11b. USA age 2.5 & 5 & 38

1986

I put my Vietnamese workers in charge of the tofu factory and the children and I went to the States stopping in Hawaii and visited Randy. The one thing I remember from that stay was that Sephera washed Sacha’s hair when he was sitting in the bathtub. We all thought it was cute; after all, they were only five. This was my third stop in Hawaii. Hawaii is one of those destinations that usually the rich do when they go on holiday. I recently read that Hawaii was the number one honeymoon spot for American couples. Not only was I married in Hawaii in 1980, but I managed to go there with a girlfriend, Carol Ann, in 1969 (with fifty cents between us). I stopped there last year, 2002, on what some would refer to as a honeymoon with wife number two and here I was in Hawaii in December 1985 with children in tow. It is amazing how people make going to Hawaii such a major thing when like Australia or New York or anywhere in the world it is just a stop along the way. Randy and I with our somewhat parallel lives would eventually both become single parents; I just started the joys of parenting alone a few years earlier than him.

We stopped in LA on the way to visit Daniel from my Order days. He was living in Santa Monica. We spent a few days with him and went to Disneyland, though the children were too young to remember it years later. Not to worry I have stored the memory into a space in space where Sacha and Leigh could, if they wished, active it, whenever they wanted. All I need to do is figure out how to activate these spaces. He was still living there last year (2003) when Narda and I stopped on one of our yearly trips around the world. Such a life us poor single parents live. Many people work all their life and hope to take a short holiday to go to some close destination once every couple of years and here I do not have a clue what I am doing in life, and I just do life as one big adventure. Sorry if that sounds or any of this sounds like bragging – I surely do not brag – I just question the human condition constantly; and travel and vacations are part of the human conditions as I know it.

From the warm Southern California climate, we arrived in the middle of a very cold snowy winter in New York City.
My brother was not at the airport as I thought he would be and when I telephoned him, he gave us instructions via buses and subway to his home on the upper Eastside. I thought we would be mugged, we were so obviously from out of town. My children had their Disneyland Mickey Mouse hats on and we were just there waiting to be shot or taken off to some bricked up warehouse in Queens and minced.

We were the only white people in our carriage and my two children, two and half and five sat there with their Disney hats on starring at the passengers. Everything to children is so fascinating but I was not feeling very secure, and I worried all the way into Manhattan instead of enjoying life to its fullest. Of course, nothing happened, and we were the weird ones on the train anyway and probably people were more worried about the likes of us than we were of them.

Christmas  1985 Clifton Park , NY with Sacha , Leigh , brother-Robert , father and me

We spent Christmas in Clifton Park with my father and my brother came up from New York City. Considering my 38 years so far on the planet, it was my favourite Christmas. Here was me, the wandering son with my brother and my father and my children and we spent a lot of time in the snow and just relaxing in my childhood hood. It was to be the last Christmas together with this group of characters as we all had different paths to take in life. At this time, Clifton Park was not developed and filled with shopping centres as it is now. There is not much to say about this time except that it was good and I wish we could have all just stayed there but I had a court order to obey, and my brother had his work in New York City, and my father was eighty. We visited my mother in the nursing home, but she did not know when we were there or even who we were. I felt so bad for my father having to be alone at his age and here we were going back to Australia and Robert so seldom came up to visit that he may as well as have lived in a foreign country too. At the nursing home my father would sing hymns with my mother but she did not know who he was but she could sing those songs and that was it she could not do anything else. My father had no let up with his Christian leanings one bit. He did not know that Robert was gay, or that I had gotten high a couple of times or that I even went so low in life as to have slept with a few dozen women without being married to them.

Of course, my argument to that would have been that it would have been impossible to marry so many women. Or I could have never fucked as many as King David, chosen by God, had. Blimey; there just are not enough hours in the day. According to 1 Kings 11:3, Solomon loved many women he had more than 700 wives and 300 concubines. Some weekends I would have had to get married four times at least and that was on a slow weekend. He knew that I was divorced though, and I think that was all right because Lesia was a Catholic and we all know that our life goes to shit when one marries one of those Catholics.  Just in today’s news there was this item:

"sex abuse by U.S. Roman Catholic clergy found nearly 11,000 minors have claimed they were molested since 1950. The abuse claims were filed against 4,392 clergy who served over the last half-century.”

