You were so beautiful

Names are so personal and commitment orientated. Once we have a name we are supposed to remember or use it as an identifying mechanism; we have personalized the experience instead of abstracting a current-moment for future reference as a memory of sort.

 

But for wherever in the universe or even on earth you, Maggie, whatever your last name was, you were the predicted high long ago and far away.
Thanks

LIKE AGING WINE
A LONG TIME
YOU AND I
WE HAVE BEEN.
5-8-72 New Orleans

 

I wrote this to Randy!  Me, your average chauvinistic type of guy - writing a poem to another guy.  How new age, how gay.  I never bought into all this new-age male sensitive new-age male crap.  I've always been into individuals.  When I'm with a woman - well I'm not going to change my behavior, too much. Of course, if I wanted to be with someone in the distant past maybe I modified the way I was a tad bit or slightly morphed into something acceptable to the other person. I don't need to do that much anymore, which is a relief; well, I change or actually adapt, a little bit, but that is just part of socialization I suppose. Probably one of the main reasons I did not have a girlfriend for over a decade, 1984-1995, was because of my failure to realize I should make some changes.

 

This particular poem doesn't sum up what I think of Randy.  It's not even a good one.  But what I find interesting is that 22 years later, now at 47, I feel like aging wine.  The years of fermenting brain.  Now even more time has passed and at age 67 without having alcohol for more than a decade I think my brain is even more fermented. Go figure. The only difference between being stoned or and drunk is that when in those states we are not conscious of how stupid our lives are and without drugs and alcohol we are conscious of how stupid our lives are.

 

To Carol Ann Benson -

I am so sorry you have gone - just left in your sleep the day before I left for Australia last year (2007). I never really got to see you again after the 1960s in San Francisco and Hawaii. You framed my life in so many ways and maybe it was good that we never were together again so you could live these days in my mind as you did in my life at the end of the 1960s.

 

You were a one off 'flower girl' that was too free for this planet filled with its empty mindless souless inhabitants. Good bye Carol Ann. 20 February 2008 

 

Windows open

curtains possessed by the wind

laughter in motion

I remember her walk

everyone did

the movement of her skirt

swallowed my thoughts

her chemise showing more than could be veiled

as my senses were captured

        imprisoned in her smile

She was freer

than any wind I had ever felt

slipping

passing my mind

like curtains

possessed by the wind

in open windows

enlaced memories.
3-21-94 Victor Harbor SA

 

I was just a step from eternity

A-top Tower Eiffel

When I saw her enter Grand Palais

and the choice no longer was clear

        end this life

        Or try to make it

With the girl entering Grand Palais

We got married

Had some children

Got divorced

She sued me for everything

        ran off with the kids

        the yacht

        Porsche

        jewels

        credit cards...

               and my latest girl friends too

At least I have something to analyze for eternity.

        5-5-94 Victor Harbor South Australia  

 

I was selling picture-poems

alongside Jackson Square

in New Orleans

reading astrology charts to the lovely ladies       

(telling each how well our charts matched: "my Mars to your Venus - what a night we shall we have")

and selling esoteric sacred secrets to the Christians when I saw her standing there reading my picture-poems

She said what my poems said shouldn't be said

she came and told me that every day at noon

But I paid no attention (like any man would)

Until the day she took me to her home somewhere north

in the constellation of Andromeda (the chained lady)

I met her anthropomorphic parents

a tree and a shirt

Then I awoke twenty-years later

in this small harbor town

on a large island North of Antarctica

where I began selling picture-poems (poems saying what shouldn't be said) in a park again

(come and purchase your picture-poems at Rymill Park on Sundays in Adelaide that aren't rainy or windy 9-5)

But I watch for her like a criminal does for justice

knowing someday it will all make sense

and I will be like everyone else

free of me.

4-17-94 Victor Harbor South Australia

 

One of the reasons I write short snippets is because they have different meanings at different times.  Everything is based on interpretation.  This is something I tried to tell my ex-wife - before I totally gave up on her.  I use to tell her that her interpretation of me was wrong.  This is probably the crux of all relationship problems.  Relationships use to last a long time, hundreds if not thousands of years ago - until all these psychoanalysis trippers came into being.  Then we began to interpret each other's behavior instead of accepting the person we are standing there interpreting.

One way this poem can be interpreted is that Randy and I are like aging wine.  We become more fermented as time goes on.  Old wine is just regular wine that has gone senile.

 

Another way to say this is that the older the wine the better it is - so some say.  Probably some tart or dirty old man first used the line on someone much younger to get into her or his pants.  I did not write this with that in mind - I am stuck on the concept that we have become more fermented as time goes on.  Pickled brain stem, stewed cerebrum, memories on ice with an olive.

Recently I wrote a particular angle to this new age sentiment.

 

DON'T SHOOT ME I'M NOT THE SENSITIVE NEW-AGE MALE
I PITY THE MAN WHO WRITES POEMS
PAINTS FLOWERS ON CANVAS
OR PHOTOGRAPHS SUNSETS
YET DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO ENJOY
A BAR-ROOM BRAWL
LUST'S CONCLUSION IN ONE MINUTE’S TIME
WORLD WAR TWO MOVIES.
1-23-94 Victor Harbor SA

Back to why I write short poems - outside of being a bit lazy - and the thought of writing a 500 page book when I can say so much in so few words becomes overwhelming at times.

I PROMISED YOU THE WORLD
BEFORE I HAD ANY IDEA
THAT THEY
WERE GOING
TO CHANGE ME
FOR IT.
1969, Honolulu

 

I PROMISED YOU THE WORLD
BEFORE I HAD ANY IDEA
THAT THEY
WERE GOING
TO CHARGE ME
FOR IT.
1969, Honolulu

I met Carol Ann around the beginning of 1969 and I have revisited those moments in Part 1 but I have to outline it again if for no other reason than to remind myself that once upon a time, a long time ago, I really did live this other life. This other life that is such a part of me, it affects the way I think, the way I drink my coffee, the way I walk the city streets.

