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12 - Goals for 1987

Christmas  1986 with Sacha  and Leigh  in Mt. Compass

1987

1987 Middleton South AUstralia

Goals for 1987 –

Tooperang Road Mount Compass

Diary entrances for 2007 (a list of who gives a shit of why anyone would share their stupid diary with anyone… when in fact our lives are just passing nothings in the meltdowns of eternity – this moment, that moment, the next moment – none of it really of any significance. If we die at childbirth, if we are never born, if we live to be one-hundred and one like my father did, if we are president, murderer, priest, or just nothing like me, none of it really has much to do with anything of the future. It is only in our waken moment that we pass as important to ourselves and perhaps to some fool or the other that is in our passing vicinity. However, saying that here is some crap entrances I wrote in 1987):

February 06:

Dear Dad
Time goes so quickly.
I haven’t taken any photographs in so long.
We tried to ring you this morning at 5PM your time but there was no answer.
Business seems very difficult at present, so much goes wrong of late: machines breakdown is the main problem, but we plug along.

We so really want to visit. What I would like to do is visit and bring you back for two-month visit. I am trying to get Robert interested in bringing you out to visit perhaps in November and we all go back in December or we come to visit in December and bring you back with Robert for a holiday after Christmas and he could take you back. We’ll see.  Money is always such a problem but maybe I can get my business running well soon. Anyway, we think of you and Sacha likes you talking to his photography.
Love   March 18, 1987

I do not recall too much from 1987 it seems I was working hard and making plans. Every once in a while, I would think things were improving. I only have my letters to my father to give me any indication of that time. I often wonder what my father thought of my letters over the years because as I read them now they sound pretty crazy, and I wonder what in the world I was thinking at the time.

Dear Dad
I hope Robert didn’t confuse or distress you. I have a chance to combine my business with a tofu company in Sydney and as my sales are there mostly it would be a good idea. Two years ago, I said Lesia wanted to go to school in New York City to study psychology. At the same time, I miss America and have become quite homesick. The children say everyday they would like to see you, so I’ve decided to move back.
I would be a director in the tofu company in Sydney and at least I and the children would come back in the Northern summer (August/July) and the children would go to the grandparents in Adelaide and I would spend two months in Sydney working with this tofu company
I also am setting up an importing company to import Australian products as a business in the U.S. So, I would like to live in Maryland with the children. I don’t want them in New York City for obvious reasons. But I’ve thought it would be best to live in upstate New York so you could see these wild children. They could go to Shenendehowa and that is why I had Robert inquire about Joyce’s trailer. I would buy a car (in the $1500 $2000 US range). And have enough to live on for 2 - 4 months while I set up an import business. If worse comes to worse, I’ll go back to nursing or get another job. If Joyce’s trailer is not free because of her daughter living there are there houses for rent near you (within half an hour)? I’m hoping this will happen in December. However, I may spend 6 months in Sydney  it all depends how long it takes to set up my business, take care of my debts, sell off my machinery (worth $10,000 - $20,000) and gather products to import. Robert would help me in the New York City area. Could you send me some local newspapers (Troy/Albany) so I have an idea what’s going on (just the want ads) so I know what used cars cost etc. I have been here 6 years so don’t know of U.S. prices.

August 28, 1987
Reading this now I have no idea what I was on about back then. Apparently, someone in Sydney had shown some interest in my business but I do not recall that. And my export idea was probably one of those passing unwanted thoughts that sometimes lodge in my brain. What is troublesome is that I was forty years old at the time with two small children and a court order that said I could not take them out of South Australia. The other fact that I often ignored was that I had a failing business and not enough money to pay my bills.

I liked living in the farmhouse and the children seemed to like it there too. Sacha, being the independent of the two children, was often wandering off. Because Licky was with him I did not worry.  He was only six years old, but he had to always be off exploring. He had found an area in the woods to make a fort, and he traipsed up and down the hills. My primary concern was that there were snakes in the paddocks, especially along a stream that went through the middle of our property and my other concern was the bull that liked to nozzle up to the cows. But the bull was either too tired from so much activity or too old to pay much attention to us. We tried to get him to chase us a couple of times, but he was not interested. Leigh, being only four years old, was always with me whether I was making tofu or writing.  As I was doing when we had no electricity, I was writing poems and stories though I no longer have a copy of anything from that period. The three of us would go hiking and go to a pond on the property and throw rocks into the middle of the pond. In other words, nothing much happened that was noteworthy.
Some weekends they would go to their mother for a couple of days but there would be several weeks at a time when the children did not stay with her. At night I would lie on the floor in the hall between the children’s bedrooms and make up stories until they were both asleep. The only story I remember was a continuous one about our dog, Licky. Licky would often go out to the paddock, in my story, at night and the children would rub her nose and when that did that she became Lickety-Split, a dog with wondrous powers especially to fly to other planets. One of the planets that Lickety-Split would go to was the Planet MOO which surprisingly did not have cows but did have lovers of cow produced goods, cats.
In the distance they could see the star of Mongt the planet Dong and the moon Tong received all their light and warmth from the star Meng
The cats of MOO were having a crisis as there was no milk. In a distant and bygone era, it used to rain milk, but the lakes had dried up because there was no more raining of milk. Then along came Lickety-Split to the rescue. Like any Christ-like God-sent-dog messiah figure that had taken on dog-illumination and had become Christed, Lickety-Split, was able to transmute stuff.  Living on a farm as she did, Lickety-Split was able to obtain large amounts of milk and magically transport them to the Planet MOO.
Suddenly they heard a noise coming from between the row of apricot rhododendrons and the yellow azaleas. Licky began barking and ran over to the nearest rhododendron bush. The children quickly followed. To their surprise, there was a large strange looking animal looking straight at them. The animal looked like a cat, like a regular alley, street, or anybody's at all neighbourhood cat, cat, though not as ugly as Bob-the-cat. The only part different was its size. The creature was larger than Licky. Licky was a large dog, not huge, mind you, but large. The cat was shaggy, a sort of dirty played-football-in-the-mud sock, dark brown, with black streaks. It had a white circle in the middle of its forehead. Its long bushy tail had a white tip, and its feet and toes were all white. Its ears went straight up into a point, like rabbit’s ears do. The catlike creature had a green box on a purple chain hanging around its neck. The box looked like a small computer and was hung in front of its throat.
"What is that," questioned Leigh?

