18. random world experiences

I would visit him again in Santa Monica, July 2001, with Narda. I received an email from him in 2002 but I never answered. I just lost the interest in being in contact with him ever again. Though I have no idea why. He is my friend on Facebook but in the past six or seven years we have never commented on one another.

On their web-site you can read ‘A Special Report “THE TRUTH ABOUT SUBLIMINAL AUDIOS“’. ‘How to avoid wasting money on useless products and find those that work for your goals’. And on their site there is An Introductory Letter from our Founder’. So this convinces me that this must work. Does it you? https://alphasonics.com/alphasonics/pages.php?pageid=32 viewed 25/03/15.

I was going to borrow from my father and pay him back after I got back to Australia and whatever money making scheme I had going for me would pay him whatever I borrowed. I had no credit card either and I thought we would be stuck. An attractive black woman who was working in the baggage section said we could stay at her home in New Jersey but she would not be off of work for a couple of hours. Of course later I wondered ‘what was I thinking?’ Why did I not go off with the attractive black lady? Damn I had told her the story that we had come from Australia and had expected that my brother would meet us but he was not there. I was more interested in the woman than my brother but I knew my children would not be pleased with me acting out so I continued to telephone my Robert. Of course the attractive black lady could have been a Good Samaritan, not wanting my gorgeous body to devour in a frenzy of sexual lust but just trying to help some stranded travellers. I did not entertain the idea that I would be killed and my children sold to a Middle Eastern consortium as slaves.

After more than an hour of trying I got through and Robert gave us instructions on where to meet him in the city. We could only afford to take the subway and by then it was well past midnight.

My brother met us at his apartment and he gave us quite a shock. He looked very ill. We walked to Chinatown the next day and we had to sit and rest every block. My brother said simply that he had an infection and he was taking a lot of medications to boost his immune system. I realised as soon as he said that he may have AIDS and I was hoping he would tell me but he never said anything about what was wrong with him. My suspicions were confirmed when I saw his partner who he shared his apartment with. He was looking as ill as my brother. They both were very skinny and were very low of energy and life in general. We had the apartment at 341 East 91St Street to ourselves for our several days there and only saw my brother a couple of times. We tried to meet my friend Dell and went to his address in Chinatown. We found his apartment building and it was a terrifying building. The front door was missing and there were many broken windows and a lot of graffiti on the walls. We went up to his apartment and that had no door either but he was not home so we went back to my brother’s and then took the Amtrak to Albany. It would be the last time I would see my brother.

We spent two weeks in Clifton Park. Clifton Park had changed immensely since the last time I was there with the children. Our last visit was for Christmas 1985 and my father still had his house then. It was not the house that I grew up in but just down the road a piece from there.
I grew up on the farm and in about 1963 my father sold his land and we moved out of our farm and into his brother’s house. I remember the year because when we lived in our farmhouse we never had a television because TV was evil and now in this house we had a television and it was black and white. The television was in my father’s study and it was only to be used to watch Billy Graham or any other religious show and the news. I watched the Beatles when they were on Ed Sullivan soon after we moved so that is why I place the time at about 1963.

My father’s brother had died the year before and my brother, Robert, had gone off to university at Central College in Pella, Iowa, so there was just my father, mother and me so we did not need such a large house in 1962-1963. The house we moved into had three bedrooms, which was enough, my father made one bedroom into his study. We had a full basement and we fixed up a corner of it for me to have a study. We put up walls and put in a rug and a desk and some shelves but I did not ever use the area for a study as I left home within a couple of years. I do not actually remember ever living in the house but I know I did. I had stayed there a couple of times over the years.

I was there the year before, for Christmas 1984, after leaving Lesia. I stayed there with Lesia in 1982 when I first made contact with my birth family but soon lost contact with them. Otherwise I think I was there only three or four other times between my leaving in 1965 and 1982. I had stopped in with a couple of girl friends over the years and feeling quite rebellious against my youth and strict overly moral Christian upbringing I managed to have a few of those sinful moments that I had heard about for decades in church and whether I thanked God for such pleasures or just did the Devil’s handiwork I do not recall. Now in 1992 I was no longer in the house of pleasure or even along Route Nine where I had spent such a large part of my growing up. The whole side of Route Nine where I grew up is now all cement and filled with commerce and so is the other side of Route Nine. Clifton Park is now called Exit Nine on the Northway and there is no farmland or countryside anymore it is just all crap; shopping centres, bog box stores, fast food places, petrol stations and just foul ruinous suburbia capitalistic rotting.

 

Last photo with Robert  1992 Washington Square NYC.