 

I am haunted by my past. I see my future as a dark cloud, my present as illusion, and my past as my waking reality. The present moment is a dream that I will awaken from, turn over in my bed, and say to Carol Ann;

 

Below Carol Ann's daughter in Eugene Oregon 1969

 

“I just had the weirdest dream last night; it was about the future, it was painful. It stretched from 1969 all the way until the year 2015. I even saw myself writing about the future as if I was writing about the past.” 

I had been living in Long Beach, California - in the mansion and enjoying myself a lot.  What I remember most was writing poems all night, having lots of girlfriends - of course this was long before AIDS - and it was the 1960s - when it was o.k. to have many lovers. There is probably a book in the Bible, one of those lost books of the Bible that is in a vault in the Vatican or in a clay jar in the Arab dessert113F that states that in the 1960s everyone on earth should fuck their brains out then Jesus will return and smote us. I never thought of spending any length of time with anyone ever.  I just figured I would be the same all my life.  I have always been an extremist, a terrorist of love; crashing into the twin towers of love and lust. For ten years, I had perhaps too many girlfriends, then for ten years, I had none. Now I am in my multiples of ten years in which one is enough. I think I like it that way - lots or none or one instead of none.  One always seemed so limiting or at least until now.

At our mansion in Long Beach, it seems that there were many things going on that could get everyone into a lot of trouble.  There were large amounts of drugs everywhere - usually on the kitchen table.  Marijuana, L.S.D., Mescaline and methedrine - I think most people in the house were speed freaks.  One - Richard I think his name was - was becoming increasingly paranoid.  He would say that there were narcotic agents watching us everywhere.

He even knocked a bird’s nest out of a tree that was near the house believing that there was a hidden camera in the nest.  I can just imagine the mother bird returning to where her nest had been saying to a couple of newly hatched chicks, now laying on the ground, "Hey Where is our fucking little shithouse of a nest?" and one of the chicks answering, "This fucked human was throwing a broom at our shithouse of a nest yelling about a narcotic agent’s camera in the nest."  If I ever become a comedian, I will do a stand-up funny thing about that one.

Anyway, Richard was going crazy.  He was digging holes in the yard trying to find where he had hid his drugs.  He had made holes in walls throughout the house thinking that there were hidden microphones and cameras all over.  He had ripped the telephone out of the socket - and had smashed most of the lights in the house so no one could see us inside - just in case.  This was a beautiful house when we moved in.  Winding staircase, large windows - most of which were broken by the time we left, and a hole in the ceiling where someone had fallen through from the attic.  This was the same Richard who was stealing Volkswagens in Santa Rosa when we lived on our farm, the Funny Farm.  I wonder where he is now or whether anyone on this planet has any thought about his existence. No doubt, he has been long dead.

Few people know us whilst we are alive and even less know us when we are dead. Only the closest person or maybe even a few people really remember our essence when we are dead and when they die then even the known essence of us disappears. We can read about a famous person who died a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago but who they really were, in thought and feeling no one knows. That is our fate, to be only known until the personal knower is dead then we are fully dead forever. I like reading stories about Kind Arthur, but I, as anyone else, do not really know King Arthur. Did he go down on women, men, horses – did he desire children did he cry when he did not have clean knickers to put on? Did he wear knickers? We are in the same boat – sailing off to Avalon that King Arthur was on, though no one will paint a picture of us doing it for future generations. We can never be anything more than a myth to someone in the future and only a handful of beings get the honour even to be a myth. Most of us are merely evolutionary fodder, just fertilizer for future consciousness that our sun will swallow one day when it explodes and shrinks down to a black hole as the universe eventually collapses upon itself in a final fart of destiny.

 

No doubt, I am the only one now in existence who remembers this Richard wanker. Perhaps that is all our fates, to be remembered by the last person to remember us as a wanker.

 

In the middle of the night, we decided to leave Long Beach.  There were about five of us. There was Jack, a Viet Nam veteran who was discharged because the army thought he was dangerous. What actually had happened was that once when he was on duty in Viet Nam he was tripping on LSD, and at some point thought that he saw millions of Viet Cong attacking and thus a mini battle began which turned out to be a battle against the trees. He managed to get the air force and army heavily into shooting up the jungle in the middle of the night. Apparently, this happens often and I have heard these stories from others too. He had his Indian girlfriend, Wahoo with him.  She, like most indigenous people had a low tolerance to alcohol.  She could take large amounts of drugs - but a little alcohol and she would rip a place to pieces - which she had done both at our farm in Glen Ellen and in our mansion in Long Beach. 

There was also the owner of the Volkswagen Van - his name totally slips me now - and there was Richard and me.

 

We arrived in San Francisco at night.  Someone knew a place where we could spend the night.  I met Carol Ann there on Spruce Street and for the next three decades, she would be the one true love of my life.  When we went into the house - she was sitting in the living room breast-feeding her baby.  I had seen many women naked and feeding their children - but this was different.  Carol Ann had a glow around her as I had never seen around another human being. And yes, she really did have flowers in her hair. Carol Ann was the archetypical flower girl.

I remember going into the living room later. The lights were off, and a candle was burning in the corner of the room.  Carol Ann was dancing and there was no music playing.  I had never seen anything like it and I have never seen anyone dance like her since.  Maybe she was Athena. 

I promised her the world.

