Goals for the period of mid-December 1994 to the end of 1995

Leigh at Morphett Vale East School year 7

From Sacha’s school diary:  things I use to believe:
1. that my father was normal
2. that my father’s name was Saint Terrell

• DEC 17 & 18 PARK
• DEC 19-22 NOVEL  EVENINGS PACK CLEAN SHED
• DEC 23 & 24 PARK FRIDAY AND SATURDAY
• DEC. 25 HOME
• DEC. 26 PARK  MONDAY
• DEC. 27-31 NOVEL AND PACK
• JAN. 1ST.  LAST DAY IN PARK
• JANUARY 3 TO NOARLUNGA HOUSE SEARCH
• LIVE IN NOARALUNGA AREA JAN. '95 - SEPT. 97 = TWO YEARS AND NINE MONTHS               
• FEBRUARY 1ST 1995 NEW HOUSE & SCHOOL & UNI.
• MARCH - GIRL FRIEND
• APRIL SIGN CONTRACT TO PUBLISH PICTURE-POEM BOOK AND BOOK OF POEMS AND CHILDREN'S BK.
• FEB.- NOV. 1995 HONOURS DEGREE -
• FEB. - NOV. MASTERS DEGREE 1996
• NOV. '96 - AUGUST '97 PUBLISH BOOK(S)
• SEPT. 1997 TO USA AND JOB IN TEACHING
• ME 50 YEARS OLD
• LEIGH 14    YEAR 9
• SACHA 16    YEAR 11

The radio station, like so many other things in my life (prior to getting my BA and tapping into all that potential of being an educated human being) was not going well. Or at least it was not going well for Sacha, Sandy – the actual founder of it, and me. A pushy idiot got involved with the radio station and soon had everyone involved turning on Sandy. The idiot managed to hold a meeting of all concerned to get Sandy out of the organization. I was quite upset. Without Sandy there would not have been a radio station, and he was the closest I had come to having an actual friend. But for some reason no one seemed to like him and there was a whole lot of crap that went on and this idiot took over the radio station. He came to our house one night and said that Sacha had said a swear word on air and he would no longer be able to have a show. I was voted out of my secretary of the radio position and that was it. We suddenly, after three years of hard work and great ideas were out of the radio station. It soon became a voice of Christianity and instead of embracing the community and including children, one of my primary goals, it just went boring and stupid.

Sacha was doing well with his basketball and Leigh was doing well with his baseball. What this meant was that we were driving into the city and around the suburbs a lot and we were not that happy living in Victor anymore. The decision was made to move closer to town. This would be the only time in our fifteen years together that we would choose to move and the only time we had a place we could live in for as long as we wanted as we were in a co-op. I put in notice that we would move out of our house the first week of January 1995.

I set up my picture-poems in Glenelg the weekend before Christmas and the following week on Saturday, the day before Christmas. I sold a lot though I do not recall how much but it was encouraging. The weather was great and there were a lot of people going to the beach. I was a bit concerned that we had about two weeks to go to find a house and so far, we had not been very lucky. We spent our last Christmas in Victor Harbor and looked to the future. Ulysses was no longer living with us. He had moved out in November after finding his mother and at the age fourteen he was determined to go and take care of her.

Leigh attended two pitching clinics in December just before Christmas and he was excited about the professional help he was getting and the fact that people who knew about baseball were telling him that he was really good. He attended the first clinic at Glenelg with the Adelaide Giants and then immediately following that he went to a pitching clinic with the Canadian Pitching Coach for their junior national team.  He was getting more accurate and faster all the time and his belief that someday he would be a major league pitcher was growing daily in our mind.

graffiti  mural

Christmas  1994 Victor Harbor  house number two, with my children

A couple of days after Christmas we found a house for rent that we liked. It was the largest house so far with two bedrooms and a large rumpus room that we would make into the third bedroom. The house at 17 Lynn Place was in the suburb of Hackham which itself had a bad reputation as being a bit of a rough and seedy neighbourhood but that did not deter us.

The important thing was that it was close to Southern Districts Baseball Club and near where Sacha played basketball – it was walking distance to both places. We rented a moving truck and dragged all our belongings and Puppy with us, managing to move in, in one weekend. We put our basketball backboard up in the backyard and what was too junky for our house.

