Life-Altering Sydney: Neuage's A Personal Journey

34 - Sydney

Life altering SYDNEY ‌ 1980

I have often thought about how a place changes in my mind from when I first hear about it to having a few experiences in it to it becoming the focus of life-altering cycles. I never lived in Sydney but the short times I have been there are so unforgettable that to subtract them would make my life so much more simple or mundane or well almost forgettable. I have lived in Hawaii a few times, and New Orleans and New York City each a few times and I lived in Adelaide, South Australia for twenty years but it is Sydney that torments me so. I was there for a week in January 1980, January 2001, August 2002, August 2003 and overnight on August 2004 and each of those times have taken me to places I did not know existed in my psyche. I now go to Sydney each year to be there on August 16th and I will do that for the rest of my life.

The astrological conference of 1980 was at the University of Sydney. I had a room to myself at the university in a dormitory building. The first
person I met when I got there was a fellow named Drew. Mainly it was only the Yanks who had arrived at the conference so far and there were several days before it began. Drew showed me around the campus and Sydney. Several times he said there was a person from Adelaide that I should meet because he thought the two of us were a good match. I had a girlfriend in Towson and even though I ‘strayed’ a bit in New Zealand I did not want to be involved with anyone that was more than a passing fling.
During those first few days at the conference I was becoming involved with another woman from Adelaide, Candice. However, as fate would have it Drew had an insight that to this day I have not been able to figure out where it came from. One evening, after everyone had arrived there was a banquet. I did not have a watch or a clock in my room so I stuck my head out the door and asked the first person that walked by what the time was. This person actually snarled at me and said ‘why would I tell you what time it is?’ That response so stunned me that I went back into my room and sat down for a while to collect my thoughts and question whether I was at the right place at all. Once I decided I was not going to be put off by someone as mean spirited as I had just met I went to the next room and found that the time was 6.25 PM – I had made my first encounter with her at about 6:15. As an astrologer one remembers time. I have always been conscious of time and looking at my diaries from when I was a teenager and not involved with astrology I have found that I always wrote down the time something happened. I still look at the chart of the time that I first encountered ‘her’ – January 26, 1980, at 6.15 PM in Sydney (Daylight Savings Time).

First meeting chart January 26, 1980 When hunger knows what time it is there is not much reason to ask anyone so I went to the dining hall where I found Drew who brought me over to where the Adelaide group was sitting, and there she was – the one who had responded so negatively toward me when I had asked what the time was. The moment was already ingrained into my brain and I remember it now as if the clock had stopped on that moment; 6.15 PM on Saturday, January 26th 1980 when the moon was at 27 degrees Taurus and 48 minutes so close to my own Moon’s placement at 28 Taurus and five minutes. Because my North Node is also at this point, with both in the eighth house I have strange things with women when any celestial body, discovered or not, hovers around 28 degrees of a fixed sign.

There was one seat left at the table and it was across from ‘her’. I was in my full on American ‘here-we-are’ mindset and though I had not worn a tie before. I had one on that night. It was a brightly coloured tie with a lion in the middle of it that Daniel had given to me many years earlier. I had brought it with me for no particular reason and I wore it for no particular reason. She, Lesia, made some comment how the Yanks would do anything to get attention even wear silly things to a dinner.

We sat across from one another and made negative statements to one another in between our various courses of food. After dinner many of the people at the conference ended up in a large room and we sat around drinking wine. There were only two things that I remember from that evening; the first was the cask of wine, I had only seen wine in bottles before and in Australia I saw for the first-time wine in a cardboard box – which now decades later is common, even in the States. But there is always a first time for everything and I remember the first time I drank wine from a cask. I am sure if I asked any Australian if they remembered when they first drank from a cask they would think I was being funny. It would be akin to asking me the first time I put on a pair of sneakers. I just would not remember. The other thing I remember from that night was that I had gotten into some heated debate, the content of which now totally escapes me with Lesia. We must have been getting louder in our discussion because at one point we stopped and everyone around us clapped and tried to get us to continue. It seems that sums up the rest of my past forty years plus with this woman, people being conscious of us putting on a show as if we were doing just another performance, but no one claps anymore – our life just became too tragic.

