy/cycles and the what-not. It is a tad bit interesting – something to think about at three AM when I am unable to sleep – but I do see repeats in my life. Probably something to do with Uranus being conjunct with Mars in Gemini in the third decan (25 – 27 degrees 22). How interesting is it that Herschel's discovery of Uranus was on March 13, 1781, when Uranus was in 24 degrees 27 minutes of Gemini and Gemini at my birth was at 25 degrees Gemini exactly. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his Mars at 27 Gemini so that tells me nothing – maybe the fact that his Uranus was where Uranus was when it was discovered was interesting to him too. Franky’s fifth cousin was Teddy Roosevelt, "Teddy," (of the bear fame) was the son of President Theodore Roosevelt. And Teddy attended the Albany Academy where I am currently working – now one could look at all that and say something means something or just get lost in my blending of it all. The astrologer, JEFF JAWER, says that the “discovery degree is found in the charts of many famous astrologers”. Hey, that is me. Well maybe on some level Franky and I are great astrologers, though of course I know intuitively that is bullshit.
I find this so utterly cosmic. The third decan of Gemini is Aquarius ruled by Uranus – in other words my Uranus was in the decan of its ruler both at its discovery and at my birth;

“Agrippa: A man seeking for arms, and a fool holding in the right hand a bird, and in his left a pipe; and they are the significations of forgetfulness, wrath, boldness, jests, scurrilities, and unprofitable words.” Dykes (Dykes, Benjamin. “THE DECANS IN ASTROLOGY”.
Viewed on-line – no longer there…

But I do repeats. I lived in the California wine country of Sonoma at the end of the 1960s and drove a pick-up truck (Ute) and at the end of the 1980s or actually in the mid-1980s, I lived in the
wine country of South Australia, McLaren Vale, and drove a pick-up truck (Ute). Maybe that is not so synergistic. Incidentally, Uranus’ cycle is 83¾ tropical years – so it is only in the degree of its discovery about every 84 years. Of course, millions were born with this aspect, as this aspect is in effect for several months at a time.

We found a house to rent on a small street the locals called Hippy Hollow. On our street there were five or six houses populated by hippies, primarily single mothers, several of whom had no idea who the father to their children could be. (This would make a good – or stupid, novel or film.
During the sex-drug eras of the 1960s a guy, unknowingly, impregnates several women, from various one-nighters and orgies and at some point, lives on the same street as several of the impregnated women). We rented a small one-bedroom house.

The film, American Graffiti is a 1973 American coming-of-age comedy film is about this area though before the hippie era by a few years. Directed by George Lucas, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz and Lucas, and starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard (billed as Ronny Howard), Paul Le Mat, Harrison Ford, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Bo Hopkins, and Wolfman Jack.

I found this online (of course) “The area that in time became known as Hippie Hollow was essentially a tenth of a mile stretch along Warm Springs Road, beginning at the first sharp bend a half mile out of town and ending at the next sharp bend turning west, where the flashing red light is today. At that time none of the locals called this area Hippie Hollow.”

“There was something very special about Glen Ellen and Hippie Hollow in the late 60’s. It was one of those moments in time of innocence and excitement, with few boundaries and a community based in camaraderie and goodwill— and of course, good times!” Printed in “Tales of Glen Ellen’ Fall issue 2013.

For a few months, life seemed settled. I was in my first live-together relationship and in a house; it was like a ‘normal-couple relationship’. Eileen and I had been through a lot together and finally we had a home together and I thought we would be together for a long time. I could not, or I doubt I put much effort into it, find work. Living in the country does not provide many opportunities for employment or it did not in the 1960s. Now with the internet one could have a good paying job and stay at home. I could work for Homeland Security or the CIA and bust people online for their nasty online lives that they all lead.

The CIA has some similar planets to me as it was formed only six-weeks after my birth; September 26, 1947; 10:10 am; Washington D.C., so I suppose I should have some infinity with it – though it has secretive Scorpio Ascendant and I have the ‘nice-guy’ Libra, ruled by Venus rising. There is still the Saturn-Pluto aspect but now it is Saturn separating four degrees from Pluto whereas the day of my birth it was exact, and Uranus is still close to its discovery point at 26-degrees Gemini and Jupiter is square Saturn just like it is with me and in a few months, June 2006, this exact aspect in these exact signs will sit exactly on my planets. Transit Saturn will conjunct my Saturn in Leo and square my Jupiter in Scorpio where Transit Jupiter will be – going over its exact place at my birth – shit. I will repeat my birth process. Whatever the hell that will mean. It is lucky I do not believe in astrology or this would freak me.