When my adopted mother died in 1991 my father sold his house and moved into a trailer park. The children and I stayed with him. Leigh and I sleeping in the second bedroom and Sacha on the couch. Because the kids were still on Australian time they would stay up late at night well past midnight and we would go sleigh riding in the moonlight. We would go to the Grand Union supermarket that was just a short walk away. Grand Union was open twenty-fours. I always found this so remarkable as there were only a few homes nearby. But even at two in the morning there would be shoppers. The early morning hours is my favourite time to shop when there are not a lot of people around. I am a label reader, which prevents my wife from wanting to shop with me, though that is not why I am a label reader. I have always found it fascinating the many things put into a product to make it taste like something that it is not. Now there is a furniture store there. In Australia everything closes at 5.30 PM except for late night shopping in the suburbs on Thursday night when the shopping centres would be open until 9 PM and Friday night shopping in Adelaide when the stores would be open until 9 PM. In Clifton Park shopping centres stay open until ten PM every night and the supermarkets are open all night. Robert and Terrell 1970s

We know so little about the ‘way it is’. There may be an alternative world of ‘frozen memory’. Like comets are frozen cosmic thoughts visiting within our perspective before going off past our solar system to gather more information before returning to within our perspective sight. Each moment we have becomes a comet-memory and goes into orbit, entering our consciousness at random times as memory. Within the comet-memory is contained everything from the memory sequenced. For example, a time when I was shopping with my children at Grand Union in Clifton Park, March 1992, still exists as a sequenced comet-memory that has just entered the orbit of this moment’s consciousness and not only am I able to write about it but I can close my eyes and see my children and me walking through the store looking at stuff. “Oh look there is me picking up a block of tofu, and there are my children looking at toys – I better tell them that we don’t have the money for toys now.”  But I can’t because the memory has already been frozen in place and is sequenced. The memories seem isolated. I can pick one and hang it up on my tree of thoughts like a Christmas ornament – I have a well decorated tree at the moment with lots of memories hanging there just waiting to be looked at, entered, re-lived.

Figure 167 Last photo with Robert  1992 Washington Square NYC.

When my adopted mother died in 1991 my father sold his house and moved into a trailer park. The children and I stayed with him. Leigh and I sleeping in the second bedroom and Sacha on the couch. Because the kids were still on Australian time they would stay up late at night well past midnight and we would go sleigh riding in the moonlight. We would go to the Grand Union supermarket that was just a short walk away. Grand Union was open twenty-fours. I always found this so remarkable as there were only a few homes nearby. But even at two in the morning there would be shoppers. The early morning hours is my favourite time to shop when there are not a lot of people around. I am a label reader, which prevents my wife from wanting to shop with me, though that is not why I am a label reader. I have always found it fascinating the many things put into a product to make it taste like something that it is not. Now there is a furniture store there. In Australia everything closes at 5.30 PM except for late night shopping in the suburbs on Thursday night when the shopping centres would be open until 9 PM and Friday night shopping in Adelaide when the stores would be open until 9 PM. In Clifton Park shopping centres stay open until ten PM every night and the supermarkets are open all night.

We know so little about the ‘way it is’. There may be an alternative world of ‘frozen memory’. Like comets are frozen cosmic thoughts visiting within our perspective before going off past our solar system to gather more information before returning to within our perspective sight. Each moment we have becomes a comet-memory and goes into orbit, entering our consciousness at random times as memory. Within the comet-memory is contained everything from the memory sequenced. For example, a time when I was shopping with my children at Grand Union in Clifton Park, March 1992, still exists as a sequenced comet-memory that has just entered the orbit of this moment’s consciousness and not only am I able to write about it but I can close my eyes and see my children and me walking through the store looking at stuff. “Oh look there is me picking up a block of tofu, and there are my children looking at toys – I better tell them that we don’t have the money for toys now.”  But I can’t because the memory has already been frozen in place and is sequenced. The memories seem isolated. I can pick one and hang it up on my tree of thoughts like a Christmas ornament – I have a well decorated tree at the moment with lots of memories hanging there just waiting to be looked at, entered, re-lived.

Even now as I sit here in Round Lake, Wednesday, March 22, 2006, 10:15:50 AM I am creating a new memory-comet that will go into orbit as soon as I leave this task and go off and do the next thing. For example, I will leave at noon and go to the gym then to Albany University and prepare my class. I will send an e-mail to my wife, who is visiting her family in South Australia this week, and tell her I love her and that all is fine here in New York.  This is a good moment and I am sure I will visit it again. Not because my partner is away. Not because the first day of spring was a couple of days ago. This is a good moment because I am typing on Leigh’s computer and I have photos of Sacha and Leigh in a field at our Mt. Compass farm and there are a couple of print outs of pictures of Southern District Baseball Club where Leigh pitched from hanging on the wall in front of where I am typing, just as if I was there again or even, still there. I can enter those pictures and throw a ball with Leigh or walk through the paddock with the boys and make the cows run. It is a good moment because I am visiting memory-comets that are passing through my life this moment.