In astrology when two or more people are together, we cast a composite chart combining the birth data of them. This chart does not say much about the individuals concerned but instead describes the energy field they generate between them. For example, a composite chart of the Beatles shows that as a group the four of them could be what they became whereas their individual charts are not as powerful an indicator to become as famous as they did. Likewise, Bonnie and Clyde together accomplished things they may never have done if they had not been together. When I combine Lesia and my chart then I have our composite chart. The Moon deals with everyday events in a chart as well as our emotional well beingness. Leisa and I had our Composite Moon square our Composite Uranus – this aspect we acted out with all the grace of any war-time hero and we were constantly manifestation a clash of our disparate energies and personality signals. As well, we acted out in the public arena our emotionally impulsive and erratic behavior.

Composite Venus opposite Composite Mars made us act with more negative vigour when it got to feelings.

These following statements were made by Robert Hand, the author of a book on composite charts, on his website
(http://www.astro.com/astrology/in_composit_e.htm) and it sums up our life in just a few of our aspects:
Sun in the eighth house: Composite Sun in the eighth house may give the two of you a feeling of "fatedness," that this relationship is going to play an important role in your lives, even if it is not a long- term relationship.
Moon in the sixth house: The sixth house is a rather serious placement for the composite Moon. It suggests that you have a sense of having come together for a specific and necessary task or purpose that may not be completely pleasant. One of you may feel subordinated to the other in some way.
Therefore, this is a difficult placement for any relationship that requires you to give and take equally, as most relationships do.

One group of astrologers that is heavily into relationship charts is the magi astrology group. They will relieve you of money to tell you how your relationships are going at http://www.magiastrology.com/interpretation_software/firstcontact.h tm

How Lesia and I were as individuals and how we were as a couple is so different that I do not even recognize my ego of who I was when I was with her ego. Left to our own devices we would have just met at the astrological conference, had our clashes, and gone on with our life without any consequences. But something more happened and the purpose of writing this to my two sons is to try and not only explain how our world became such a disaster with results no one would ever want to have but for me to try and understand and maybe find a belief system, a worldview that could possibly explain such a travelled travestied life.

Like any loser (winners too) I have met many people along the way through life. I have met them at a pub or a party or just in passing and had sex with them a few days later or a few hours later. I have met people I have gotten along with and people I have not. I have gotten high with some folks and sat next to a stranger on a train or a bus or an airplane and that was it.

What makes meeting someone change the course of our life when we have no intention of ever seeing them again? Is it fate? Whatever that is. Is it past life experiences that are being continued in this moment’s sphere? I have spent decades trying to sort out what happens when we meet someone. I even teach a course on Interpersonal Communication at a university in New York and in that I discuss the first meeting of someone and what happens. But I do not explain it in a metaphysical genre – my students think I am strange as it is so I try to relate in young person’s 21st-century thinking. But it is this beyond the ordinary physical realm that I look to try and explain relationships in my own life. I look at the first meeting astrological chart because that is the birth of the rest of the life of that first meeting. First impressions are more than just what we see and how we interpret that moment. It is why we meet at that particular time that is important. If I had met Leisa at another time, then would something different have happened? Why did we meet at the moment we did? I have followed our first meeting chart for decades for events and a transit planet was always setting something in that chart off, so it seems. If we
met at a different moment we would have had a different chart and different experiences I would assume. This is an impossible to verify hypothesis because we only have one first meeting time. But due to what happened in our life I would think that if we had met at another time we would not give one another the time of day – which in fact is how we started. Lesia would not give me the time of day and that should have been a clue.

I remember little about the astrology conference – I do not remember anything except meeting Lesia.

I took a tour of Sydney going to the Sydney Harbor and taking the Manly Ferry from Circular Quay to the Manly Wharf and back. I took photos of the Sydney Opera House and that was it. I remember having a feeling that I had seen the Sydney Opera House before and it had stuck in my mind – it was on the postcard that I had seen in 1969 in Honolulu. Back then I felt a link to the photo of the Sydney Opera House and now I was standing in front of it more than a decade later.
On that January afternoon I dismissed it as being one of ‘those things in life’ and most likely I would never be in Sydney again and the postcard I had seen in Honolulu would eventually fade from memory. As I write this in Jersey City forty years after, 17 February 2009, from when I saw ‘the postcard” in Hawaii and thirty years after I first stood in front of the Sydney Opera House, I see on the calendar that in another four months I will be back in Sydney lighting another candle as I have for the past five years. Bloody Sydney what a curse it has been.