I have two ways I write this. One is, I promised you the world before I had any idea that they were going to change me for it.  And sometimes I write, charge me for it.   I was genuine.  It was not one of those if you go to bed with me I will do this or that.  She was the first woman I had ever met that I did not want sex with as much as I just wanted to be near her; actually, I wanted to be her. Could it be that I wanted her essence so much that I took it? That is why over the years she sunk into madness, and her essence continued to flow through my being until I decided a few years ago to no longer be her madness and to be sane like I am today.

 

I think I summed it up best 20 years later.

 

I Used TO BE SO JEALOUS OF YOU
YOU HAD A FREEDOM I COULD NOT REACH
SO I TOOK YOUR BODY INSTEAD
AND THAT WAS GOOD TOO.
BUT I NEVER REACHED YOUR UNSETTLED FREEDOM
THE ARIES FIRE THAT A LEO
CAN ONLY TRY TO EXALT
BUT NEVER SATISFY.
1989 Middleton South Australia 

 

Below is my all-time favourite

WANTED TO LET GO YESTERDAY PAST GLORY EXPERIENCE
BUT KEEP REMEMBERING HOW I SAID
ONCE IN A DANCE
TOMORROW THE WORLD I WILL GIVE TO YOU
AND FOR MORNING AFTER
THE UNIVERSE WRAPPED IN GOLD
AND WHERE ARE YOU TONIGHT
WANDERING STAR PROMISE CATCHER
FLOWER CHILD
BECAUSE I'M STANDING HERE
WITH THE UNIVERSE
WITH NO ONE TO GIVE IT TO.
5-26-71  LAHAINA, MAUI, HAWAII

I will stop discussing the origins of my poems at this point. If I explained my best dirty-dozen or my favourite hundred maybe even the top one-thousand poems and who inspired them I would never finish this story. The purpose of writing this is to provide my children with an overview of my life in order for them to see how this bit of a life outside of their own life, though integral to their life became woven into the fabric of their consciousness. My writing is also a part of my insecurity that no one will have an inkling of what I have experienced during my sojourn on this stupid little piece of a shit of a planet. Of course, the fact that no one gives a shit to begin with is too scary to contemplate. Everyone should write about their life if for no other reason than to relive it from outside of the experiences being written about. Someday this story, or the little bit that I will reveal, will be finished and I will sit down and read it as one who is viewing someone else’s life. That will be one groovy moment or instead maybe one long embarrassing moment of realization that I was so much more stupid than I am today.

Nineteen ninety-three was another one of our settled years. I was doing my third year at Deakin and I worked hard and even though I did not get what would be considered good grades; I barely passed, I was half way through my studies and at the rate I was going I would have my university degree completed by the end of 1994 at the age of 47. The thought of graduating at the age of 47 did not bother me; I had a full life and what I deemed to be missing in my life was that I had yet to complete anything. I did not value receiving a university degree as much as I did complete something. I had not made it to the end result in the Holy Order of MANS, which would have been to at least become a priest if not a Master Teacher. I never got past the lowly position of brother. My art career had yet to be successful. Being successful means that I had at least a handful of or at least some fans and a few actual, real gallery shows. Now at the early youthful and disease-ridden age of 56 years and eight months I realise I will never be a successful artist. I was not sure about parenting, there was the chance that I would succeed at that though I was not then, nor am I now, confident with what are actually successful children.

Some notions of a successful child:

• spontaneous laughter, unsolicited smiles
• not fat
• content with what they have in their environment without demanding/wanting more: food, possessions, love
• polite, kind, caring of other humans no matter what their status, colour, beliefs
• kind and caring of animals and the environment
• not whining, demanding, complaining
• establishing self-created goals and working toward achieving them

 

Dear Dad
We have not heard from you for a while and you probably are thinking the same about us. We do not have a lot to report. I am selling my picture-poems in the city on weekends though it is just about breaking even with the costs of petrol and my stall but I think it will grow. During the week I try to pour lots of learning into me. And keep the children sorted out. Leigh does so well in school. Sacha is a handful though. I have to speak with his teachers every couple of days. He is a very hard-headed and rebellious child. We have him on behaviour modification plans; basically, I won’t take him surfing unless he maintains some sort of civil behaviour at school. He is smart but gets bored so easily. I guess it is all the travelling we did last year makes everything seem mundane now (see I can blame it on you). They have their school photos today so I will send the photos off to you next week.

If you are ever in a video store I am trying to get a baseball video, VHS mode, shops would know what that means, for Leigh, for his birthday. There is nothing here and I remember seeing a lot when we were there but we didn’t have a video player then and now we do. One I was looking for but it isn’t in Australia is called “Bad News Bears” it is about a group of little league kids who make it into the world championships, also I saw some Babe Ruth and etc there.
Did I ever tell you the $100 you sent me for my birthday the children grabbed and bought me a bike (remember I crashed the other one?)

We have your photo in the window in the living room it is so good you were here. We still live in the same place in Victor Harbor, there has been a big sign for months saying ‘For-Sale two new townhouses - completion date the end of April’.  Of course they haven’t started yet  and the last I heard was that the person wasn’t going to work on our house until after he had built and sold the two in front which he hasn’t started on yet.  We could be here for a while.  I hope so. It is a dump but big, cheap and I can’t handle moving all our junk.