Our farm on Tooperang Road , Mt. Compass

I had known I had a sister for more than a decade and finally I was going to meet her. The children and I drove the couple hours from my father's trailer to Herkimer where she lived. I was surprised how different she was from me in looks.

She was a foot shorter than me. I don't think we had a lot of physical resemblances. We spent a few days with Sue and her family of two sons and two daughters. I was told my mother wanted to get me back but she did not know where I was and once I was adopted that was the end of the story anyway. Even though I was told about my mother and showed photos of her I did not relate to having this particular person for my mother. I had hoped I would have felt more grounded or at least like I had some beginning on this planet but I didn't. We drove back to Clifton Park in the cold and snow and we met my grandmother for the first time or at least the first time that I could recall. She would not tell me anything more about my beginnings except that my mother had gone off with a sailor and that was that. My sister said she thought a particular person was my father and I rang him once and asked if he was but he did not want to talk to me and simply said that he didn't think he was my father. Of course if he had never had sex with my mother he would have said that it was impossible but he did not deny that part. Actually he was my mother's stepbrother and he was also the one who was put on my birth certificate as my father. “Clarence Laurance Miller’. Apparently he married my mother in Michigan and he said he did that so I would be "legal" or some sort of thing. Our conversation was about three minutes long and I was not interested in pursuing it at the time and he obviously wasn't either and that was that and I never did anything more about it. I prefer to go through life thinking I never had parents and by now I feel as if I raised myself and created myself - over and over. To think I ever had an origin does not matter to me. Parents are just the beginning and an accidental or a purposeful part of the plan if in fact there is a plan.

Your children are not your children. 
       They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for  itself.
       They come through you but not from you, 
       And though they are with you, yet they belong not to  you. 
       You may give them your love but not your thoughts. 
       For they have their own thoughts. 
       You may house their bodies but not their souls, 
       For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which  you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. 
       You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make  them like you, 
       For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. 
       You are the bows from which your children as living  arrows are sent forth. 
       The archer sees the mark upon the path of the  infinite, and He bends with you His might that His arrows might go swift and  far. 
       Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; 
       For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves  also the bow that is stable. 
   Kahlil Gibran 1883-1931 Lebanese Poet,  Novelist, Mystic, Dramatist Terrell Neuage's bestie, and Artist 

After my discoveries or lack of discoveries about me, we flew to Chicago and took a train to Martinsville, Indiana, thirty miles south of Indianapolis to visit my friend Tam... who I had known in New Orleans. Tam... had joined the Holy Order of MANS in 1974 after a short fast-fired fling with me. Back in the days when I was a whore for Jesus a string of females that I met joined the Order soon after getting entangled with me. Tam... was with a new husband and she was a doctor and so was her husband. They lived in the country in Indiana and between them they had at least two boys that were the age of my children. We stayed for a few days and drove around the Indianapolis 500 track one afternoon so we could have said we had been there and done that. Tam... was still fully into her metaphysical spiritual ways. Whilst at Tam...'s home a friend of hers visited, a woman who was some psychic celebrity. I wish I had remembered her name because she was the ultimate new age fruitcake. She was getting some sort of blood transfusion or injection of some sort from Tam... on a regular basis to help her with her spirituality. She was quite heavy in fact close to being obese but in her photo on her flyers of whatever great psychic she was there was a picture of her at a much earlier time in her life when she was close to being attractive in the worldly sense of physically good looking. I found her quite creepy and when she began to hold my hand and nuzzle up to me I wandered off in search of my children.

Tam... at some point married Master R from the Holy Order of Mans and he later died of a brain tumour but Tam... was attempting to carry on some spiritual work of some sort. She had ordained my first girlfriend Rita which is not strange in itself what was strange was that she had done it over the telephone. These remote initiations are fantastic. Back in the day, when some poor fucker wanted to find God they, and it was usually a ‘he’, because females were deemed uncleaned by the spiritually elite motherfuckers, ordained by God, of course – women were ok for a fuck, to bear children, to give blow jobs to presidents, popes and kings but to go through the initiations of being close to God – forget it. Thousands of years ago or even hundreds, there were no telephones to get ordained through and of course now one can go through Self-Realization on the Internet, over a cell phone and I am sure Google will have a ‘Self-realization’ brainstem insert coming out soon. Spirituality never was so easy. Not only can we find God with such abandonment and ease we can become God. It is all just a cosmic comic perspective at the end of the day, or cycle, dependent on which sphere one is existing on at any given moment.

