try this intro to book two - the first few paragraphs are at the end of book one but it continues for 400 or 500 more pages just as life does

if you have already read this at the end of book one then of course jump to the start of Book two, the story now continues, with all new materal

TryThis

“Leaving Australia, After” available from Amazon  as paperback, e-book, hardback

,Online in sections at   https://neuage.org/leaving_australia/  & book one is online in sections at https://neuage.org/LeavingAustraliaBeforeTheAfter/

 (“Try this” – try raising two children with two hands tied behind your back… a novel started in 1995 and re-started many times over with this current story edition started from scratch in Germany in July of 2003. Below is the opening paragraph from the 1984 version.)

"It's not all that bad - being a parent, actually it is really almost quite easily accomplished. Just put Them out in the garden and water Them once in a while and They'll grow up just fine".

I believed that once. Don't anymore.

Last night when the policeman knocked on the door, or did he ring our doorbell? It was so confusing at that moment. Two AM - dog barking, head-butting the door. My girlfriend pushing me out of bed as she escapes under our sandalwoodstainedsatinsheets.

Dreams dissolve into dissolution. My son says, 'I didn't do it Sorry dad', as He goes off to His room followed by two 'friends' I have never seen before -
One of which could possibly be a female. Perhaps they both were.
Why is my life like this?

Back in '78 - 1978 that is. I lived with Lynn and her eight-year-old daughter. Lynn and I weren't really lovers. Oh, maybe on the odd occasion when snow had newly fallen fresh and we didn't have a date we would pretend we were each other with someone different, wanting us more than we really did each other, but that was not usual. All I ever wanted in life was to live in a world of usuals. I never have. We lived in a small house in the country not far on a clear day from Baltimore to Washington D.C. Leos, pretending we were in a mansion, or just a small weekend retreat in some foreign Alps. I was kind of happy. Maybe Lynn was too. Her daughter was, she wasn't an adult. How could she be unhappy? Use to tell Lynn that someday I too would have children. I would be a single parent...the only way to pretend the world is different than it is, is to do it alone with no one there saying it isn't. Lynn wasn't happy being a single parent but I would be. I had a feeling. It would be great. me and my Children. Having a wonderful time frolicking through life. I would live in a two-story house somewhere in New England with two children, a story for each child that I would change as they got older and I would write novels as snow climaxed outside. Somewhere this story changed when without me paying close enough attention it changed and I didn't with it. Now I have been a single father living in a foreign country with no nearby alps for fifteen, longer than would have been if I had not done them here, years, while too poor to buy paper to write novels to my two Children reading them if there was snow to read them against down here in Australia.

Lynn  committed suicide in 1984. Me in Australia her Maryland. Never got to tell her the joys of parenting single handed. Two hands tied behind my back too. Dreaming of developing my beingness in lightly falling snow that never here has known.

It keeps happening. The noise and clutter. All my Son wants to do is beautiful the neighbourhood - the ugliness of suburbia is just too much for him. A few cans of spray paint can do wonders for these parts. I decide I will learn to understand. my Children. My my my how will I ever understand? Home from the library. Arms full of books, articles, magazines. Graffiti. Hip-Hop.

When my son first said he was into Hip-Hop. He was eleven. Year six. We were living in Victor Harbor. A tourist destination when there is nowhere else to go. After fifteen years in Australia I am beginning to think that most of this big island is a destination. It was originally a destination for convicts...excuse me that is my Americanized colonial self-perceiving deceptive-perceptions... of course before it was a destination it was home to non-convicts, the real owners of this land. Such intruders we whites were. I was a convict of mis-guided love, and now I am imprisoned, gently raising my children on this island floating out of Dreamtime. Kangaroos. They use to hop across the back of our farm when we lived in Mt. Compass before starting over again in Victor Harbor, before starting again in Port Elliot, Middleton, Hackham, Christies Beach. We would go out to the paddock and watch our dog chase them. Hip-hop. Hip-hop. Sacha was not into kangaroos suddenly. It was Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop is a culture: rap music, graffiti, skateboarding and anti: Anti-everything. I wanted to know more. Did my Honours thesis on

'Graffiti as text'. Read. Talked. Observed. Even did some myself.

my Children Graffitied
the face of time.

This is going to be longer than I had expected it would be should be could be. I started writing this in 1978; Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland with Lynn and Tracy, when I did not have children - just the imagination of how easy it would be. Having children. Well credit to where credit is due. Of course, I would not have the children like in those comedy films that come out every so often. Arnold what’s his name having a baby.

Yeah Right Let's be realistic. Some woman would have the baby for me. I would get her pregnant in the normal back seat of my Chevy, underneath a voyeur moon in Scorpio way. A beautiful act in itself. I wish I was Mosses or Noah or one of those people who God told to populate the earth. Solomon. No wonder he was so wise. What a guy. Seven hundred wives as well as 300 concubines. Why hasn't Hollywood done a movie on him. Speilberg's 'King Solomon'. See randy Soloy seduce one-thousand pin-up broads. Nakedly. Then wham. Christianity comes along. Guilt. Guilt.

And more guilt. One woman. One man. Or burn in indignation… Wow So I wrote that first few lines at the beginning of this chapter long ago. Kept adding to it. Then one day I had some children. A wife. Actually the wife came first, then the child then I moved to this foreign shadow. The wife was foreign to begin with. She was just returning to her shadow with me in chains crawling behind. Suddenly, I got divorced. It was like having a toothache in the middle of the night and even though I pulled the tooth out sometimes it still hurts. I couldn't leave the foreign shadow. My family and friends were dying one by one in America. I was dying one by one in Australia. I was very very poor, not very smart and losing my clinically classical Neanderthal mind. I had two children - babies actually, in the year of their Lord, 1984. I had no friends. The wonderful South Australia Family courts said, "here, hear, have a couple of kids, just don't leave town with them. Don't you leave either". I threw away all that I had written about the joys of parenting except for the first few lines.

Now I will start all over again. About being a single father. Or single mother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, grandmother - I am them all - unto to myself, unto THEM - my father my dead mothers, my dead brother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, grandmother, son. I have changed attitudes, switched gears, toward raising children. I hope by writing this I will realise what that changed attitude is and in what gear it is. And my children will not be dented in their attitudes toward life needing perpetual un-denting by future new-age therapists in the future, as they laboriously try to explain:

"Dad? Well he just kept slipping further and further away from reality. Spinningly. We tried to pull him back. So did his girlfriend. Then she slipped and fell too. We were worried that we would become sucked into the same vortex, so we sent him to the 'Jimi Hendrix Nursing Home for Lost Shadows'."

Hawaii port shipping belongings to Adelaide. At this point in my life all my wordly belongings fitted into this one large crate and one suitcase. How I now have a large shed and a house full of crap 45-years later is, well, beyond me.

2- 1981 the start

BOOK ONE
Return to Home Page of Book Two

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.