Or consider this: Pakistan became a country on August 14, 1947. I was born, August 10, 1947.
On August 15, 1947, India became independent of Mother England, unlike, Australia POMES (prisoners of Mother England) who never become independent. And of course, I go to both those countries and have a step-son living in Pakistan (2018 – current).

We got some form of welfare, probably unemployment. We would go to the local city, Santa
Rosa, to fill out our forms at the beginning of each month. After a month of seemingly domestic bliss Eileen began going to San Francisco frequently and staying a couple of days at a time. I am not sure what her reason was, but at some point, she came home with some fellow and announced that she was going away with him. I was devastated to watch my first serious relationship come crashing to an end so rapidly. I had had my end of a relationship experiences in the past, including when I ended up at Bellevue Hospital for taking too many sleeping pills a few years earlier. However, I had never been with anyone as I had been with Eileen. We had been together for more than six months and by the age of 21 that seemed like a very long time to be with the same person.

The following day I took a hallucinatory drug, STP (containing a mixture of DOM and atropine, an anticholinergic drug, or an atropine like drug. Dom is 4-methyl-2, 5- dimethoxyamphetamine), which was much stronger than LSD, to try to change my sorrows into something I could understand. STP was a three-day trip experience, developed by the United States military to put into the drinking water of the Viet Cong during the Viet Nam war that America was losing at the time. In medical books, it says the effect lasts from 15 to 24 hours but for me it lasted much longer.

After taking the STP I drove to the writer Jack London’s historical area, ruins of his wolf houses, in hopes to find a different mental state than I was in with my grief of Eileen leaving me. Until my mid-50s I was always extremely jealous and, in every relationship, I would be jealous during the whole relationship along with being suspicious and possessive. This behaviour was no doubt a carryover from my adoption where I was so concerned about the principal female in my life leaving me as my mother had. I loved females but I did not trust them. I spent decades studying females so that I would know how they thought and acted, thinking I would then become immunized to being rejected. Of course, even with all my study, and first-hand experience, I never did learn, and now I no longer attempt to figure out how the female mind works. I mean, really, where would a dude begin?
The writer Jack London lived in Glen Ellen from 1909 until his death in 1917. He devoted much of his time to development of his Beauty Ranch and the building of his mansion, Wolf House. Many of his novels and stories, notably ‘The Iron Heel’ and ‘The Valley of the Moon’ mention Glen Ellen and Sonoma County. I wandered around what is now Jack London State Historic Park, which contains the ruins of Wolf House, several ranch buildings, the grave of Jack and Charmian London, and a museum housed in Charmian London's "House of Happy Walls."
A sidenote, almost interesting, is that we have a place very much like Jack London’s near our house in Adelaide, on Perseverance Road, 2016. The Newman’s developed a nursery on the site between 1857 and 1871, over time assisted by their 17 children. The remains of Newman’s Nursery are behind our house in the Anstey Hill Recreation Park is a 362-hectare (890-acre). We just went up there today and because I am on chemotherapy it took forty-five minutes going up and twenty-five minutes coming down with lots of stops going up. Forty-seven years later and I am going to a similar place as I did in Glen Ellen to find changes from my everyday world though without the mind- altering drug just body-altering drugs as my body fights its battles with interferon and anti-hepatitis C drugs.

I became bored wandering around the ruins of Jack London and drove home. The STP had not made any effect on me so I took a couple tabs of LSD. In medical reports there is a warning that because of the slow onset of action of STP users re- dose, thinking it was not taking affect.