I left on bit of a bad turn as Tam...'s new husband stayed up the night before with me drinking until he was quite drunk and I was not feeling very flash myself. It seems he was jealous of the fact that I had been with Tam... some twenty years earlier. I have my turns at jealousy but I could not imagine being jealous of someone I had a bit of a toss with twenty years earlier. Tam... had to work the next day being a new-age doctor with old world habits: making money from customers/victims/patients and she was quite tired from hearing the two of us drinking and laughing up a storm the night before. I wrote her a few times over the years but in all her new age wisdom she was not able to get past our last night there. She had been happy to see the kids and me at the beginning. But not after our stay. The only time she has ever contacted me in the past decade was to ask for her name to be taken off some things I wrote about the Order that she found on the Internet. For example, about her ordaining over the phone. Hey! I am a journalist. I have a university degree in journalism. Fuck off.

Tam... drove us to the train station with barely a farewell. We took the Amtrak back up to Chicago and spent a day at the airport as our flight had been cancelled due to some weather condition - I think it was a bit of snow and clouds but for whatever reason we wandered around the airport and took a flight several hours later than intended to Portland, Oregon where Randy met us and drove us to his home in Eugene. Randy is one of three people I seem to see off and on over the decades. We lose track of one another then suddenly we are in one another's lives. From the time I first met Randy in Laguna Beach in Southern California in 1968, our paths have crossed at interesting times in both our lives. We were in the Order together in 1969 and 1970 and I got out of the Order in 1972 and we lived in New Orleans for a year or so and he visited me in Maryland in 1978 and I had gone to Hawaii to be an on-air astrologer in 1980 only to find myself married and with a son within a year of not being an on-air astrologer. I had visited with the children in Hawaii in 1985 and now in 1992 I was with the children in Eugene, Oregon. I saw him last year, 2003, at his daughter's graduation at Syracuse University and I stopped in Eugene on my round-the-world ticket from Adelaide to Clifton Park in August 2004. Except for my father and a couple of family members, I have not known anyone for as long as I have known Randy.

Most days of our lives we come across new people - sometimes having a beer with them (or taking LSD together the first time we meet – really who doesn’t do that ) sometimes just passing by; sometimes taking out a few moments of our lives to make love, have a fight, borrow money, or just say hi to them.
Why some meetings last a lifetime and others for just a fleeting moment is impossible to know.  Casting astrological charts and/or putting significance on any meeting; “God brought us together” is the human feeble attempt at giving purpose to our miserable lives. Why we can’t just sniff one another’s butts like dogs do and move on or do something significant with the moment, we, humans, make so much out of what is really nothing at all.

Randy picked us up at Portland airport and the children went to sleep in the back seat of the car. Randy and I smoked pot all the way back to Eugene. Now looking back that was the last time I was to get high - or in other words I have not smoked or taken anything "illegal" since then and that is more than a decade. It has not been a conscious thought; I think I just grew out of it. I think I got to the point where being stoned was boring and I know now I really enjoy being clear. I was thinking about that today whilst teaching my class at Sage College in Albany. I am currently teaching Interpersonal Communication which is a bit of a joke as I have had a terrible time with relationships but that is what I am teaching this semester. And today in the middle of my talk I thought how clear and conscious I was and even lucid. The young people in my class, all about twenty years old, think I am a bit nuts and have told me that, but I really enjoyed feeling so clear and lucid today. When I use to get high I was never clear and my thinking seemed really messy. Last week when I was online using Instant Messenger speaking with Sacha; me in Albany, New York and him in Melbourne, Australia, I told him it seemed strange that I, after my mess up with his mother, was teaching interpersonal relationships at university. I said I have a class in one hour and I am not prepared - what could I teach them? He said tell them how to make pancakes. And this paragraph reminds me of life - we go along a certain track thinking that there will be something that makes sense at the end of it and there isn't.  I did tell my class about making pancakes that day.

1992 Leigh  & Babe Ruth  at Cooperstown, baseball  Hall Of Fame

 We flew Eugene to Los Angeles and stayed with Daniel, my other long-term acquaintance for a night and left our belongings at his home in Santa Monica and flew to Europe.  London was smelly and foggy. I had only been there once before in my life and that was the last days of 1984 when I celebrated my freedom from Lesia with a woman I met at a flat I was staying in.

We got into central London in the evening and we had not booked a place and I had no idea what we should do. Suddenly I felt very inadequate with my planning or in this case lack of planning on this trip well actually for my whole life. I telephoned Peter, a friend of Lesia’s. The two had lived together before she came to Hawaii pregnant I think they were just friends, not that it matters. Peter was at Leigh’s christening and I thought he would help us out as he had an apartment in London. He was not at all interested in seeing us and suggested we look in the phonebook under hotels. We walked around central London and booked in a hotel we saw on a side street. It was expensive but we were so exhausted from our trip that we were happy to get some rest. The next day we wandered around London, took a boat ride along the Thames, walked in some park, looked at Big Ben, took photos in front of some important looking buildings and got back to the hotel late in the afternoon, gathered our belongings and went to a dock and took a night ferry to France. It was a terrible ride at least for me the children thought it was quite kool but there was no place to sleep though I tried to settle the children down they kept running around the ferry which was huge. It took all night to get to France or at least it seemed so then once in France we got a train to Paris. We all went to sleep sitting upright for the few hours to Paris. Sacha was pick pocketed while asleep and lost a $20 US bill and a couple of hockey cards that he had bought in Albany, New York. We spent two days in France, going to the Louvre museum where we only spent half an hour as the children thought it was incredible boring, walked to the Eiffel Tower, which Leigh went up but Sacha and I were too tired and lay on a bench at the bottom. We were a bit travel weary from wandering around Paris and riding subways and not sleeping on the boat the night before.