Did you ever get a chance to give that My-Life stuff (the brochures) to Joyce? Our neighbour’s doctor told him (he is in his 60s) that he is like five years younger because of BioGen he had almost died last year and his wife is the one who signed me up.
Our car stopped in Adelaide last weekend had to put a new something that cost $150 in, an alternator, I think. I should stick to my bike.
Well that is about it for now.  Love Terrell Leigh Sacha March 10, 1993


Children of the Sofa

In February, I published my first and only literary scribble. I had been sending my children stories to publishers for more than a year. I have taken years of courses through TAFE on Writing for the Media and I have taken a module of study concentrating on children stories and how to get them published. I sent out more than one hundred stories to at least two-dozen publishers and within a few months I had a box filled with rejection letters. Finally, out of my many postings, which were getting too expensive for me to continue with I got my one and only acceptance letter. The children’s publisher Scholastic, offered to put a story in one of their magazines, Lucky Magazine, and my star reached its lifelong climb to its zenith in February of 1993 with the publication of my story, “Veggie Fighters” and I was sent the incredibly large sum of $150 for my story. Finally, after years of trial and tribulation as a writer I was published. The magazine is for the seven- to ten-year-old range.

 

Veggie fighters

https://neuage.org/stories/vegi1.htm

I had told my children that ever whom the story that was published was about would collect ten percent of what I received. Of course the children were quite excited when I told them in the beginning because it was clear that my stories would become books and become million sellers and if I only got one dollar per book that meant the child who the story was about would be collecting about one-hundred thousand dollars which to a ten or twelve year old is a lot of money indeed.

 

We realised one-hundred fifty dollars was a bit of a setback but it was a start and because the story had Sacha’s name in it he was the one who could choose to do with it what he wanted, and he chose for us all to go to the Moscow Circus. For some reason we were all disappointed, probably because we sat way in the back of the Adelaide Entertainment Centre and there were large posts in front of us. Over the next several weeks I wrote many letters to Scholastic magazine telling them what a great story “Veggie Fighters” was and asking whether there would be a book of the story out soon. Of course, I signed each letter with a different name and usually I posed as a schoolteacher who wanted the story in book form for my school which was very large and would need some one hundred copies, minimally. Seeing that I put false addresses on the envelope I have no idea whether they were responded to but I was never approached with a contract to publish “Veggie Fighters” in a book form that would be sent to every country and probably translated in some fifty languages. I sent Lucky magazine many more stories, but they were never interested in pursuing my great talent and that was that. And now more than ten years later I have to admit the dreadful reality that “Veggie Fighters” was my one and only thing to ever be published.

 

I suppose now anyone looking at my life, laterally, would say it is clear that I totally stuffed up my life and that I was a complete failure as a parent but in 1993, when the boys were ten and twelve, there was that thought in my mind that I was a good, if not fantastic, parent. What made me think that I was doing it right was that the children were happy and achieving what they wanted. I did not impose my will on them in the way some parents push their children to become something. Lesia would say that I pushed Leigh into baseball and that he was living out my unlived life; whatever that was meant. I never pushed my children in any particular direction. I played basketball with my kids, threw a ball, kicked a ball, and went swimming with them. I never played cricket with them because cricket is stupid but all other sports, we had a go at. We would each bounce a basketball as we walked to the centre of Victor Harbor most nights. It was a half-hour walk, and we would stop and have an ice cream then return bouncing our basketball. Puppy would go with us and I am sure we were familiar with sight for a couple of years and we all got good at bouncing a basketball. I tried surfing but I could not stand up on the thing and my children made some picture-poems but I never had a particular agenda for my kids to become anything. I wanted them to be happy and not racists and I wanted them to be caring about others and to have a look at different beliefs and not become overtaken by anyone-world view. I hoped that they would come to understand life not based on someone else’s dogmatic beliefs but instead based on their own perceptions of the way it is. I suppose in hindsight I could have had a more structured environment, maybe some rules, but we all lived in the moment and for Leigh the moment was always to do with baseball. He collected baseball cards, had posters on his walls, and carried his baseball glove and a ball in his school bag even though no one else at his school played baseball.

Leigh was very adamant that he was going to be a major league pitcher and nothing would stop that. Sacha did not have such an exact concept of what he would do for the rest of his life. He was interested in music. Both boys took piano lessons from an early age, and Sacha began to be interested in graffiti. His interest in graffiti began when we traveled overseas in March and April of 1992. The more graffiti we saw the more interested he became and when we returned home he began to obtain cans of spray paint, in several ways, and the obtaining of cans of spray paint is not important to the story, except to say at times it did cause much stress in my life. We had a large shed attached to our house and Sacha had freedom to work on developing his tag and learning the fine art of graffiti. Unfortunately, his art spread through the Victor community and there were periods of intense self-reflection, usually, aided by the local police department. So as much as my life was affected by Leigh’s baseball it was affected by Sacha’s hip hop/graffiti lifestyle. By mid-1993, the two boys had developed their own stream of adolescence, which had no similarities. Sacha and Leigh seemed to always have been different in so many ways, from personality to their likes. I do not recall very many things that both had in common. They did not like the same music. Leigh liked the Beatles and the Beach Boys and Sacha liked heavy metal and hip-hop whilst we lived in Victor. Leigh was not interested in tagging or getting into any kind of trouble whereas Sacha had no problems with living as an outlaw even at twelve years old.