Toward my last moment at the conference I came across Lesia. She had said at some point that she was going to the States in April or May to check out some Transcendental Meditation (TM) trip. I think we had several arguments about TM. Lesia defended it with vigour and I thought it was a ‘cultist’ brain dead type of mediation where the power is given elsewhere and it was nothing I approved of for a series of reasons.
Before the conference Lesia had been at a TM retreat in the Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney. She had planned to go back to Adelaide following it but instead met up with friends at the astrological conference. Both of us were in Sydney seemingly through fate and for both of us it was a last-minute decision to be there. I suppose any meeting between any two people could be diagrammed and charted the same way. We all meet one another through the two of us being at the same place at the same time and any number of things could have prevented the two people from being in the same space at any moment so my meeting Lesia in Sydney is only significant in my mind and to a few others because we have made it so. And of course, almost every event of my past seventy-four-years makes it significant.
When I saw Lesia, during my final moment at the conference I told her she seemed like a person who was lost and who would be lost no matter where she was so I gave her my address back in Towson, Maryland saying if she was lost in the States as I knew she would be I would do what I could do to help her. I said to a few people from Adelaide that I wish I had not given Lesia my address and they both informed me she had thrown it away saying she surely would never want to see me again.

I got back to Towson in February 1980 and put the astrological conference and the trip down- under and my kidney stones behind me and concentrated on work at Shepherd Pratt Hospital and local random love.
Experiences come and go in our lives and we move on. Even though going to New Zealand and Australia was a new experience it was in fact too short of a time to really have gotten to know either country. I stayed in touch with the three females I had interacted with in New Zealand and with Australian Candice who I began to have a romantic letter-writing correspondence with. I thought at the time that I would never see any of them again and it seemed like safe correspondences. Of course, this was a long time before email, Instant Messenger, chatrooms and all the other future Internet fool’s tools or we would have stayed in touch maybe to this day saying hello occasionally, in a Facebook/Twitter type of Internet social space. Now so many years later I do not recall any of their surnames and I am sure I am not remembering Candice’s name at that.
In Towson I had a girlfriend anyway – Beverly, and we were sort of settling into a relationship. We did not live together but we spent a lot of nights together and I do not recall speaking about the future but I think we were actually in love and that was that. I continued to work at Shepherd Pratt Hospital doing as much overtime as possible to pay off my substantial credit card debt. I had stopped in Hawaii on my way back from Australia in February 1980 and visited Randy for a few days. He was quite insistent that I should move to Hawaii – he had a new girlfriend, and they were doing quite well with their life and for some reason he thought if I lived in Hawaii it would make life more fun for him. I had been in the Order in Hawaii with Randy a decade earlier and after what we had been through together I was not sure that giving up a bit of security that I had in Maryland to start over again in Hawaii was such a good idea. However, a month later in early March I was getting bored in Maryland and feeling life was too routine and suddenly I was thinking about going to Hawaii. It was one of those thoughts that crept into my brain and just would not go away. I am sure I did an astrological chart on it as I did charts on lots of things trying to see how they would turn out if I followed the thought. I had a notebook with blank chart forms and I would constantly do charts as thoughts occurred to see if any were worth following. I did charts so often that I could quite accurately do a chart without any data with me. I would know by what time it was where the ascendant was – that is easy as the sun is at zero Aries at six-am and every two-hours there would be a new sign on the horizon. The planet’s positions I knew. The moon went quickly, going through all the signs in a 28-day cycle. Other planets would be a bit more sluggish in their shitty movements through the cosmos but overall I could do a chart without an ephemeris with me.