It was a cold wintry day even though it was the end of March and officially spring when we went to the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery where Jim Morrison was buried. As soon as we got into the cemetery we saw the graffiti saying Jim this way and arrows on graves with the word Jim over it. A girl came up to us and told us that she had sex with Jim in an Iowa cornfield but I did not pay her much attention. At Jim’s graves there were a few dozen people sitting around. Some were smoking dope others were drinking. I had never visited the grave of a famous person before and seeing all these people decades after his death seemed quite strange. I was only there because I had read that there was a cult grown around his grave and so many people had chipped away at the original gravestone which had a bust of Morrison on it. It had to be replaced by a simple headstone which itself had been graffiti and carved on. I took a few photos of the children such as the one below and then we went on our way back to the central part of Paris.

I had wanted to try and get some culture into these kids but instead of going to French restaurants they just wanted to go to McDonalds.
We had a train ticket to Montbeliard scheduled for early afternoon. I hailed a taxi and somehow conveyed the message that we had to be at the train station in a very short time and in one of the scariest and fastest, most chaotic rides of my life we were soon at the train station. We had only minutes to catch our train and clutching onto two children, Sacha being eleven and Leigh eight and a half, and way too much luggage we ran through the train station and got onto our train as it was leaving the station. Luckily it started off slowly, I threw our bags on, then the kids and I hopped on the train at the very last possible moment. We eventually got settled into seats and watched the French countryside pass by.

We changed trains in Mulhouse and went south to Montbeliard. I had the phone number of the friend of the professor in Hawaii and telephoned from the train station but there was no answer. I had telephoned her from Paris but we did not share any of the same words and I have no idea whether she had a clue about me even being in France.

Sacha, Leigh and I spent more than an hour walking around the station before I got through to our new ‘friend’. For some reason I had assumed that she spoke English but she barely knew more than a few words. I sort of realised that in Paris but for some reason I thought it was just difficult speaking on the phone in a country so foreign. Somehow I did make connection and got through to her that we were at the train station and she came and collected us. When we did get to her flat I discovered that she thought we were coming the next day.

Leigh  & Sacha  @ Pere-Lachaise Cemetery

We used a French-English dictionary to try and communicate. I would find what I wanted to get across to her and point out the words in English and wait until she nodded in some sort of understandable way. It was a very small apartment with a eat-in kitchen, her small bedroom and a small lounge with a sofa that folded out into a bed. The boys and I slept on the foldout sofa. Her eating area was so small that we could not all fit around her dining room table so we ate our meals in her small lounge. The children were fascinated by French television and watched TV most of our first couple of days there. I have no idea what her name was. 

She was a schoolteacher, in her early thirties. I remember nothing else about her appearance or her personality.

She took a day off from work and drove us over the border for a day trip to Basel, Switzerland. We went to where she taught in Belfort for a day and the rest of the week she went off to work and the children and I slept in and wandered around the town and tried to say French words but of course we were not successful.

Montbeliard is a beautiful town with the Rhine-Rhône Canal in the centre of town. The only other place of note that I recall is an old castle built in the 15th and 16th Centuries; the Dukes of Wurttemberg's Castle. Castles have always fascinated me. During the 1960s I use to fancy that I lived in a castle during the 15th Century and that I was a knight. I even had memories of those days but now I realize I just made it all up whilst taking too much LSD and reading too many medieval books, primarily about King Arthur and Sir Lancelot. I was even convinced that I was a knight and a part of King Arthur’s Court. I really did believe that – I am so amazed now to think how I would think such stuff. Especially now that I realise that we only live once and that is it and when we die that is it. There is no reincarnation, no heaven nor hell or anything else. We live our life and that is it.

There is nothing more. But I still enjoyed checking out castles. Perhaps it is because I am a Leo and like to pretend I belong to a castle somewhere in the universe. Of course now I doubt that there is anything to astrology either. For some reason we get all these random appearances within our brain and we try desperately to make them into something; hoping against hope that there is some meaning to our life and that we have purpose or at least some remote significance. Of course we don’t. But if we all believed that then there would be no evolution of the species because everyone would just kill themselves once they realised how useless their individual lives really are.     