Sometime in 1993 Sacha walked off of the tennis courts at Victor Harbor High School where we were throwing and hitting a baseball and announced that "baseball sucks". He did not have anything more to do with it after that. I had hoped the two would do the same sport primarily because it would be easier for me to transport them to one venue instead of two. In August of 1993 Leigh signed up to play peewee baseball with Southern Districts and Sacha signed up to play basketball at Noarlunga. This meant a lot of travel for us and almost every afternoon I would collect Sacha and Leigh at school, and I would have a plate of food for them, and we would either go to Southern Districts for baseball two evenings a week for practice for a game on Sunday and a couple of afternoons for Sacha to play basketball. As Sacha was in a basketball league, we had to travel around Adelaide a couple of nights a week for games and a couple of nights a week for practice. I spent the day working on my university degree, writing stories and doing my picture-poems. I was collecting a single parent pension and I had given up all hope of finding a job, but I was working at my schooling fulltime, and I was a fulltime parent. My idea was that I would get my college degree then move the children to the States and I would get a good job doing something that required a college degree and I would make lots of money and Sacha and Leigh would have what they wanted when they got to be older like a car and money to go to university following high school but of course as always I did not really have a realistic game plan. What I find most difficult about life is how much we get stuck with the choices we make and how little room there is for error. We only get one shot at each moment and it impossible to know how that moment will turn out. I am sure there are more realistic and rational ways to go about living life than I did but I could not get a handle on it. In 1993 Leigh turned ten, Sacha was twelve and I was 46. I did not have any friends; I sometimes went to a pub with Sandy who I was involved with at the radio station but not often. I spent most of my time alone when the children were not with me and I rarely went out on weekends when Sacha and Leigh were in town with Lesia. I lived life as if I had just stopped in town for the weekend and soon the boys and I would be in the States and finally my career would be on its way.

What was exciting in Leigh’s life was that he was playing baseball and even though he had already played one year he felt that now he was on his way to the major leagues. His favourite player was Don Mattingly, first basemen for the New York Yankees (The Sporting News: Yankee Player of the 1980s). Leigh had several posters of Don and I do not know why he focused in on him but Leigh wanted to play for the Yankees, and he thought first base would be his spot. Actually, he believed he would be a pitcher and on the days that he did not pitch he would play first base. He did not care that pitchers rested on the days they did not pitch, he was going to be different and play every day and go for both batting and for pitching records. What I want to point out in this part of the story is that Leigh did not need anything else to do his best he did not need subliminal tapes or motivational exercises. Leigh seemed to be born with motivation and determination and the will to succeed. We got to Southern Districts at four PM each time even though practice and games started an hour or more later. We would practice an hour before practice began. We began practice even earlier than that. Every morning Leigh would throw one hundred pitches before school. At Southern Districts we would practice everything we could think of. I would pitch and Leigh would hit. His goal was to put the ball over the fence and it would take him until he was ten and a half at the beginning of the next season to put it over the peewee fence but every day, we were at Southern Districts he would try. We managed to collect a lot of baseballs, some we bought but most we found in the bushes around Southern Districts and instead of turning them in we kept them. Often, we would have 20 to 30 baseballs which was good as it meant I could throw a lot before we had to go and collect them. After a few games Leigh believed I was the worse pitcher in the world, but I never believed I was good, and I had never actually pitched in my life until Leigh needed me to throw the ball so he could bat. Many times, I hit him or the ball was way over his head or it bounced on the ground two days before it got to home plate, but I worked on it and eventually I could pitch strikes or near enough so that Leigh could hit them. Other times when he was not pitching to me he would stand in the outfield or at third base and I would hit it to him so that he could become a better fielder. I had played a little baseball in primary school and some at Bible camp and I had a net to throw the ball into when I was a child, but I do not recall ever being on an organized team.

 

I was in my mid-forties and just learning how to play baseball. I followed baseball a bit as a child, I think I like the New York Yankees because I lived in upstate New York, but I do not recall liking any particular player. I had only been to one baseball game in my life and that was with my girlfriend, Beverly, in the late 1970s. I preferred basketball all my life and getting involved with Leigh’s baseball was a bit new to me. Lesia would claim that I was pushing Leigh into baseball to live out some childish fantasy of mine, but I never had a fantasy of playing baseball at any time of my life.

Leigh began as an outfielder but he wanted to be a pitcher and our coach, Richard Teague, from California, brought him in after several games to pitch. When the time came, a couple of months after play began, to pick the peewee All-Star Team Leigh wanted to try out. The All-Star Team would be Leigh’s first test of success. I recall everyone making the six U-10 peewee teams, but only twelve would be chosen out of eighty players. I counted forty-five players showing up that first Saturday and a lot of the players were older than Leigh who was nine.

To try and gather some money to supplement my single parent pension and maintenance that I got from ‘the mother’ I got my father to sign up for a multilevel marketing thing I was involved in. I had believed at the time that this would take me to financial independence and riches. I think I managed to sign up two other people in the year or so I believed I would soon be on my way to independence and riches. After all the ads had told ‘real-life stories’ of people who signed up a handful of others who signed up another dozen or so and these folks now had homes and cars and vacations and there were photos of the successful sellers with their beautiful new sexy looking partners and I had been thinking I had been celibate a tad bit too long and I too should get a home and nice car and one of those good looking partners other sellers were getting. It must be true, or it would not have been in their brochures and magazine ads.

Dear Dad,
We have received your latest series of packages. The children love what you send. This last one we got yesterday - with the baseball folder I will put away for Leigh (the folder) for his birthday - though I gave them the magazines. Sacha really liked the hockey one.

And Leigh? Well, if he doesn’t drive me totally nuts no one ever will. First he insisted on his allowance and his savings in his bank account (not the Trust account - but his allowance savings) goes to purchasing a subscription for the Weekly baseball paper - I convinced him that was insane (it would be about $50  per year) - now he is writing off to baseball camps listed in the back for brochures. He is determined that we move to the States (and so is Sacha) in two and a half years - when he finishes primary school. I would be through, hopefully with uni - but I told them it would be difficult to find work after living here so long - but we will persevere with that goal - the end of 1995.

See you signed up with My-Life. Robert has been interested - puts things off - but I think he would like their new product 'MegaGenPlus - it is cheaper ($58 here though I don’t know what it is there) have been using that one this time (at this point we can only afford one product every three months - the requirement to stay active) - so I sent you a form for the States they probably have new ones now - but if you could post it on to Robert - tell him to try it - he can get his money back if he doesn't like it - I know even the children like the Megagen one and I give them about to 2 teaspoon per day - I take one teaspoon.