The problem is not just dishonesty and deception but that there is the lack of opportunity to express love.

To make someone celibate or to withhold physical touch is going to at some point lead to answering the simplest biological urge, which is to fuck. The socially made-up moral codes that say we cannot have sex with another willing person is immoral. I recently saw a book in the local supermarket that was entitled "60 things God said about sex". I did not purchase the book or even look at it, except for the title on the cover. I wondered, as I stood in the grocery line, who would really know what God said about sex? Considering there is no future of any species without sex I would assume that the book would have told us that to fuck was divine. What else could it possibly say? Societies that are open about sex we call primitive whereas it is modern day Western society with so many rules about interaction that is perverted. Nevertheless, I would never single out the Catholics because every group has its people who do things that go against what they teach. I teach interpersonal communication at university, and I am sure I break some rules in my communicational interactions. In other words, little outside of our having a good time in Clifton Park happened so I was padding my paragraph.

• January 14th back in Australia
• February 15th Dylan and Tom Petty concert
• February 22nd final decree – divorcee – Lesia didn’t show at court hearing
• March 7th received $10,000 overdraft from bank
• April 23rd council OK’d tofu factory at piggery 
• Sept 9 $225 to Peter Scrags for custody order
• December 18th delivered nasty note to lawyer owner of piggery – something about a backhoe – end of factory 8.30 AM -   told to move out - Fallands said they were moving out
• 25th told Leonie we would move to her farm
  
  

Following Christmas, I went with the children to Baltimore by train from Schenectady. We stayed with the Fishers in Sparks, Maryland. Sacha celebrated his fifth birthday on January 4th. I hold the moment in memory knowing neither Sacha nor Leigh would have recalled visiting an area of my life in an area of the world we would never return to together. Of course, everything can only be memory now. The life of Sacha, Leigh and me together will never again be any more than in the past. The three of us were such a unit. However, I suppose that unit existed more in my mind than in theirs. We were so together then that now even though we are so apart forever we are still together.

There is a space in the universe, maybe it is in a parallel universe in a black hole at the edge of forever, where the three of us are still travelling and dreaming and planning for a future that somehow somewhere will manifest – somewhere far beyond the pains, mistakes and regrets of this life. I know it exists because the moment I doubt that it does I will no longer be able to go forward. I live in the past because I know that in the future I will be able to reclaim my destiny – my two children and I – free together in a distant dimension.  This will be in another sphere that is so unlike the physical world, perhaps more like a dream we suddenly wake from in this life, that it is impossible to even imagine it in this story. I am writing another story where this other world will be a reality, but it is currently on the ‘back-shelf’ until this story-project is finished.

We arrived back in Adelaide and the first thing we did was move. I started a day-care centre at the local football club in Mount Compass. Sacha was starting kindergarten and Leigh was with me so it seemed a good thing to have a day-care centre. One of the mothers at Mount Compass School who I had told about our tofu business said that she had a house on her property that we could rent. Also, on the property, there was a large concrete building that was once a piggery. We were renting a new three-bedroom house behind Mt. Compass School and we had been content with it but when we saw the next place, we knew it was time to move. We had been in our first home together for one year.

The road to the Encounter Coast is a two-lane winding hilly wooded country road. To get there from Adelaide we would take South Road (Australia seems to name roads instead of numbering roads like they do in the States) to the Victor Harbor turn off and drive through the wine area of McLaren Vale, up the steep Willunga Hill (which caused the death of a couple of automobiles for me) and to the first and only town before Victor Harbor, Mount Compass. When we lived in Mt. Compass the only shop across from the school was a deli and eventually during the 1980s a few more shops were built. There was a bottler (wine store) and a bakery which I sold my oven I originally made my baked tofu in to.

The petrol station that is there now was there then and I think a small butcher shop; but not being a meat eater, I did not take notice of that. I think there was a gift shop of some sort. In other words there is not much to Mount Compass if one did not live there or have children going to school except for a place to stop and get some lunch and a drink on the way to the coastal towns of Victor Harbor, Middleton, Port Elliot, and Goolwa. Three of those towns would become future homes for us in our eight houses in ten years’ living trek through the Encounter Coast area (four towns would become home if we included Mount Compass). If I add our tofu factory at Myponga we would have most of the towns of the Fleurieu Peninsula as part of our experience.