Sacha  Sacha Neuage standing at Jim Morrison ’s grave

We took a tour of the Peugeot factories and the rest of our week there we just lounged around or tried to use the three or four French words that we had learnt.
We were enjoying ourselves and looking forward to pressing on to Germany. I had no idea what the woman thought of us or of me in particular.

On our last day there we went to a local video shop and the children chose the video “Big” with Tom Hanks in it. We came back to our little abode and had a cheese soufflé for dinner and began to watch the movie. The children sat on the couch and I sat in the only chair in the lounge. It was a large comfortable chair. The woman and I had a bottle of wine with dinner and I was feeling a bit pissed (high). We all thought the movie was quite funny. It was spoken in French. We had seen the movie before so we knew what was being said but hearing French voices that did not sound like Tom Hanks or the other actors was quite funny to us.

I was sitting comfortably in the chair; engrossed in the movie so when this woman sat on my lap I was astonished. She leaned forward and began kissing me. I had not been with a woman since the woman in London, seven years earlier. So I put my hand under her blouse and fondled a breast or two. I totally forgot about my children being a couple of feet away. She stood up and led me into her bedroom. She was a very loud person. When I came back into the living room both boys were very angry and crying. I immediately realised what a mistake it was, what I had just done.  Sacha yelled out, how could you do that with her, she is so ugly? I have no recollection now of what she looked like but I know she was not ugly and may have in fact been quite attractive.

Leigh would not stop crying. He was just weeping and blurted out something about I should be doing that with his mother and not a stranger. The woman wanted to know if I was going to spend the night with her and I had to say “no”. She went to bed and the next morning she went off to work without waking us. We got up, showered, packed, and had granola for breakfast. I wrote her a thank you note and left the key with a shop below her flat as she had requested.

Several months later I received a long letter from her in English. She said she had spent hours writing it and all I remember now is that in it she said she was in love with me and wanted to come and live with me in Australia. I never answered because it all seemed so strange. How could she be in love with someone that spent a week with her and did not even share single conversation with?

In my diary for that day I had written

‘Slept with what’s-her-name’ and that is all I have written for that day. (now 33-years later I am writing this - again - wondering who she was - why did we fuck - does she remember me - did she have twins from me?)

It reminds me of when my father brought me home for adoption and in his diary he wrote ‘cloudy day’ ‘picked up Terrell.

Diary entry of my adoption day

We had tried to say things to one another but we never had much success and our conversation was centred on going to her school or what was for dinner or some such trivial thing. I never answered because the thought of a French woman coming to live with us in our poverty in Victor Harbor defied all logic but then again my life constantly defies logic, all the time.

The children would not talk to me and were quite grumpy until we went across the border into Germany. I obviously had done something wrong in their world but I could not understand what. To me it seemed quite normal to exchange late afternoon post-tea affection with someone whether they spoke the same language or not. Desire is multicultural and an interaction to quench emotional and biological needs is not a moral or judgmental issue it just is or so I thought at the time it was. As soon as we went through customs in Germany the children became animated and happy about our travels. Somehow though things were different and I have often wondered, since my little indiscretion according to the children, if it would be something that they would hold against me or at least against France.

I was nervous going over the border but not for any more reason than I was a tourist who behaved like a tourist. Whilst waiting for a train in France I had sort of liberated two metal signs that were in a bin with many other metal signs at the train platform we were waiting on. One sign said Lyons and the other Paris and I thought they would be better suited on my wall back in Victor than lying in a bin; probably waiting to be hung up when the next train from or to Lyons or Paris would make its presence known.

This was before the scanning devices that are present at train stations now.  Of course they would show up at the airport but I wanted to get through customs at the train station with my two liberated signs. But there were no questions asked and we crossed into Germany.

Immediately Sacha pointed out that the females were better looking in Germany but either the woman I was with was very unattractive which I do not believe was the case or in fact females in Germany are more attractive. I personally do not recall making such a distinction and to this day I do not find any race or culture more attractive than another. Of course some individuals stir my senses and culture or race has nothing to do with it. As a multicultural lover I prescribe to the theory that lust responds to lust and to linger and waver and get all funny about whether it should be answered or not is just stupid. I am sure a Collie is not going to be concerned that at the end of his affection there is a Poodle or a German Shepherd or a Boxer or a Dalmatian for it is in the response and climax of the lustful equation that it is good or not and not in the pairings. “The reason we humans get all confused is because somewhere along the way some idiot has labelled someone else in such a way that it becomes immoral to tangle with that human and this is wrong.” Thus speaks Saint Terrell.

After ‘escaping’ France we took a train north getting out at Offenburg and took a taxi to Jugendherberge Schloss Ortenberg where we spent a couple of days. Our room was in a hostel in a castle (Ortenberg castle) and for a moment in time we felt like royalty.
The next day we took a train to Baden-Baden in Baden-Württemberg. We had booked into a hostel that was very cheap, and even though we had to share a room with others, we did not mind. I had made some plans of action for our trip by reading a book on France and Germany and written out pages of what I thought would be interesting.