Within a few minutes, I began to trip heavily as the STP took affect then later the LSD kicked in. I put on a record album of Odetta, a blues singer. I had a record player that would take a dozen albums, but I had only put the Odetta album on and left the arm that was to hold other albums off, meaning that when the record ended the album would play repeatedly. The needle would drop into the middle of the album and play that part of the album over and over. The “Battle hymn of the republic” was the song that playing again and again.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of  the Lord
   He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes  of wrath are stored,
   He has loosed the fateful lightening of His terrible swift sword
   His truth is marching on. Glory Glory Hallelujah Glory Glory Hallelujah  Glory Glory Hallelujah
   His truth is marching on.
   Battle Hymn of the Republic
   Julia Ward Howe

Another sidenote (July 24 2025...I have re-started playing the piano, after about sixty-years since having lessons back in Clifton Park. I still have my piano books and my brother's books. Back in the day I played the piano in Sunday School and Robert played the organ for church. One of the first songs I have started to re-learn and play every day for the past two-weeks is the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Odetta sang at a show I attended, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ – with Garrison Keillor, the 7th of December 2007 at the Town Hall – 123 West 43rd Street, New York City. I have been listening to the Prairie Home Companion since the late 1970s, even whilst living in Australia for twenty years. When Keillor was doing a show in NYC Narda bought us tickets for my 60th birthday. Odetta was not advertised to be on the show. She was very frail and, in a wheelchair, but her voice was as strong as ever. I thought of looking her up on the Internet but decided to keep her in my memory as the one I listened to singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic on a record I heard whilst tripping in the 1960s and as she is now in her wheelchair belting out songs forty years later. We all do so much in forty years that to keep track of earthling’s lives, aside of our own and family, is just too much. Odetta died December 2, 2008.

I had lain down on the sofa because I was too stoned to move and that song, playing loudly, played continually all day. It played in my mind for years becoming triggered by emotional events or if I got too high. Sometime during the playing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic Eileen came in and collected her possessions then drove off with the pickup truck. I never saw her again. Years later I received a post card from her, I have no idea how we had made contact. She was living at the hippie commune, “The Farm” in Summertown, Tennessee. Somewhere along the way I had heard that she had joined the revolutionary group the “Weathermen” a group of protestors, who sometimes took violent actions, named for the words in a song by Bob Dylan that said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The group was responsible for blowing up a bank in San Francisco and other extreme protests against the war in Viet Nam (though I am sure Eileen was not a part of that section of the group).

Now Eileen would be in her 70s if she is still alive and she may even recall being a twenty-year-old hippie a long time ago. I just hope she is not a seventy-something hippy now – they are a sad lot for never having progressed out of one stage of their life. Like me. It is like being stuck in one’s adolescence and because of the fear of growing up and taking on responsibility it is easier to stay stoned and hug trees and say that all we need is love. There is no evolutionary growth of the individual. But then again looking around at the world today being high all the time is probably a perfectly normal way of coping. The drug takers of the 1960s are the grandparents of those today who live on Prozac and other mood-altering drugs that are legal. The American population takes them by the handful and the government is happy because no one will protest what is going on in the world because everyone is too high on prescription medication to really give a shit. Even the United States Air Force is enjoying the thrills of flying a 30-million-dollar jet whilst stoned on speed. A few innocent people living in a village in Iraq or wherever killed by ‘friendly fire’ is just part of the fun of flying a jet fighter plane whilst being legally stoned. I am not making this up – it was in the ‘straight media’ heaps of times a couple of years ago,

Staying in the Glen Ellen area, I moved into a farm with several other people. It was not really a commune like Morning Star was. I had visited Morning Star and I had stayed there as well as the other commune in the area, Wheeler's (Ahimsa) Ranch. See https://www.diggers.org/. Morning Star, considered the first hippy commune in California, attracted the hippest of the hippies, but it had not appealed to me. There is even a play and musical about Morning Star. But then again, I was never amongst the hippest. Lou Gottlieb (October 10, 1923 - July 11, 1996), a member of the folk trio The Limelighters founded the 32-acre Morning Star Ranch. I moved out to Wheeler’s 320-acre ranch, but it was too basic as it was just beginning when I visited there and most of the people there were living in tents. Eventually the ‘authorities’ bulldozed both communes, first Morning Star then Wheelers.