The road to our new next home was just outside Mount Compass turning left onto Tooperang Road which was one of the most beautiful drives to any home I have ever had. Tooperang Road is a windy road with a few hobby farms and dairy farms amongst a heavily wooded area. Further along the road is the Tooperang Rainbow Trout Farm where Sacha and Leigh went fishing, I think their only time and brought home a large trout for dinner. A few kilometers along Tooperang Road at its beginning from the Adelaide to Victor Harbor Road after Mount Compass Ice Company and around the big curve, sitting on a hill on the right side of the road was the old Mount Compass Piggery and at the bottom of the hill a two story chalet like house. The piggery had been abandoned years earlier and there were broken windows and the whole site was quite rundown, but I saw the potential for a large health food manufacturing base in that place. There was spring water flowing under where the piggery stood and because I used so much water in my production it made it an ideal situation for me. We moved into a small house on the property. It had one large room upstairs and for the next year we called this place home. My intentions were to start tofu production right away and I applied for council permission to build a food factory. I invited Jurgen Klein out and we talked about sharing the factory with my tofu at one end and his body creams at the other. He had just begun setting up his factory in an old cheese factory site in Mount Barker half an hour away. I also planned to build my children’s furniture in the same building as my tofu and Jürgen’s skin care products that would become famous as Jurlique skin care products96F. The Robins who rented the front of my tofu factory for their health foods were also going to move to the Mount Compass site. The building was huge, and I would have easily put my factory from Hindmarsh in one fourth of the area and all the other ventures would easily fit in. Another exciting step toward our surely successful life and business was that the people who owned the land were Seventh-day Adventists and they had a relative who was involved with the Sanitarium Health Food Company. There was talk that I would be doing big business with this group of people. I have had some stupid affinity with this madcap group since birth being born in Battle Creek, Michigan where the Sanitarium Health Food Company began, and in the future in October 2013 and again July 2014 I would have stents put into my heart at the Hong Kong Adventist Hospital and here was another shot of involvement with them.

Tooperang house at piggery

The couple that owned the property was going to help finance the rebuilding of the property and sell it all to me. Life could not be better for a few months. My customer base was growing and I moved my factory from the Hindmarsh location outside of Adelaide to what use to be a large cheese factory on Kondaparinga Road in Meadows. Meadows was a twenty-minute drive through Kuitpo Forest, a beautiful drive from our house on Tooperang Road. I saw the Meadow’s site as little more than a transient site on my way to the real factory I was going to build on Tooperang Road. I had moved from the Hindmarsh site because the rent was too high for my original tofu factory. Not being the businessperson that I should have been I made so many bad decisions that it is difficult to say which was the number one blunder, but I think how I ended up with the tofu factory building at Hindmarsh would be up there with mistakes that I should not have made.

Mt. Compass  Farm on Tooperang Road

When Lesia and I were going through the spoils of divorce-war there were two items that needed negotiation: the first being our home and the second the tofu factory. Lesia said at the start that if I were to go for any part of the house, I would lose contact with the children. I knew she could not do this and by now had realized that she had made a lot of threats and often made legal threats if things did not go immediately her way. However, I was concerned that the court would rule I would only get to see the children once or twice a month, so I looked at the various threats and thought the best way was not to go for any part of our home.

Lesia had put a down payment on the house shortly before meeting me and I paid toward the house for four years as well as doing a lot of work on the house itself. My lawyer said there was no question but that I should get one-half of the worth of the house. However, I wanted the tofu factory so as to continue my business. When the dust somewhat settled, we agreed, our lawyers agreed with one another, that the best plan would be that Lesia kept the house, and I got nothing, and I bought half of the tofu factory from Lesia. I could not really work out in my mind at the time, as I was too emotional about whether this was a good plan. What was not good was that I did not have the money to buy out Lesia as I had no savings because everything went into a joint account and suddenly there was nothing in it. We sold the tofu factory for about $80,000 on the condition of the buyer that I would rent it back for two years at $800 plus a month. Before we sold it the mortgage was a little over $300 a month. Lesia wanted back any money she had put into the factory such as the ten thousand dollars she had put into it from her accident insurance from Hawaii. We still owed some thirty or so thousand dollars on the property. At the end of the day, I ended up with the business and about twenty thousand dollars, which I used to buy a truck, and for our trip to the States. Whether at the end of the day I got a good deal I do not know.  I had wanted to trade the tofu factory for the house, but it did not happen, and I believe at the end of it I got a bad deal. I had never dealt with lawyers before and outside of just plain disliking the one I had, I would watch him go off and speak with Lesia’s lawyer; then the two bitch-lawyers would come back and tell us what would happen. I was amazed. I thought I paid my lawyer to win for me at all costs. Surely, he would punch out Lesia’s lawyer or at least kick him once severally in the testacies, but no such thing happened and in fact they looked like they were friends and were often laughing together. I am sure they were having a laugh at us. They could have been lovers and grabbing quickies in between laughing at us.