"I don't know, but I hope it’s not thinking of us as its lunch," Sacha said hesitantly.
Licky didn't have anything to say, she wasn't even barking but was just sniffing the large animal or whatever it was.
"You can call me Space Cat," the large creature proclaimed. "Space, what, quizzed Sacha?
"Space Cat," it said.   

I can speak any language in any universe that is what this box in front of my throat is for. It changes my voice into whatever anyone is speaking. Actually, I MEOW like earth cats do, but unless you understand MEOW it's not much good speaking in that mode." Just then the creature began to bark. Licky barked back. The two of them barked back and forth for a while*

"Your dog is special, that is why I am here. If you push her nose she changes from Licky to Lickity Split. When your dog is Lickity Split she can fly and leave the earth, too. Not only that but if you two hang onto her while she is flying, you can leave the earth, without having to have a spacesuit on. I have been appearing to Licky in her dreams for a long time, so she knew that I was coming. I just forgot to tell her what I looked like. She always thought I was a dog, because I spoke to her in dog talk, as she doesn't speak MEOW. Since I wasn't on earth when I came to her in her dreams she didn't see me but made up her own pictures of what I look like. She thought I looked like a Dalmatian - the kind of dog that rides on a fire truck. It's really quite funny, but you won't understand."

SPACE CAT AND THE FIRST TREES sometime in 1986 or 1987 at Mount Compass 
Bob the cat
We spent many a night on that story with varying adventures then we moved on to different stories, but I do not recall them now. I was enjoying being a parent.  It is by far my favourite thing to do.  Parenting. We spent a lot of time playing. We would use the whole house for games such as building a marble track that would start in Leigh’s room and go through the hall and wind around in the living room. We had it starting about four feet above the floor and it was a gradual descent to the living room. We also had an electric train that went throughout the house, and we were constantly buying more track and carriages and cityscapes for our set up. We had the train going through chair legs and under tables. We only ever had our electric train set up in our Mount Compass home and I carted around our boxes of tracks and cars for more than a decade. They gradually became rusted and when I finally started to abandon Australia in 2002 the boxes of tracks and carriages were left on the sidewalk in front of the last Australian home my children and I would ever have together, our home in Christie Downs. Years later, with all the events that befell us, our last home was our last time together except for the time together when only two of us were still alive.

I was thinking about life on earth on the way home from work tonight, Thursday, 9 March 2006. I have thought about life on earth for many decades, but I began a different track this time. I have come to believe that there is really nothing to believe in – or at least not in the sense that there is something outside of ourselves to believe in. But what I find interesting is that we are possibly approaching a time where we can exist forever. With the promises of nanotechnology, life extensions, cloning, the possibility of downloading one’s life into a cyborg type of thingy, space travel and all the bits and pieces that science is bringing into our evolutionary selves we could have parts of consciousness throughout the universe.

Of course, we are looking at two-thousand more earth years to be able to leave the universe. But looking past the bullshit that has been passed down for two-thousand years that we are supposed to believe and comparing it to how fast things are going now – now that enough researchers have moved away from religion and religion no longer has the influence to stop research and real life progress we finally have a chance to live forever.

If we did this then we could have our Saturn-Self ~ our Saturn consciousness. In a decade of Saturn years some two-hundred and eighty Earth-years would have gone by. We could have a part of our self on each planet living with the body that functions on those planets. Then we would branch out throughout the galaxy then the universe to eventually leave this budget universe.

If we had progressed at the rate we have for the past decade since the time of Plato, we would be doing that today. What is so interesting is that is exactly what metaphysics teaches. That we take on different bodies and our earth body is just what we are going through a certain set of experiences with. That sometimes we live on Jupiter or Pluto or Venus and sometimes we need these hard-core lessons, so we get sent to prison which is earth or if we are really fuckups then earth, acting as a kindergarten is where we are sent to learn basic shit.