It is interesting how we all seem to have slightly different belief systems. I embraced the concept, and still do, of free love. Sex for the sake of love, even the line from the Crosby, Stills and Nash song, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you are with” is almost noble in some way. All the moral codes that humans have established to control and maintain the sex act over thousands of years only lead people to sneak off and answer their needs in clandestine meetings or fantasies that become answered through masturbation, unfilled guilty thoughts or rape in its extremist acting out.

However, in practical, everyday living, I can only embrace, as most humans do, the thought of free love. I do not believe it really works because we have jealously genes. We are after all, no matter what religion tries to say, part of evolutionary functions.

We developed the possessive jealous protective type of genes to maintain and further the biological species that we are assigned to. The pattern that works for our species is the family unit. This will gradually change and the communes of the 1960s no doubt were a cosmic experiment that humans tried as a new way to develop future societies. However, until the genetic structure that we now know is changed, the evolution of the species will continue along the lines societies have currently established.

Of course, with cyborgs and machine parts as humans this will really change. When humans begin taking on robotics as lovers, love will be seen for what it is – just chemical reactions to further some future Genome Project.

My problem with Morning Star and other communes was that I really did want my own one- on-one relationship with a woman. I had no concept of ever having children and I did not want to get married. I liked having different lovers, but I also wanted one other human being to go through life with that I could trust to be always there as we journeyed through life. Given the option, I would have settled for the one person but as I had not met anyone that seemed compatible for more than sex, sex was a great option.
Sex is a comfort we fancy that we cannot survive without. Sex is just an extension of our need to be touched or to be close to another human being. Females tend to use sex as closeness more than males and males often use sex as a release of testosterone or in some cases as control over a female. Of course, females use sex as a release and surely women use sex as control. At the end of the day sex is such a complex issue that we can adopt any psychologist or philosopher’s viewpoint as our own or make up a series or adopt a range as our own.

Perhaps I was trying to find my mother in another woman, the female touch that I did not have as a child. I never did feel deep love from my short encounters, but I did find some momentary comfort of being close.
The small farm that I moved into was once a chicken farm. My home became what was once a walk-in freezer; an area of about 20 square feet with no windows and just the single very thick door.
Several people lived in the main house and others had made a home in a barn like structure. There were three or four couples and several individuals of various genders. I spent most of my time alone with the occasional overnight female guests including one who had been a Playboy centrefold. It was one of those warmer summer months when there were not so many clothes to shed. I did not like her, though she had ‘the body’ and I asked her to leave after a few days. She lived in San Francisco and was a ‘present’ one morning from a couple that were living in the main house. This centrefold-girl just got into bed with me one morning and we had sex and she wanted to have sex more and more and she said she wanted me to tie her up and beat her a bit but I was never into that type of thing, so I asked her to leave. From a physical view she was very attractive and had big tits and all the parts that made her a Playboy centrefold but from a personality level she was a bit awful. I had a car by this time after asking my father to send some money to help me get restarted after Eileen had left.

It was the first car I had ever owned, having only had a motorcycle which I had left in Florida, years earlier. I was collecting unemployment and every once in a while, everyone on the property- farm-commune would pick grapes for a winery in order to get enough money to pay for the rent. Last weekend I was in a grocery store in Georgia, and I saw a whole section of wine from Glen Ellen, California. It could have been from the same winery I had picked grapes for forty years earlier along Sonoma Highway – perhaps I would know it if I saw it again though I have no intention of every going to that part of the world again. Our life there lasted for a few months, the last few months of 1968. We all got very high all day and listened to music and made love and generally did not care much about what was going on in the world.

Funny Farm, what either we named our place, or someone else did or perhaps the locals named it that, existed for those few months as almost an unreal world. People would come out from San Francisco to visit though I do not remember why our place was anything special. Sonoma County is world-famous as a wine growing region. According to the 2000 census, the area had a total population of 992 and there were a lot fewer people when we were there.

The people that lived at our place, Funny Farm, had developed a taste for stealing cars. They stole several Volkswagens in a few months and took the parts they wanted for two Volkswagens they were fixing. One of the vehicles was a Volkswagen Van. By the time we left Glenn Ellen the van and a ‘bug’ had a new motor along with lots of other new parts. There were several cars in the woods from the people with us who were going to Santa Rosa to steal cars for parts. We never seemed to have much money except for whatever one got from welfare benefits and our grape picking, and I think there were some drugs that were brought out from San Francisco and sold amongst the local population’s youth. There seemed to be a lot of marijuana and LSD available all the time and we lived a carefree life. I spent a lot of time with several others bagging up marijuana for resale and capping powder drugs such as LSD.