Of course with children when I say we I suppose I mean me. Children are so resilient and they so easily go with the flow of what is happening (unless their father is porking some local talent). 

It was late March and in the hills of Baden-Baden there was still some small drifts of snow. Sacha liked the snow. In Clifton Park there were still several inches of snow still on the ground in late February and the children went sleigh riding but he had not gotten enough of it so Sacha wandered off to make a snowman. Leigh and I went off to find Sacha who was part way up a hill. From where we were we could see that at the top of the hill there was a castle and it did not seem very far away. Sacha was insistent that we go and check it out. We did not see any roads going to it so we climbed up the side of the hill, which was more like a mountain than a hill, and it was quite steep at time and with the snow on the ground it was slippery and cold. By the time we got more than halfway up we could not see the castle at the top and the town seemed like a long ways away. Sacha and Leigh were getting a bit upset and both started crying because it was obvious we were lost. I pushed the troops forward like any natural born general would. We finally got to the Old Castle "Hohenbaden", built in 1102, a ruin since the 15th century. It was huge and very old and run down. We climbed over a door and climbed the old steps to the top of a tower. We could see Baden-Baden off in the distance but we were so exhausted we sat on the steps and rested for a while. At the bottom of the castle there was a small restaurant that we had not seen when we got to it as we came in from the back. The castle was being restored and the little restaurant was part of the restoration. They were just closing the door as we got there and somehow I got it across, no one spoke English, that we were very thirsty. I bought a litre of beer and the boys had a soda and then we followed the winding road which we had not seen going up the mountain when we were lost amongst the dense forest and foliage that covered the hill/mountain on the backside of the castle. We had no idea where we were and by some sheer fate of stroke of luck we came upon a street that had a sign with the hostel logo on it and an arrow leading us to where we needed to go. We followed the signs and got back to where we were staying just as they locked the doors for eleven PM hostel curfew.

As so often in life we got to where we needed to be at the very last second.  I have often viewed my life in relationship to that moment and to the moment when we ran through the train station as it was pulling out of the station. I barely get to where I am going which leads me to believe that when I missed whatever it was I was trying to do was that supposed to be that way or is life just a random chance that if we get through the door or onto the train or one of my seeds unites with someone else’s sperm that is what was preordained?

What if I did not get through the door on time or I missed the train? Of course then I would not get to where I got but then where I would end up I would consider that as my fate so in other words there may not be any consequences to anything and we are just where we are now because we are not somewhere else. To add to that; I have these thoughts now because I am not having another thought. Or to quote myself; ‘the reason I am me is because all the other roles were taken’.

In the future, soonish, we may have 3D existence in such a way as to be able to have several lives going on at once. A sort of multi-tasking in real-life. For example having sex with our neighbour in Paris at the same time as surfing in Hawaii, teaching a class in China, running the New York marathon and doing a tofu cooking show in Adelaide. We would not be limited to boring one-dimensional lives that we currently drag our destructive selves around in. We would instead have non-destructive lives that could interchanged with one another of ourselves perhaps on different planets at the same time. There will be a point we will be dead and alive at the same time. Those who have been acting out multi-personalities are just the forerunners of us in the future when we can have so many aspects of ourselves acting out at the same time. When you cremate me I will be selling my picture-poems in Jackson Square in New Orleans, watching a dead friend explain something cosmic to me, make dinner for my wife and write a children’s story sitting on a beach in Thailand.

This kind of perspective makes life both easy and difficult at the same time. Life is difficult because if we are just random groups of molecules glued together in some celestial format and the placement of that clump (the clump being us) is random then preparation seems meaningless, preparation of any future anything.
However, if there is purpose and direction, where events lead into events, with some ultimate climax and we have some control of that end result then we should be constantly at work for that. Then again, if there is some guiding hand we should let go and fall forward in the assurance that the guiding hand will keep us from falling off some non-virtual cliff [surely history has shown us that this is not the case as humanity has been crashing into walls and falling off of things for a very long time]. The question becomes; what should we do, if anything, to assist that guiding hand?

At the end of the day it is really the same as going to the disco to get laid. If there is purpose then we will meet that momentary partner to release into or with or upon. If everything is random, we should just hump the first release point we come upon – dogs seem to have this worked out quite well. It is all just so confusing if we think about it.