From Donald Bradley the guru of AstroCartoGraphy

The Moon on the Midheaven (MO MH):
Here you have an emotional involvement with your status in society and a need for social acceptance, so there is deep sensitivity to public feelings and probably some political awareness. All of this fits you well for a job in public service or the helping professions, and there is a need to be useful, particularly in your job, which might also be in domestic concerns. There is a strong attachment to your mother here. People in higher positions, like the boss, seem to notice your affairs constantly, and you are deeply affected by status, seem to crave it more, and tend to define yourself by your social needs, or by your needs for attention. All these needs and feelings fluctuate, however, so sustained effort toward any goal is dependent upon exterior forces.

Astrocartography is a method of locational astrology, which claims to identify varying life conditions through differences in location. It was made popular by the astrologer Jim Lewis who cacked it when he was 54.

“In the mid ‘80s he was struck by a vehicle while crossing Military Road, in Sydney, Australia on his Mars Ascending line.”
As I say many times, there is always something to be found astrologically to explain shit.

I must say that in decades of doing ‘event charts’ that I have never really been able to predict what would happen if only I had continued with the thought when I first had it. Whether it is my own lack of being able to read a chart or whether in fact the whole deal with astrology is suspect I do not know. It could simply be that it is impossible to remove the ego from the moment and keep from reading into the chart what we want the results to be. Beyond reading what we want into a chart is the fact that there are so many interpretations for the different planets and houses and aspects that any idiot can find whatever he/she/it wants to find in the chart. I must say, even though I believe there is something/nothing to it and I am still casting charts,
I am beginning to wonder if either it is impossible to know the future or it is all a bunch of bullshit to begin with. Really! Think about it. Every moment has so many factors involved: people around us and of course their stupid little needy charts getting acted out, world events, weather, new solar crap such as the Planet X entering our solar system, a solar flare with flair, and so much more. How could anything really be predicted? As the world becomes more complex until no event can be realised without massive, embedded computer chips in our brain to figure out everything that is happening and influencing us in any moment astrology will be swept into the dustbin of stories human used to try and find meaning in their worthless limp little crappy lives.

Nevertheless, there was a moment when my whole being began to be directed to going to Hawaii. There was a draw to Hawaii and I was flirting with fertility fearfulness because the last time I ended up in Hawaii it was just so weird. I had never intended to really go there to begin with and when I finally did get there I thought I would only be there for a few weeks but I ended staying and having many weird and strange experiences that affected me for decades after because of the Holy Order of MANS. Within a week of me feeling drawn back to Hawaii and I felt like I was already on the course to go there with no way to stop I had put in my resignation to Shepherd Pratt Hospital telling my number one girlfriend, Beverly, that I felt I should go to Hawaii. I had been attending Towson State University right up until I left for Australia/New Zealand but I did not enrol for the spring semester due to a lack of funds.
Because the Order had paid the fees for my first couple of years and I had struggled with paying fees whilst I worked at Shepherd Pratt Hospital and now I had spent every cent I could on my credit cards and as well I had gone over my overdraft at the bank, it was apparent that continuing nursing training (and fantasizing about training young supple nurses) was not going to be a reality. It seems like my whole life is a continuation of my formal education – I have started so many schools and at thirty-three
years old it just looked like I would never get a degree in anything.

I began packing my belongings and I got rid of everything in my house except for my bed, as I needed a place to sleep and do whatever else it was I did in my bed.

I had ‘one of those weekends’. Beverly had stayed Friday night with me. We were going through a bit of a sexual experimental stage. All I will disclose to this computer is that we had an open relationship and we had agreed to see other people, whether together or not. Saturday afternoon I visited my friend, Kathy, who I worked at Shepherd Pratt Hospital with and for whatever reason we were soon having a sexual Saturday afternoon get together.
That night I went to a nightclub and met a female who came home with me and we spent the night together. Sunday, I was resting at home doing whatever I did on a weekend day off – probably cleaning, writing poems – getting high, I really do not recall.