When the two years of required renting of the tofu factory that I had basically built from scratch were up I looked at moving because it was too far from my home in Mount Compass to Hindmarsh to drive to, to soak beans then drive back out to our home. I was always driving back and forth several times a week and each trip was more than an hour. In Meadows there was a huge abandoned ex-dairy and cheese factory and I was able to rent it cheaply. My health food makers, the Robins, along with the unknown lover, George, that had been renting the front of my tofu factory moved out with me and we started production all within a couple of days of renting the place in Meadows. We took it apart and rebuilt the cool room from my Hindmarsh factory. We dragged out all our heavy machinery and by winter 1986 we were the tofu makers and health food operators of Meadows. There was a small room on the side of the factory that the children would stay in whilst I was working. It was not ideal, but they watched television and ran around the factory, and no one seemed the worse for wear. Sometimes the Robin’s two children along with George’s two children would all run around together. It was not far to go home to our house in Mount Compass. The narrow winding road between the two towns was densely forested making our early morning and late-night drives extremely spooky at times. Kuitpo Forest was the site of the first plantation forests established in the Mount Lofty Ranges in 1898 and a hundred years later the wooded area covered more than three and half thousand hectares.

Only two things stand out from the time I made tofu in Meadows. The first was that I was told that Lynn, who I lived with in Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland, had committed suicide. I do not remember how I found out. I think I received a letter from Donald Fisher and I telephoned him from the factory.

I was shocked I had lived with Lynn and her daughter, Tracy, for more than a year in 1978 - 1979. No one knew why she would want to die she always seemed to have so much going for her and she was still young, and she had a beautiful daughter. How could such a thing happen? Why someone would want to end his or her life is beyond my mental reasoning. Lynn had some of the same beliefs as me that life is eternal and that this is just a passing phase and we are presented with experiences to either work off past doings or to improve our lot for a future life. After all we are all creators, and life is the physical manifestation of our thoughts of our conscious creations, and I know that Lynn believed that too. Almost twenty years later I would have had some correspondence with her daughter Tracy who found me through my Webpages but I have not heard from her for more than twelve years since then. Tracy said she still had a couple of the picture-poems I had given her mother, and I thought that was incredible. I sent her photos from that time more than twenty years earlier and then as people come and go in one another’s life we got out of contact. I have lost her email address though I recall she lives in Baltimore. I was in Australia when we began to email one another and with all that happened the past twelve years I have lost any correspondence I had with Tracy.

The other thing that stands out in my mind was a visit from Lesia…

I saw her car outside of the factory, and I thought she had come to take the children for a day or two so I could work without always keeping track of the kids. It was a Sunday, and I went to ask if she could take the children and I would collect them Monday morning. I went into the very small room, which had a bed and a small table with a television on it, and there was Lesia taking photographs of the room. She was taking a photo of a pile of clothes that were in the corner of the room. She made some comment about I would be hearing from her lawyer, then she got in her car and drove off. Neither the children nor I could believe what she had done. They had thought she had come to collect them too, but she was only there for ten minutes before saying she had to go. The photos never appeared in any court hearing, and I often wondered if she showed them to the children in their later years and told them that was how I took care of them. In actual fact we had a great house or two great houses whilst living in Mount Compass.