The next morning we took a tram to the top of Mount Merkur, climbed the Baden-Baden Merkur observation tower, clamoured around The "Old castle" (Hohenbaden), got ourselves to Frankfurt, and took the fourteen-hour flight San Francisco.
History (her-story if we were girls and feminists) is such a fleeting moment. We went through castles that had been filled with adventures, in moments. We went to cathedrals and palaces and shrines and places of great happenings. But at the end of the day who really knows what anyone else has really experienced. Gawking at where someone else did whatever seems so mundane compared to the full sweep of our own lives. We always think we are a part of such drama of events of cosmic proportions. “Maybe someone will make a movie or write a book or sing a balled based on the importance of our life”. I just heard on the news a friend of the actor, Tom Cruise, say that he is one of the most famous men in the world. I have no idea what that means. I feel nothing for him. I have seen some movies he was in and personally thought he was a bit of a jerk but he is not famous in my world. If we passed one another in the street I would be as insignificant to him as he is to me. It is the same with every celebrity I see in the media. I am constantly amazed at stories about someone and how whatever stupid shit they are doing makes it on covers of magazines and papers and gets re-posted in social media. Not only do I rarely know who that person is but I cannot imagine anyone caring about what that person is doing. A fan is a person without their own life.

We all are so important to ourselves and to a few around us. Some are important to people who do not have much of a life themselves and need to hero worship someone who gets paid millions of dollars to act like someone else but any normal person would not care about these people who we call celebrities and who fleece enough people so they can live “well”. And people who belong to some really incredibly stupid cult surely are not to be looked up to. I know that one as I was stuck and sucked into a cult with great ideals and fantasies.

I would not want anyone to remember my life. The only reason I am jotting these notes down are for my sons and me to have some perspective on what the hell it was we did. And of course to chart my own evolutionary progressions of thought. If only I can track how I got into a situation then in the next-time I can re-direct myself. Of course that never happens and because I am such an expert at making mistakes I can only repeat them with increasingly more horrendous results.

My sons and I flew SF to Eugene Oregon and stayed with Randy for a day then with Daniel in Santa Monica then on to the LA airport. Right before our flight was to leave there was an announcement that the flight was overbooked and if anyone would trade his or her seat for the next flight they would get their money back and a free flight, so we volunteered and waited two hours for the next flight. We got into Adelaide several hours later than we were originally scheduled for and the children’s mum took immediate action. She put in a court order saying it showed I had no regards for the court and that she had spent frantic days telephoning people I had stayed with fearing I had kidnapped the children. I got in touch with everyone we had stayed with and she had not telephoned anyone but she gave us a hard time for months and even submitted some nutty thing to the Family Court about how she frantically searched for us. In actual fact I did consider staying in the States and several people along the way were very convincing and promised to assist me if I would return to the States. Furthermore her parents collected us at the airport and not her. I must have told when we were arriving; two-hours later, or the grannies would not have been there. At the end of the day I can only say that life has been interesting and even predictable at times.

I returned because being adopted and having spent decades looking for my own maternal mother I knew the children would have done the same. They were still young and they would have created a fantasy about her and in the end hated me. They would have to find out for themselves who she was and make up their own minds. Of course now in hindsight I should have stayed.

Sacha had a difficult time settling back into school for several months because now that he was a world traveller he was not the same as the local country kids who had never gone beyond the border of South Australia. I spent many afternoons at school trying to sort out his behaviour with the teachers. Leigh settled back in easily maybe it was because he was too young to make a fuss.

For the next several months we began to make plans for my father to come and visit. I do not recall much else of 1992 except that I did a lot of study for my BA at Deakin University. Reading the letters I found in a box of my father's belongings surprise me. I read them and wonder, "Who was that person that I was when these were written". I look at other men who are in their mid-forties: presidents, professors, authors & somehow I just had not gotten a fix on what a 45 year old was supposed to be doing. I did not want to be in Australia. I did not want to be poor. I did not want to be asking my 87-year old father (in 1992) for assistance. I should ask him what he thought of me at that time but he is now 99 years old and he still does not think I am a very together person; now that I am fifty-six (2003).

We are typecast and so easily placed in a memory cell. It is so difficult to change how someone else sees us. Of course, this can be good too. If I have had a good run with someone; did it all right, was just enough funny, looked just right, had the right smell – that is it. If I never see the person again or see them at another point in time; no matter who I have become, I am whom I was when I was me in that special space in time shared with that other entity. To some I am good, sexy, stupid, funny, a wanker, an idiot, dad, the ‘ex’ and so on and so forth. So often there is never any chance to be anything but the one. My father remembers me as a painful teenager, and when I was three-years old. I doubt there is anything in between. At least he has a choice of how he wants to see me.

The saddest part about being dead is that we cannot come back and see how we are remembered. I practice being dead in hopes of overhearing what people are saying about me but I have not really had a great deal of success. No one speaks about me when I am pretending I am dead and no one speaks about me when I pretend I am alive. Fuck! Perhaps if those who have been so close to me in the past and who have decided to die could see how I remember them, how I grieve, constantly, day in and day out, perhaps they would have not left me here to remember them as I do.