Late in the afternoon I got a phone call from Lesia who said she had just driven across American ‘on the wrong side of the road’ and she was tired and in Washington D.C. on her way to New York City. I told her how to get to where I was or at least to an exit from the Beltway Road that goes around Baltimore and I met her at the Towson exit, I believe it is exit 26. She followed me to my home and even though we did not want to see each other we both were polite and I thought I was doing her a favour and all she wanted was a place to rest before tackling New York City. We had a couple of drinks – probably White Russians (Vodka, Kailua, Irish Crème, Milk) as that was my drink of choice in those days and I have a photo of her laughing in my kitchen there in Towson Maryland in March 1980. It is a photo that I have always kept though I am not sure why. I am sure there is some significance to holding on to such a thing. I look at it sometimes and try to recall what my life was like before that night when we had our White Russians and laughed so freely and everything I have written to this point is my trying to get back to who I was before that night. Not that there is anything to it but Lesia’s
mother is White Russian, now Belarusian. Ironically, or not, my adopted brother, Robert, was White Russian.

I told Lesia that I was moving to Hawaii and that most of my belongings were either sold or already sent there or were packed in my car as I was leaving within the week. So much of my story seems to be of events happening at a certain time which without them happening at that time my life would not be what it is today and I would not be writing this. If only she had come through the area a week later I would have been on my way to Hawaii where a different destiny would have befallen me. The one thing that was still in place, at least for the next four days, until the rent was up, was my bed. After four days I was moving into someone else’s apartment for a few days prior to leaving for Hawaii. We both agreed that we could share the bed without touching one another and in fact we did not want to have sex with one another. I had already been with three women that weekend and Lesia had said that she could not have sex even if she wanted to because she was not taking any sort of birth control and of course in 1980 it was unheard of that I would use anything to prevent pregnancy. This was before we knew of transmittable diseases except for V.D. which I had not had for more than a decade anyway. We finished off the bottles of Kailua and Vodka with some milk for nutrition and went to my room had our showers and went to bed. We got as far on either side of the bed as we could and I think we actually went to sleep.
However…‌

Sometime during the night, and I always say it was her, one of our legs touched the other person’s leg and that was it. We spent not only that night but also the next couple of days in bed. The next morning after that first night I felt very strange
– I thought I was possessed – there was a feeling of someone else there with us and I am not making this up at all. For whatever reason we could not let go of each other and I had never been through an experience like this before. I was not high from drugs and we did not do any more alcohol for the
next couple of days and we did not go out of the house. I do not remember anything about the rest of the people in the house or whether I went to work at the hospital or spoke on the telephone to any of my female friends but I do remember that I felt incredibly fearful and at the same time excited. After three- or four-days Lesia left for New York City to check out the TM situation there. Whilst we were locked together in some incredible moment that neither of us understood or could describe after we decided to go across the States together the following week. Lesia was leaving from San Francisco to go back to Sydney and I was leaving from San Francisco to go Hawaii.

I remember little of that week except that I felt overwhelmingly different than I have ever felt at any time in my life. I knew from the core of my being that my life had changed forever. Again! Lesia returned on an Amtrak train from New York City and I collected her at the Baltimore station. We were still excited about being together and we stayed at one of my few male friend’s apartment in Baltimore. We continued where we left off with our lovemaking and being totally wrapped up together. Granted whilst she was in New York I slept with several of my female friends, but for no other reason than a final goodbye. I had slept with three people within the day of her returning but when she returned my sexual exploits came close to stopping except with her. I would not have sex with another person other than her for the next four years. Hey, that is a long time in my world, though soon after those four years I was almost celibate for a decade except for two one-nighters. Another way to look at the change I went through is that I have been with five or so different lovers since the weekend I had four in a row, forty-five years ago).

We packed the car, a 1979 Volvo. I was still making payments on it – I was a bit in debt, between my credit cards and my costly almost new car and my ticket to Hawaii and whatever other costs that I had incurred since quitting my job. On the day we were leaving, my girlfriend, Beverly, brought us sandwiches and snacks for our trip and even though she said she understood what was going on she
would always be in love with me. That threw me for a moment and I felt bad about leaving her and even though we had agreed we were going to be friends I think we both did not understand the moment and I actually thought I would be back with her after a few months in Hawaii.