Megagen is good for a pick me up and extra energy but in the long run nutritionally the Biogen is the best. It should last you, 22-3 months - let me know how you feel with it - the Megagen is instant because it has ginseng, royal jelly, bee pollen etc., Biogen takes a few weeks to affect the system. A person I signed in Minnesota - says that it has totally changed his health around and my neighbour after a by-pass is doing real good - we're basically: quite healthy so the only difference I noticed with Biogen is that stopped my coughing - my doctor friend in Indiana said I had an allergy - but Megagen is good for my studies as I am usually up until one am and again at six AM. It is strange I do so well in some subjects and so poorly in others and I spend equal time and in my mind I do well it is the problem of doing this off-campus not meeting the teachers not knowing exactly what they want.

The children like the puzzles you send. We're developing a shelf of them like you have.

Sacha is going to a private college in Adelaide next year at the cost of several thousand a year - but he wants to live out here and the drive will be expensive and take a lot of time - his mother wants us to move to Adelaide - but Leigh is really stuck on finishing school here then moving to the States - we don't know where - I think in your area - and have the children go to Schenectady but that is, a big thing to think about - I told the children I would need to sign up hundreds of people into My-Life to get an income that we could live on. Daniel in LA gets something like $20 thousand a month off of multi-level marketing but he works terribly hard - last I heard he was off to New Mexico to live in the desert for a break from it all. Maybe Joyce would be interested.

Just wanted to say hello - thanks for trying My-Life. Thanks for all the things you have sent. And if things turn out the way we want them to we will see you a lot in 1996. (You'll only be 90-something by then - maybe during the summer of '96 we will hire one of those big vans and drive across the States - you will be up to that won't you`?
They haven't finished the houses out front and hopefully they won't sell until the end of the year - we're surely not in the position to move.

I haven't been going into Adelaide on weekends to sell my picture-poems as it seems to rain only on weekends here - though I am going to the Adelaide City Council to see about setting up an area in Adelaide for sidewalk artists next week.

We think about you and Clifton Park a lot - maybe sometime you would find a Shenendehowa paper to send. Leigh liked the baseball section from The Times. Every time we go shopping at Woolworths here - we go late night as they are opened until One PM now on Wednesdays - we pretend we are going to the Clifton Park Grand Union to shop. And when we go to Adelaide we pretend we are going to Crossgates in Albany. I don't know how we will do it but we will find a way to make enough money to move there - probably as a combination of "my-Life (which is growing painfully slow - I only have ten people in my population and there are others who are getting thousands from this company per month - and my writing and picture-poems - and a full time job - I would like to be teaching at University level by the time the children go to University - probably Australian studies as that is what would be different there.

Well just a short note here - this computer is good - I bought three business computers for $10 so we each have one with word processing - and lots of business applications I don't have a clue about - and best of all no games.... the dictionary is American spellings, and I have to add Australia. I bought the printer for them for $100. So we did very well - and they are even the computers I learned on three years ago. The training Centre I learned this from bought new computers, and these were just sitting on a shelf. If we ever get on the phone - I will wait till we move - I plan to plug into computer lines around the world for information. The only problem with this program is that colour, harbour - though Victor Harbor is spelt Harbor though the high school spells it Harbour. It is quite confusing.
The whales are bank in town - I will pet one for you.

If you hear from Sue I will write in a day or two. The past few months have been too busy to think straight.
June 18, 93

Dear grandpa,
Has much changed in Clifton Park? Nothing's changed here. They’re demolishing our house to build town houses so we will have to find another place to live, but hopefully that will be in a couple of months. I wish we could move to America. We borrowed a slide machine off one of my friend’s dad and we watched a lot of old slides you sent on it. If you have any more that you would like to send down now's the time. Well that's it from victor harbor
love Sacha July 1993

Dear Grandpa,
How is it? I'm fine. Sorry l didn't write sooner but with my birthday I've been really busy. Thanks for the Friz-bee, Baseball card holder, T-Shirt and Dartboard, especially the Baseball card holder. I'm really trying to collect a lot of cards, especially pre-55. I bought 20 more sheets at 60 cents each and dad bought about 5. I filled them all up. On my birthday we went to the oval near our house and played with the Friz-bee and a flying bird. We're hoping to be able to go to America in 1 or 2 years.
LOVE LEIGH August 1993

Picture Poems come to Adelaide

One block away from where I set up in the East End Market is Rymill Park and through the park there is a tree-lined footpath that I thought would make a great place to sell my picture-poems. I submitted a letter to the Adelaide City Council in early December with the hopes of being set up by Christmas time. My proposal was to make the area into an open art area similar to Jackson Square in New Orleans and the outdoor art shows in Paris, Frankfurt and other cities that I had seen.

The art scene in Adelaide was a ‘who-you-know’ affair and there were few galleries. There was no venue except for setting up the way I did for artists to show and sell their pictures. Adelaide calls itself the Festival City but that is based on its arts festivals that are held every two years. Adelaide claims itself as one of the most creative and innovative arts festivals in the world but that of course is local hype. When I go to other places in the world I seldom meet anyone who has ever heard of Adelaide. The Australian cities non-Australians have heard of are Sydney and Melbourne. A few have heard of Perth and even less of Brisbane or Darwin.

I had sold my picture-poems at a previous art festival, in 1992, and I wanted to be well set up for the next one in 1994 and I thought if I had the park set up as an art door art show then I would be in a good situation. The art festivals are set up to mimic the big ones such as the Edinburgh International Festival, British Arts Festivals, Amsterdam and most every major city in the world.