The first thing that was done with the tofu factory I was building in Mt. Compass after a few weeks of cleaning was to put windows in. From where I was making tofu the view was spectacular. In front of the building, which would have been well over one hundred feet long and thirty feet wide was a grassy slope. I was going to farm the area and grow organic soybeans and organic vegetables all watered from the natural springs on the land. There were several acres between the factory and Tooperang Road and there was a winding steep dirt road to the top. From the windows I could see the cleared farmland and the wooded areas surrounding it across the road.  I had very well planned out that where I would be cutting the tofu and preparing my secondary products would have the advantage of the large windows that I managed to get on sale and have installed. I thought after a year or so we would have a factory store where we would sell tofu products, health foods, skin care creams, picture-poems and I would do the occasional astrology chart each day and of course we would sell the classically carved creative children’s furniture or at least some rocket beds and car beds and kangaroo beds. There was wooded land behind the factory that would be ideal for some cottages for people to stay to get away from the stresses of the life in cities around Australia. I had a grand vision; whole foods, mediation, astrology, skin cares, and the beautiful countryside that made up the glacier-formed valley of Tooperang. There would be art and writing retreats. My brother, Robert, would come as a guest, and there would be seminars on parenting because if there was one thing I had learnt with all I had been through in my first few years with the children it would be how to parent. I was already starting to write articles about parenting and fancied myself a bit of a guru on being a single male parent. I would be discouraged for a moment when it looked as if all my plans were going slow or ‘heaven-forbid’ they may not even happen - but then I would go look out the window of the factory at the valley that spread before me and know that I was living a blessed life. And I was going to be making soy products for the Seventh-day Adventists and the Sanitarium Health Food Company.

Not that I gave a shit about the Seventh-day Adventists or know what they are on about other than Saturday is like a Christian’s Sunday to them though I have never taken the time to find out why. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this shit of a story here, where I was born – the very hospital I was born in – was originally a Sanitarium/ Seventh-day Adventists enclave right there in my birth town of Battle Creek, Michigan. I am sure there are some connections in our life – cosmic paths that we follow along, but we are unable to really discern what those paths are because we are such assholes.

Our home life was difficult at times because I worked so much, and we seemed not to have much money and I had a bit of a difficult time keeping track of finances, but I saw it all as birthing pains. A grand vision that will become a grand project needs a lot and I had a lot. I especially had a lot of faith. At the time I believed in miracles and I believed that everything I had learnt in the Order and from doing astrology and from listening to subliminal tapes and reading lots of new age books was coming together for this great enterprise that I was chosen to bring into manifestation. I had told Lesia how well things looked for the future for the children and me but she only laughed and told me I would fail but I paid no mind to her because I had the power of my beliefs and if I had to really stretch the ‘spiritual truths’ I was saved at a Billy Graham shindig in Madison Square Garden back when I was seven. Lesia said I was delusional. I said I had vision. We got a dog from a store window in Gawler Place in Adelaide and named her Licky, for obvious reasons. I think it was just a mix of lots of types of various dogs, but we loved her as a composite ‘Our Dog’. Licky  in Disney gear – Mt. Compass  1985 –
Hats Leigh  and Sacha  wore on subway in NYC.

 We got two cats too and named them Bubble Gum and Chewing Gum. They disappeared and we figured a snake or something that was not a vegetarian ate them. We got two more cats and named them Peanut Butter and Jam, and one got run over on Tooperang Road and the other disappeared. One warm day when our door was open a large grey tomcat wandered in. The children and I were sitting in the lounge and could not believe what we saw. The cat walked, went to where Licky was sleeping on the sofa, swatted her across the nose, causing the poor dog, only about six months old, to run howling out the door and then the cat laid down on the coach and went to sleep. I had never seen such a thing. The cat lived with us for years and we named him Bob-The-Cat.

Licky never became friends with Bob-The-Cat. She managed to keep quite a distance and when Bob-The-Cat wanted the couch Licky would go elsewhere. Bob-The-Cat was most likely a city cat that was dumped out in the country because the owners could not put up with his controlling ways or perhaps they moved or were abducted by aliens we have no idea but Bob-The-Cat seemed to like our house and he was not intimidated by anyone.

Our house consisted of one large living area and small kitchen and a dining room downstairs. Upstairs there was just one big room. Because the children were so young, Leigh was between two and three years and Sacha was between five and six, we slept in one huge bed. I think it was bigger than a king size. I also did not have any girlfriends during this time so one bedroom was fine. Actually, I was mostly celibate from January 1985 until April 1992 because I did not want to get involved with another Australian.