On November 5, Election Day, I thought about going to vote. I had registered some weeks earlier because I was at the right age, 21, to make a stand on my country’s future. It would have been my first voting ritual, a sort of silly coming of age, wank, and I had thought of writing ‘Mickey Mouse’ on the ballot. There were more than 30,000 dead in Viet Nam and the world had seemed to go to pot. There were stories that Richard Nixon as president would round up all the hippies and send them to concentration camps or to Viet Nam. There was the same type of paranoia then as now with the ‘Patriot Act’ and the menace of Homeland security. Tricky Dick was the front-runner and the nation seemed to be behind him. I knew that it would be a mistake to have him as president, it was a feeling I had.

However, on the day of the election I took a lot of LSD, smoked hash, got as far as the front porch to the house, and never left the property. I could not drive as I could not see very clearly and no one else was going to vote. A few days before Christmas, we celebrated the launch of Apollo 8 on the first US mission to orbit the Moon, by taking LSD.

Then again, I am just me, wandering life, with little to say about anything. I am just a quiet observer and have never been even a bit of a political mindset.
I am jumping ahead in this story – as if I had any idea what the future would be. (I need to constantly remind myself that the purpose of this story is to give a glimpse of my life for my children in case they wonder why, if they ever had, thoughts that they could not explain. Every thought we have is influenced by what is around us. Because of being a single parent for the life of Sacha and Leigh I would have said or done something that will pop up in their brain later in life so it is wise to say some of the way things filter through my brain in hopes that they don’t think they may have untended thoughts that have no reason for existence; or something like that).

We can only know the future when we go back to the past and discuss what the future will be up to the time we are now writing. Psychics are never right – only after the events then they are quick to say they predicted something but put the prediction in strange phrases, like Nostradamus, then anything can be said about anything. It is the same with astrology, put enough aspects, planets,

asteroids, midpoints, moons, nodes, stars, and damn isn’t it easy to predict in hindsight what just happened? (note: it is now 2015, eleven years after writing this and little has changed but then again everything has changed. For one thing, I feel content and maybe even a bit happy, so the world did not go as bad as I had thought. Of course, the world is in absolute tizzy about so much but I am settled for about the first time in my life, here in Adelaide South Australia. Even though my story is titled ‘Leaving Australia’ for the past six months I have been living here again still with Narda and after three great years in China. The future can be different than in our most out there thoughts.

I was twenty or twenty-one and Clifton Park was a long time ago in my world. I do not recall exactly what happened but at some point, we did not have any electricity and it was cold, the winter of 1968. Not cold, like upstate New York though but a miserable damp cold. We used to make large campfires at night to stay warm and cook meals – we were gradually knocking down parts of sheds and barns and one day we were given an eviction notice. We left the next day taking the two Volkswagens with us. There were about seven of us in the van – a mixture of females and males. There was no definite plan where we were headed – which seems to have been a pattern throughout my life. I was just going along with everyone else, and they were going along with me and we were all going south along with seemingly everyone else and south is Los Angeles.

No one in the van had been there before but we all agreed it would be a good place to go. I had been on the outskirts of LA a couple of years earlier in Garden Grove. I had never intended on going there but fate or my direction had me go there for whatever reason I needed to be there.

Perhaps all the reincarnation crap is true, and I had ‘karma’ there to deal with. Of course, in hindsight of an afterthought nothing significant there happened so I did not pay off any karma. Then again maybe everything that happened there was karmic and I created more of that cosmic-comic goo that I never seem to pay off but instead I am destined to just continue piling the ‘karma-crap-bucket’ higher and fuller. If karma has a smell – well, we do not really want to go there, do we? This really puts the dick up the Strong AI machine intelligent Nano brained zealots, doesn’t it? Those that maintain that robots in the future will demand rights because they will be conscious because their Nano brains will have more intelligence than all of humanity combined do not take into account the purpose for life on earth; to create horrible karma and then to pay it off through crafting crappy books like this – now what robot of the future – whether part human or not, will be able to accumulate karma? None.