Even Albany New York has their summer arts festivals; with a large area of the city having indoor as well as outdoor events such as plays, dance troupes, comedian and acrobatic performances along with art of every sort imaginable. Few tourists from within Australia or outside the country go to Adelaide so it never grows out of its overgrown small townisms. It is a city of one million people who think they live in a town of fifty thousand. Sydneysiders named South Australia as the nation's most boring state in a survey in 2002. There is little culture growth though the people, who reside there, the Adelaideans, believe they are worldly, but they just aren’t. I also pursued the Adelaide Festival Theatre to let me set up a weekend outdoor art exhibit and after many letters over a year I was almost allowed to begin there.

However, like most plans of mine it was stopped at the last moment when I received a letter from the theatre committee to say they were going to have some group from Victoria set up a weekend arts fair for the summer months and the group had already done the same thing in several other cities in Australia and they were going to now do it in Adelaide in front of festival theatre but of course nothing ever came of it. So I pursed the Adelaide City Council but by December of 1993 I still had not received an OK as they had to bring it up at several more meetings before anyone could give the go ahead. To me it seemed like such a simple no-brainer of an idea that even a committee would agree.

My idea was quite simple. I was to charge only ten dollars a day to each artist setting up. I figured I would easily get one hundred, maybe even two or three hundred artists. I mapped out the park footpath. There was a tree every ten feet so each artist would have an area between trees. I figured I could easily accommodate more than two hundred artists. But knowing how I have had such a time of over estimation in life and thinking I would get more than I actually did at the end I downsized my enthusiasm and hopefulness to a mere fifty artists for the two days each weekend. Still, this would be fifty times two days which would equal one hundred and times ten dollars would be one-thousand dollars a week. I would give the council one half of that and keep the rest for my professional services of running the bloody thing. Beyond the five hundred dollars for each weekend I would make, which in my world of living off of a single parent pension would be a lot, I would sell my own art. Currently sales were not very good and that I figured out was because people who like art did not go to where I was selling my picture-poems on weekend.

There were only two or three other artists in the whole market I was currently selling in and the rest of the stalls were filled with cheap crap from China, food stalls, lots of cheap jewellery stalls, the fortune telling lady in the stall next to me who had a few shots of booze before starting each day, and a mix of other stalls of mindless crap that people bought instead of investing in the future by buying my picture-poems. It was obvious that with an art doors art show every weekend like in New Orleans or Paris that people would come for art and seeing my stuff they would buy at least one picture-poem each and that would put my sales through the roof. I wondered if I would be able to keep up with it. I had worked out my picture-poems to an exact rapid-production science knowing I could make 16 eight by ten-inch picture-poem frames out of one 32-inch by 40-inch matt board poster board. Because I did not have much money I would go to picture framing shops and hustle cut offs which sometimes I paid for and sometimes they were given to me but it made it affordable for me to make lots of picture-poems. There was a time in 1995 when I counted more than two thousand picture-poems I had completed. As always, I was just waiting to be discovered, and I would just not be able to keep up with the demand for my art once I was so having a couple of thousand sitting in the box was a sensible and well planned out business plan. I worried that once I had set up an art zone in Adelaide’s Rymill Park that I would not be able to keep up with the demand and still do my schoolwork. By the end of 1993 I had finished three years of university, and I had one more year to go and it looked like I was finally going to finish something, and I would be like everyone else in society, a holder of a university degree. My schooling would come second only to my parenting and after that was the bonanza that would come from being a well-known and loved picture-poet type of person. I became almost intoxicated with the thoughts of success. Finally, I had come up with something that would move me up the scales from loser to successful poet, artist and parent. I had not really found in my astrological chart where this was all shown but I knew it was there somewhere amongst the thousands of aspects and planets and asteroids and mid-points in my chart. It just was not as obvious as a Saturn transit to my Venus (as I am having now in July 2006 whilst writing this).

We needed to move out of our house at 110 Victoria Street as the townhouses were finished and our house was going to be renovated to a large modern home that would have no signs remaining of the likes of us. This had been the longest we had lived anywhere in the same house. By the time we were to move we had been in the house for three and a half years beating out the time Sacha and I had lived in North Adelaide with Lesia by a few months. Our third longest house to this time had been the farm in Mount Compass that we managed to stay at for two and a half years. Because of our uncertainty in staying in a house I had begun to explore how we could stay put for longer. I was torn between finding something that would last until the children had grown up and were ready to leave home and keeping the option open to leave Australia soon and live in New York. I had written Lesia asking if we could go to the States but she said she would never allow it. Because there seemed to be little hope of moving to New York I thought staying put for a few years would be the best thing for us and that it would be a stabling influence for the children as they were getting older and our home life was anything but secure.

I have had bad blocks of ideas and many plans to make money and get ahead in life but I seemed to be lacking something in my makeup to bring anything I attempt to do to fruition. There are so many stories of successful people who start with nothing and take an idea to great heights. I had those great ideas that someone else would have been on the cover of Fortune 500 with. I could even map how to succeed with them but there was no one to support me and my ideas would become kindling wood in the mind of God that was lit but never got beyond the smouldering stage; lots of smoke and whoopee then puff it was gone. I am sure it is because I have my Sun, Venus, Pluto and Saturn in my tenth house all square to my Jupiter in my first house. I have grandiose visions and a mark of a spark at the start but because of all the squares in my chart they are blocked, usually by Saturn, and then crystallized and shatter and everything becomes dark. Perhaps there are people who are not to succeed and it is written on their soul; and because our particular low-life God, the God of our particular little insignificant solar system, which resides in the slum section of the Milky Way - which is obvious to all, is in the low rent district of the universe, is a statistical God who gets lots of laughs out of observing his/her creation living in misery, ‘my life sucks’ script.  Then again perhaps every thought does come true. It just does not come true in my particular realm that I can experience. This is a teaching of the Holy Order of MANS - that every thought has power and energy and manifests on some level. For example, with the choices I had of leaving or staying with Lesia, there is, according to this brainless and unfounded thought, though as legitimate as any other notion that is impossible to prove such as the basis of most religions three other distinct Terrell’s existing simultaneously somewhere in the solar system and maybe even here on earth in a different dimension like the parallel universe concept; but which is the successful one and which is the most miserable is of course just speculation because I can only follow the outcome of the one I can witness with my physical senses that I am living at present.