BOB THE CAT AND HIS FAMILY

 Mount Compass is too hilly and remote to be cemented over by highways and shopping centres and our new home reminded me a lot of where I grew up. In the mid-1960s my father sold our property, and we moved down the road to where his brother had lived. We moved into a smaller house than the sprawling hundred-year-old farm that I remember as a child. The house in Mount Compass reminded me of that farmhouse. It was not a hundred years old or two stories but it was large and had a rambling farmhouse feel to it. There was plenty of land too.  The difference was that our Mount Compass home had rolling hills with a combination of cleared land and woods and a pond at the top of a hill that overlooked a valley. Often there would be kangaroos hoping across the paddocks. Clifton Park was flat though we had a lot of woods and lots of cleared land and instead of kangaroos we had deer that would come to the door in the winter.

Soon after I moved into Falland’s farm I moved my burger making process to the farm then eventually I moved my whole production to there. The barn that I moved my food manufacturing into was very small and not a barn like barns are in America. It was not a farm but a couple of small buildings together. I moved my tofu gear into the dairy barn – or the Australian equivalent of a dairy barn. It consisted of three rooms. In one room there was a thousand gallon refrigerated milk vat that I used to store my tofu in as I did not rebuild my cool room but took it apart and left it somewhere on the farm. The milk vat could have been five hundred gallons. I am not sure. Someone once said it was a thousand gallons and I think they were referring to the milk tank. Then again it could have been the words to a song that I got confused by; “she had enough milk in her tits to fill a thousand-gallon tank but I loved her just the same”. There is not actually a song like that, but it could make a good country ‘n western diddy. Maybe Dolly Parton could sing it. It was about ten feet by three feet and five foot deep. Next to the room that had the milk vat was a room about five-foot square; barely enough room to swing Bob-The-Cat by the tail in area and that became my secondary food production area. Next to that was an area where the cows use to be milked. It had a roof but no walls though the area was fenced in to keep the cows out. There were still more than one hundred cows that lived with us, well not in the house with us but on the land. They just seemed to roam around the farm and were content eating whatever grew on the ground. They were no longer milked, and I am not quite sure what their role in the scheme of things was. We pretty much stayed clear of them and their male mate, the bull. I think the idea was that they would get pregnant, but they were in the background of our life and just part of the ambiance of the place.

My only encounter with the cows was a bit of an ugly one. I would make up large batches of burger mix, enough for a thousand burgers. One day some cows broke through the fence and got into my burger mix which was in 25-gallon plastic tubes. I had gone into the house to check on the children and I never realised how strong cows were until then. I hit and yelled at them, but they kept on munching until I managed to punch one hard enough in the head to make her and her two mates run off. I had lost most all of my weekend production.

During this time I began experimenting with making a cheese combined with cow milk and soymilk. On Tooperang Road on the other side of the road to Victor Harbor was another old cheese factory building and they were still producing cheese at it. I met with people from that factory and from CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) in Adelaide about combining soy and cow milk curds together to make a new product low in cholesterol. For a few weeks I thought we would come up with a new product that would be healthy because of the high amount of the isoflavone genistein found in soybeans. We tried different coagulants and after a few weeks of meetings my life was just becoming too difficult to keep track of what I was doing so it fell by the wayside. I realised I did not have a clue what I was doing, which of course was nothing new; that I wanted to be in the States; that there never seemed to be enough money; that I could not keep track of who owed me what, and the whole tofu business and raising kids at the same time with no assistance was becoming too difficult. There was one period that I got so far behind with my finances that the electricity to the farm was turned off. It was during the winter, and we cooked our meals over a barbeque on the porch. I did not have the telephone on at the time either. The electricity was off only for three weeks but we had no lights or heat, and I was unable to make tofu during that time. I persevered forward though still believing that I was going to have a successful business and the children and I would one day sell the business and move to the States.  I would write poems and what I think I thought at the time was a great novel by candlelight. I figured that one day my children and I would look back on this period and have a good laugh. We would be sitting at our lovely home somewhere in the States and we would be wealthy because of the great success of my novel that I was writing.

I have no idea what the novel was about or whatever became of it. I did not have a typewriter, and computers had yet to enter my life so I had many pages of handwritten crap that I worked on for a few years then it was dumped in between one of our many moves and that was that. I am convinced now that it would have become number one on the New York Times Best Selling List. I would have become a millionaire and famous and I would of course have been in the movies that would have been made from my novels. But I have no idea anymore what they were about.

12 - Goals for 1987

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 77.