I saw Beverly once more after March 1980, I think it was on a visit to New York from Australia in 1984. I think the children were with me though I cannot recall. She was married and had a one year old daughter. We were sitting in her car and she asked if we could make love one more time. We didn’t. We kept in touch off and on with my last letter from her in August 1988. I was living in Mt. Compass South Australia at the time. She wrote “...I cannot keep your letters anymore... I need to discuss with you the dilemma of being connected to you by some invisible force that serves as a distraction in my everyday physical life...we are still bonded at the heart. I don’t want you to explain it in writing. I need to see you and without any distractions. No kids like we did last visit Please don’t write to me anymore and this is my last” And that was her last. Never heard from her again. Oh well. And this is exactly why I do not understand woman.

Just a slight addition: She emailed me when I was living in Jersey City in 2010. She said she looked me up on the Internet because she had a feeling that I had died. Oops! No not true. We had a few correspondence and at one point I was going to visit her in Baltimore then she said it would not be a good idea to see her and that was six years ago and we have had no more contact. Her daughter is a musician and Beverly thought I should see her perform in Baltimore. We did not go to her show and I see her daughter is still active on-line and she looks a lot like Beverly did in 1979. I thought of ‘friending’ her but realised it would be strange, almost perverted so I never have.

When I first told Randy a few weeks earlier that I was thinking of going to Hawaii but I did not have a job there or any money now he called me and said he could set me up with a radio station doing astrological studies on air. He also said he was a
painting contractor and he could use the extra hand and would pay me well for it. Having my own astrology show appealed to me and that was what cemented in my mind that going to Hawaii would be a good idea. I would go for six months and then come back. I had made an agreement with the hospital that I would be back in six months and take my job back, unless of course they had no vacancies. Everything seemed on track for my well planned out life – but as I had not realized by then my life’s plans seem to go in far different directions than I would ever imagine and now as the decades quickly pass me I still have no idea what or where tomorrow will be.

Even now, married, one would think I would be settled but we have lived in two countries and five homes in the five years we have been together and just last month we made a sudden decision to leave our beautiful Victorian house that we put so much energy into renovating last year and move to New York City. Since doing that two years ago we bought a brownstone row house in Jersey City where we are the only whites in the neighbourhood.

Now in 2021, we have had ten homes (owning five of them) in three countries.

We started our drive across the States in good spirits. After all this was just a passing fling – an affair that would last for a couple of weeks instead of just one night and surely I could cope with that. We got to Chicago and stayed with some astrologers we had met in Sydney and they thought our story of meeting in Sydney and ‘falling in love’ after disliking one another so much only a few months earlier was highly romantic. We took turns driving on the freeways across America intoxicated all the way. We had quite a stash of bottles of liqueur and made mixed drinks as we fled – I would characterize my life as the act of fleeing and now I was fleeing the East Coast. When Lesia was driving I would write romantic poems. Life seemed surrealistic, beautiful, and full of rhyme and reason and we had been brought together for a moment of pleasure and nothing more. Somewhere in the mid- west Lesia made a comment that the who I was witnessing of who she was, was the holiday her and not the real she – I laughed and thought I had a woman of humour. We stopped at a TM college somewhere in Iowa or Ohio or one of those flat states. Lesia investigated it and I paid no attention. We drove through a snowstorm and we both favoured the same song that was at the top of the pop charts at the time: ‘Stumblin' In’ by Suzi Quatro And Chris Norman:

Our love  is alive, and so we begin
Foolishly  laying our hearts on the table Stumblin' in
Our love is a flame, burning  within Now and then firelight will catch us Stumblin' in
Wherever  you go, whatever you do
You know these reckless thoughts of mine are  following you I'm falling for you, whatever you do
'Cos baby you've shown me so many things that I  never knew Whatever it takes, baby I'll do it for you

Now when I hear that song, decades later, I go back to that moment and I wonder what ever became of those thoughts. I review that song now, here twenty-four years later and know the only reason I am sitting in my serviced apartment in Melbourne, Australia for this Christmas week of 2004 is because of that period in my life, back then. And on Suzi Quatro’s webpage I see she is doing a tour of Australia (2009) bloody hell is it not all so cosmic? And lo and behold here she is back in Adelaide in February of 2015. Life is a cycle. I didn’t go to see her but I did think about it for a few weeks.