I had been studying astrology for a few years and I was the local astrologer with several people a day coming to me to have their charts read. I did not charge money, but I received drugs in turn as, at the time, I thought I had more clarity of mind whilst reading someone’s chart if I was high. I say all this now, thirty-five years later, not having gotten high for a decade or so, expect for a glass of wine or two2, with some amazement.

Since returning from Paris of Christmas 2005 I have stopped drinking alcohol. Not for any reason except that when we got back to New York after sleeping through New Years at a JFK airport hotel I did not have a glass of wine or anything else. Then I did not feel like having any the next week or the week after and now it has been six-weeks and I have not felt like drinking anything. I did that once with coffee – didn’t have any one morning nor the next and that was it for three years. Now I have several cups a day. The reason I brought all this up was to point out that I have never made decisions set in concert – that is a stupid line – but needless to say – what I do today is because it is what I did today and there should never be any more value to it. We should only be faithful and true to this moment. To be anything less deprives us of evolutionary growth because we have no idea what the next moment will need us to be in order to move forward. We should not arrive at the future dragged there kicking and screaming. We should arrive at the future as a well- rested traveller with excitement for the new landscape – whatever that may be. As an add-on, I still have not had any alcohol since Christmas 2005 and today is 10 September 2021. Now it is July 24 2025

Actually, a few years ago, I took a single puff of pot whilst white-water-rafting in Oregon, but I did not like the affect. I write this and it is like, “who was that person that did those things years ago?” it is not like I just had a toke or two of hash or marijuana or opium, it is like I should have been dead, many times over; I did such large quantities of each thing. I do not think I was suicidal; I did not want to end my life. I doubt that I was overly depressed; actually, I was quite happy much of the time. I have been quite depressed for the past couple of years or maybe I am just overly sad, without taking anything to mask these feelings. I know I did not feel then like I feel much of the time now. I just enjoyed, and why I cannot fathom now, getting extremely stoned, every day, from morning until I passed out at night. I think it was just boredom; my interest threshold has always been extremely short.

According to my parents, I was one of ‘those’ children who were a ‘handful’. Even as I get older – old, I find it difficult to sit still for very long. I am always off trying something else. What I like about the internet and computers is that I can have several projects going at one time: a webpage creation, developing a 3D animation or digital video, writing a story, poem, email, all at the same time. I will have several programs and multiple windows open on my computer at the same time or until the computer crashes – which does not take long. Now in March 2015 I have three computers going on my desk and my ‘Smart’ phone. There is no end in sight. With faster and more powerful computers comes more consuming software. We are led to believe we need faster and more powerful computers then we get faster and more powerful software which gets upgraded within six months and we believe we need them but wait… then we need faster and more powerful computers to use the new software – and on and it goes. I was born to multitask, and computers have taken the place for any need to have drugs.

It has always been about entertainment; I need to be entertained or I need to entertain.
Finally, there are ways to entertain and to be entertained at the same time. I am often so wound up, lately, that by bedtime I need to read something boring until I fall asleep. Lately I have been reading, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Corbett and Connors and I will go from being hyper and too much awake to asleep in ten to fifteen minutes. It is a 560-page book and in three weeks of nightly reading, I have read 60 pages.

Today I am so upset because of the 2004 election results that I will continue where I left off last night and I will be asleep in no time; “The syllogism is the formal device that Aristotle invented to analyze and systematize deductive reasoning, The enthymeme, as we have just seen…”. Gosh darn; I am so excited I can hardly contain myself. Perhaps if I had been reading these books back in the 1960s I would have done fewer drugs, then again, the book I was reading before this one, on parts of speech, may have caused me to use more drugs. (While editing this e-book version I am watching the June 7, 2016, primary between Clinton and Sanders)

Or the series of books I recently devoured, one after another, to get my mind into shape to teach a course on nanotechnology at the State in this order: "Radical Evolution" Joel Garreau, "Prey", Michael Crichton; "The Singularity is Near", Ray Kurzweil, “Are We Spiritual Machines”, Discovery Institute Press; The World Is Flat”, Thomas Friedman; "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century", Howard Bloom; "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", Ray Kurzweil.

17. 1968

Return to Home Page