Now at the end of this thought I have not really gotten anywhere and I am just as confused and unknowing what the hell is going on with life as I was when I left work. Shit. Though I can imagine some things that would need to change if we lived forever. Surely we would not want to be married for ten-thousand years to the same person, or go to prison for ten-thousand years or anything for such long periods. So it would end up just like it is now – we would come to earth; fart around for a century or so then go elsewhere. We would have different families on different planets as well as different lives. I suppose I would be Saint Terrell on say Uranus, a teacher on Pluto, a sex fiend on Jupiter (twelve earth years to every Jupiter year sounds good and it is such a large planet I could really have a bit of a wander, and of course on earth I would just be a bum.

Our first couple of years on the farm Leigh was not in school yet so we would play at home whilst Sacha was in grades one and two at Mount Compass Primary School. We use to go and collect Sacha at the end of the school day but he wanted to take the bus, so we were left with little to do except to play and cook meals. Leigh helped a lot in the kitchen, and we would make bread and muffins and whatever we had for dinner. I made all our bread for years and the favourite was banana bread for quite a while until I got too carried away with ingredients. I have rarely followed a recipe in my life, including my commercial tofu products, and I learnt to cook from mixing things together.
The last bread I made I mixed peanut butter and jelly (jam) in it and it tasted awful, so we went to buying bread. Outside of the tofu business, which had its moments, life was good. Some fifteen years later when Sacha and I were taking a drive to Victor and doing the Neuage’s homes view we sat along Tooperang Road looking at where we use to live on the farm and Sacha told me how he remembered that time as one of my playing so much and that it was not like a normal family. We discussed how it differed from other families then I said maybe it was because I took LSD several times and smoked a bit of funny weed from Hawaii that made our life a bit different than others. Somehow that explained a lot to him. 

He remarked how it all made sense from that point on. Of course, our neighbour’s and those we came in touch with would just have assumed we were a regular family except that we had a single parent household. Being a male single parent was strange for that area and I did not come across another male single parent until we moved to Victor Harbor a few years later. We also had a brush with success that really looked like we were on the way.

I have no idea how we met them but two people showed up at our farm and said they were investors and that they would be interested in seeing the tofu business take off. I had one other person a couple of years earlier that had some political connection to Adelaide show interest but he did not come up actual money. The political person whose name escaped me was a real hustler. He had a Rolls-Royce, hqwahbzand we drove around and went to pubs and dinner together, but I did not trust him and even though I thought something would come out of it nothing did and I decided not to have anything to do with him anymore. This was back when the tofu factory was in Adelaide. He would tell me how he and friends would know when areas would be re-zoned before they were and they would buy up land then sell it later for huge profits. He seemed like such a wheeler dealer that I thought it would all go wrong.  Of course, looking back as I seldom do anymore because it hurts too much it would have been best to go along with the business/politician and then sell everything and gotten the hell out of there while I could. If I had life would be so different, for example, there would be no part three to this book.

But these two people that started to come to our farm out in Mount Compass came up with money. They gave me ten thousand dollars, and I never signed up for it. They dealt with other people’s money and would get investors to put up money for what they said were high-risk ventures.  For example, me. I was to pay back the money at a very high interest plus everyone would get a cut of the tofu business. It all made perfect sense to me at the time. I was heavily in debt, struggling to get my tofu and products interstate and even in the local shops. I was making tofu in a small dairy that did not seem very sanitary. There were rats everywhere and Bob-The-Cat did not really seem interested in them. They seemed to be the same size as him and nothing seemed to work to make them want to leave the area.

Dear Dad
Have had a major change in plans. I was one day away from selling off all my machines when some people came along wanting to invest in my business. So, I am producing from a dairy on our land, so am very close to home, just a few steps away. The children are fine they really wanted to go to New York for Christmas but I want to put at least six more months into this business then look at selling it. Also, if I left now my investors would probably shoot me. Don’t know what to say anymore it sees as soon as I get all my plans together, they change. I had set up to export some Australian fashions but will put that on the shelf for now.
If I could get the money, I would have you and Robert visit for Christmas  maybe&
Love Terrell   October 21, 1987

Reading my pile of letters that my father saved all these years is revealing. I had forgotten about starting some fashion export business. I still don’t remember it. I think someone was a clothes designer and I entertained the idea of setting up a label to sell in the States. Hopefully I never got beyond thinking it would be a good idea because I barely recall anything about it.

My beautiful four-by-four truck, with Light Foods nicely painted on the side had a diesel motor. I bought a truck with a diesel motor because I was told it was cheaper to run and because it did not have a radiator, I did not have to worry about putting water in. Well, that came unstuck at the end of 1987 when the motor cracked one morning because I had not put water wherever it was supposed to go so I was without a vehicle for a while because I did not have the money to get it fixed.

Christmas  1987 Mount Compass  with Sacha  and Leigh

13 - Dear Dad

About Terrell Neuage
PhD

Terrell Neuage at Kerala beach, February 2025

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.