Somewhere in Colorado, we could not find a hotel to stay in. I had camping gear with me because I thought in Hawaii I may be living in the back of Randy’s house until I could afford my own home so I suggested we camp in my tent. Lesia was not too keen on the idea but we snuggled up only to wake the next morning in several inches of snow.
She was quite cranky about that and I had some dark thoughts that the way we were in Sydney was the real way we were together. By the time we got to Arizona we were not getting along at all and we were disagreeing about everything. We were into about
our fourth day traveling together and the second week or so of our time together. Lesia had decided to stop drinking and smoking somewhere along the trip and that was putting pressure on me because even though I did not smoke much I liked having a cigarette occasionally, whilst I drove drinking booze. This seems so foreign to me now that I can hardly believe that I used to smoke, having stopped one day more than twenty years ago, and now I would never think of drinking any alcohol before driving. But back then, twenty-four years ago, I was doing it all and I never thought anything would ever be different. Going ever further back I used to take LSD and drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco smoking pot along the way but at least I was not drinking and driving.

By the time we got to California I was looking forward to seeing Lesia fly back to Australia. We stayed for a night with my friend Dell who I had met in 1974 when I was selling picture-poems in New Orleans and is one of two people I have seen at different times of my life for the past forty years – the other being Randy. The next day Lesia was on the plane back to Australia and I spent the night with a female that all I can recall now is that she was a Pisces and I have no idea if I knew her before or if she was a friend of a friend or if I met her after seeing Lesia off at the airport. But she was the last lover I would have besides Lesia for years to follow. I do recall that she had an apartment in San Francisco. The next day I put my car into storage for six months and flew to Honolulu – I had a return ticket and would be returning in October.

My entry into Hawaii was a lot better than when I arrived in 1969 and it was good to see Randy again. He had a new girlfriend of Japanese descent that was a Hawaiian native. I love Hawaii and it is a place where life can be just too good and it is easy to get bored there. Considering it is one of the world’s more frequent tourist destinations and I have always been quite poor, to have visited there for varying lengths of time seven times so far in life is quite remarkable. (I am staying there for a week in November 2016 too) I always find it quite amazing how people will save for years to go to a place like
Hawaii or Australia and I have rarely planned and most definitely have never saved to visit these great destinations.

As I tell in book 2, my blood brother who I discovered in 1987 and first met in 2002 has lived in Hawaii the past forty years. Hawaii always seems to be a return point.

I was anxious to get to work at the radio station where I was going to do my astrology talk- back show because I did not have any money left and I had been living on credit cards with no way to pay them back. What Randy had not told me when I was in Baltimore, quitting my job, was that ‘the show’ was an idea he had and not an actual job. We went to the radio station and they were not interested in my idea at all. I began painting houses with Randy and at the same time I started a job at Queens Medical Centre at 1301 Punchbowl Street in Honolulu. I began working there as a psychiatric assistant nurse in the locked ward – meaning they locked the door behind me when I went to work with the ‘criminally insane’.

Those first few weeks in Hawaii were as good as it gets in my world. I was on a life-long holiday. I was 32 and had no concept of the future or that I should be preparing for it. I lived in my tent in the back of Randy and Cheryl’s house and got high all the time. As one does in Hawaii. I wrote letters to Beverly, and my three women in New Zealand and to Candice in Adelaide, I sent a postcard to Lesia too, providing the phone number of where I was staying in Hawaii, though at the time I had no idea why. I still don’t know why I gave her Randy’s number.

Life was good. Surely, finally, all my bad karma had been paid off and I would just have a lovely life for the rest of my life.

One afternoon Randy and his girlfriend and I snorted cocaine smoked some strong Hawaiian dope and went to see Slide-Guitarist Ry Cooder playing in concert. The only song I remember him doing that day was the Elvis song ‘Little Sister’ which of course has nothing symbolic to the moment. I think I was intrigued by the idea of him being born in the same year as me, 1947 – though on
a different date (March 15). We came home stoned as could be feeling as high and good as anyone on good Hawaiian marijuana and cocaine could be.

continued = 35. Guess what?

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About Dr. Terrell Neuage

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