 

1. The Terrell who stayed; meaning I would have lived out my life living in North Adelaide. I could have been terribly miserable as I was when I was living there or I may have been able to construct another mindset so as not to be affected or I could have just given up being me and become the person Lesia wanted me to be which of course would not have been the me that I had been or that I am now. This would be the equivalence of the suicide of my being, and I would have been reborn as Lesia’s concept and who I was before would no longer exist - except of course in some parallel space and time where the original me would go experiencing life as a free and creative person without shackles. I had thought about this before - my life was so bad that if I killed myself and was reborn immediately in the same spot and the same age I would have slain the me who was miserable but the idea of any form of suicide is so horrendous and so anti-evolution that I could never carry it out. I think when I took so much LSD the primary reason was to get away from the way I was. To destroy my current thinking processes and create a new me. Once Lesia made a comment, though in a negative fashion, that I re-invent myself frequently, but I see that as the ideal not as the negative. I wish she would have re-invented herself and perhaps we could have gotten through whatever it was we were supposed to have gotten through. Of course, that goes back to the notion that there is a reason for everything which sometimes I believe there is and other times it seems it is all just random events, and we put meaning to the event and then following that we construct a belief that there was a reason for what happened. At the end of the day, it is all just mind masturbation, and no one knows shit. And for this particular life, the one where Lesia and I stayed together and raised the kids would have to have been agreed upon in mind by the others.  Leigh would have had to never have played baseball which of course would have so altered his life that he would never have had the experiences that he had, Sacha would not have gone through some of the things he went through which I am not going to tell about in this story because there are some things that are not for others to know and who knows I may have become a successful tofu manufacturer or I may have gone to nursing school or gotten some straight boring job or gotten to the point where I could not cope anymore and gone off of a fifteen story balcony of a hotel knowing that at the instance that I hit the pavement I would no longer feel the emotional and mental anguish that I was feeling. Our life is based on what we believe and if I had gotten to the point where I thought that there was nothing more after we died then to end suffering makes perfect sense. But for whatever reason I believe there is more, and I really do believe that this life is just a passing test along the way and because I cannot get those beliefs out of my head, I stay alive.

2. The Terrell who left Australia and left the children behind. I could not have done this and I never entertained this idea. However, I thought of moving interstate to Melbourne with the children but then I would have had to have the permission of the Family Courts and Lesia, which I would never had received.
3. The Terrell who took the children with me to the States. This is my favourite and I have entertained this so much over the years. However, I would have been a fugitive because Lesia would have sought to have the children returned to Australia. And my children at some point would hate me. Because I was adopted, I know what it is like to create a fantasy of the mother of what she was like. For many years I would watch movies of the late 1940s, which was the time when my mother was giving birth to me to try and imagine what she would have liked and what sort of lifestyle a teenage mother in 1947 1950 would have. I did not want my children to do this, and I knew it would be best for them to see their mother often and create their own mindset about her then there would be no illusions, and they would not be angry at me for taking them away from their mother. The facts are straightforward; I went to court for custody of the children, and the mother did not put up a fight. I have no idea what would have happened if I had been told I could only see the boys once a fortnight, which is so often the case in parenting disputes. I always thought because I never entertained that outcome that it did not happen but that is to put the type of metaphysical slant on to it that I am in, saying here; that we do act out various choices on some level. It is obvious that the parent who has custody has the power in the family and somehow for better or worse that power was given to me. What I had learnt from disputes with Lesia before our relationship finally collapsed was to be relentless with going for what I wanted. My tactics were to exhaust the enemy, and I think that is a part of the American mindset and no matter how global I like to think I am I too had taken on, somewhere in my social conditioning, the American colonization behaviour. This particular type of behaviour, as America has shown throughout its short history; i.e. Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Africa, Korea, Panama, Haiti, Iraq and everywhere else they have gone, specializes in overpowering the opposition to such a degree that the enemy is so exhausted from the start that eventually, usually toward the beginning, cave in and are left with just some weakened skirmishes ability. Depending on whose side they are, i.e. whether they side with American aggression or not, the weaken defenders who are all but squashed and conquered are either referred to as freedom fighters or terrorists.  These were my tactics in my fight against Lesia, to come up with way over the top scenarios and Lesia, in her trying to do things by the book, would become confused quickly and by the time she caught her breath I would have what I set out to get. Actually, I used the overpowering techniques as well as guerrilla tactics, usually at the same time. I would do whatever I could come up with to really get her mad (of course I would not say what those are in my own best interest) and as soon as she was overly angry with that I would put in my court orders asking for custody, maintenance, permission to take the children overseas or whatever else I wanted from the Family Court. She would in turn write something quite stupid and submit it to the Family Court and I would sit there performing the role of victim until after the court ruling. Of course I could have gotten it all wrong and I often do, and it could have been that she did not want custody of the children once they began to live with me and that is why she did not challenge me and I was a single parent and raised the children on my own. Because I have never asked her I have no idea what went on in her mind though I know from what the children told me over the years she was very negative about me and never said a kind thing.