We piled into the garage. There was a reserve in the back of our house, and we had a fence, as Australian homes do, around our property. The owners said they were retired and were going to go live on their boat on the Murray River for the next several years. The man said he was going to write a book about his life – though he did not elaborate on why he would write on his life. I never understood why someone would be so pompous to write a story about themselves and want to publish it. I would never do that and in fact I am writing all that I am writing for two reasons: firstly I started this on Leigh’s twenty birthday – and it was not because of that, it just got started then and I wanted to write my children about all that had happened in my life and eventually theirs. I thought at some point they would wonder why they thought the way they did and I believe parents have a great influence on the way their children act and think, and I wanted to write all this to explain our life. In fact, I have two proposed readers for this, Sacha and Leigh. The other reason I am writing this, especially now, is for my own therapy – for me to try and understand why life got to where it got to and whether I could have made it any different. I want to look at every nock and cranny of my life to try and understand it all – no small task that is for sure. Everyone should write their own history/herstory to get a sense of life. And to map the evolutionary trek of their thought-processes such as how does one have a worldview? Is it adopted, morphed, borrowed, stolen, self-invented or just a hit and miss of events that almost is understandable.

Viewing the news is a depressing and non-rewarding event that should be avoided at all costs.  Most news – 97.5 percent, has nothing to do with us as an individual. The Jews are bombing the Middle East back to the stone age; America is creating instant third-world countries and sending Iraq back a few thousand years; today’s news is that the earth will be uninhabitable soon as the Amazon is being stripped and it will soon be a dessert – we have one-year to go some news story say (Sunday, 30 July 2006). I am summering in Australia now and I have not seen or heard anything in months that has anything to do with my world. I am going off to see Sacha in a couple of days after not seeing him for a year because I live in New York and he is in Melbourne. Leigh – well I am not sure when I will see him – I suppose that is a philosophical/spiritual question with any answer anyone could create. The only news I suppose I would be interested in is the weather and what the Australian dollar is up to125F.

Therefore, and this would be true for most of us, there is nothing more significant than our own story. Sometimes when I glance through a newspaper or magazine, I see some celebrity doing something to get attention, but it does not concern me and whether they made it to the news or not really does not matter. What I like about Australia is that it is easy to find areas where nothing has changed since I lived here more than a decade ago.

The last day of the year 1994 I stayed the night in Adelaide and the children stayed with friends. I stayed at the children’s grandparents. They had a sleep out – a small one room detached shed from their house and I wanted to set up early on New Year’s Day, Sunday morning in Glenelg. I lay there on the small cot looking at the shadow of the things in the room that were covered by sheets. This was the grandparent’s storage area – during the night I could hear rats scurry around in the room and outside at midnight I heard the fireworks and wondered why I was staying alone on New Year’s Eve. Somewhere inside of myself I decided I had been out relationships long enough and I knew 1995 would be different.

1995

when I dance…”

Broken bottles from the party of the night before littered the park in Glenelg where I sold my pictures.
Glenelg is where the first British settlers arrived November 8, 1836 in their ship the HMS Buffalo, beside an old gum tree which is still standing, to proclaim the province of South Australia. A replica of the ship, HMS Buffalo is located near where I set up my picture-poems at the end of the tram line and along the beach. I am sure the first folks to Glenelg got drunk too when they hit the shore though I doubt they made the mess I had to navigate126F . Tens of thousands of people party in Glenelg New Year’s eve and for some strange reason not only did I not party but I was out there at the crack of dawn setting up picture-poems whilst the sanitation crews swept and raked up the debris. I constantly get myself into this misfit roles but I was not going to be thwarted from my objective to be very visible on a hot summer’s New Year’s Day when I was sure there would be thousands of people out and what else would someone want to do but buy a picture-poem to start off a new year on the right note.

I sold enough to make the day worthwhile. I met Kris that day too so it was a noteworthy day. Kris as so many females have over the decades have done, read my poems and remarked that they liked them. In all my weekends of selling my pictures either at Rymill Park or at the East End Markets I never had more than a causal greeting with a female. No one ever returned and no one seemed interested in me but Kris talked with me for at least an hour. She had two children, a boy and a girl the same age of my children, the girl being Sacha’s age and the boy close to Leigh’s age. Leigh was 11, Kris’ son, was 12, Sacha was 13, though he would be fourteen in a few days and Kris’ daughter, had just turned 14 so we were all lined up with the years. Kris was a single parent and I thought she was the most attractive female I had come across in Australia. She was three years younger than me; 44 at the time we met. I gave her a book of my poems and she gave me her phone number and I arranged to telephone her within a few days after we got settled into our new home. Of course, I lost her phone number in my packing, moving, and shuffling about and that was quite upsetting because I knew she would be my next girlfriend. It was just one of those things I knew, I even did an astrological chart of when we first met, and that confirmed to me that we would get involved.

Kris Special

The next weekend I set up in Glenelg particularly in hopes of meeting Kris (her name was Chris but for some reason I liked it with a K and once I started that way I never turned back) but she did not come by. The following Sunday was a rainy and windy day so I set up under cover on the other side of the street underneath the town hall. I was concerned she would not see me but in the afternoon I saw a friend she was with on the first day I met her and from her I discovered I had written down the wrong phone number. I telephoned her that night and we spoke for hours. I knew that after ten years of being without a woman – except of course for the couple of one-night stands in London and France – that it would now change. The children were also older now and I thought it would be easier on them for me to get involved with someone and in fact that it would be good role modelling; some semblance of an adult relationship as is popular within typical moral society. So far my children had not had a lot to go on in terms of romantic relationships.
I stayed awake
all night
just to catch
a glimpse
of you
dreaming
about me

As important as that first contact with someone and the thought of getting in a relationship once again were a few other facts in my simple boring quiet laid-back run-on sentences life: the Internet, starting a post-graduate degree and Leigh’s climb in the baseball world and Sacha’s dealing with adolescence.  Most of which I will leave out of this story which is really written for Sacha and if he reads this – if you read this – then I would have had one reader of this and of course to tell you what some of the more outlandish things you did would not be good.
Leigh attended a coaching clinic at Glenelg with the Adelaide Giants the next week and that became the focus point of our little family (Sacha, Leigh and me).
We spent the first few weeks of 1995 getting settled in our new house in Hackham and at the end of January at the beginning of the new Australian school year I put the children into Wirreanda High School at 105 Richards Drive, Morphett Vale. Sacha was in year ten and Leigh in year eight. Wirreanda was a lot bigger than the Victor Harbor schools and in fact was a city school but there was baseball and basketball and lots of kids to meet and have fun with and to get into trouble with.
Looking back to then, now, (Saturday, November 17, 2007, Brooklyn, New York City), with a job as a middle school teacher at The Dwight School, a private school in Manhattan, I am a bit shocked reading my son’s diary. It could be all our moving, my role as single-parent, my start-up relationship with Kris (Chris) [after not being with anyone for ten years; except for a couple of foreign one-night stands in foreign places like France and England], or just the adolescence of my children but I did not have a clue about their school day. Here is an entry in Sacha’s school diary: Both children signed my name on whatever they needed, always without my knowing. I had caught them writing my signature over and over on the kitchen table years earlier, like they were in some contest.  Every day the children were not at school or needed my signature they would match the signed name in the front of their diary so they got away with a lot. What the two boys had in common with my name is that I did have a rather large, crossed T but the rest was not close.

They were not even close to my signature – the teachers at Wirreanda High School must have thought I was quite illiterate, that I could not even spell dental – the fact that I was doing my PhD probably was not known – not that that would be enough to spell dental correctly but I should have been thought to have written a bit better.
This weekend, August 1 – 2, 2015, Sacha came over to Adelaide from Melbourne and I gave him a box of his diaries and notebooks from his high-school start-up days (start-up like in a Silicon Valley web-app start-up without the success of an app that lasts) and he surely remembered these days and what a project he was. Now some seventeen-eighteen years later he remembers the past like I remember my past at Shenendehowa – just passing shadows trying to have fun during aborted learning. I look at the children I teach now in primary and middle school, and I look at those Sacha-kids and wonder if they will someday get their act together and be as successful as my son – once they get out of the public school system.

I had my first indoor show in Adelaide coming up and it had been many years since I had shown my work as a real exhibit. I really enjoyed showing my picture-poems as street art but no one really wants to do that people just pretend that they want to do that. Every artist, at the end of their brain space, really wants to do gallery shows and that is what I wanted. My brother, Robert, did many gallery shows and I was always proud of him. One show I went to I had a girlfriend make me a purple velvet cape for and I thought that I was looking good.  Strangely, for me, there were many gay males who thought I too was gay and I tried to be polite, but it just got strange. What I learned was that gay people think everyone is gay, or at least that is what a couple of people explained to me. The people I spoke to could not understood why I would want to be with a female, and I could not understand why anyone, male or female would not want to be with a female. Sexuality is such a strange thing I don't think anyone will ever really work it out. In all my years I never managed to have my own gallery show – I had my picture-poems and some strange things I painted and constructed and wrote in and on in some indoor spaces but nothing that was all me which is what any artist really wants.

 In Adelaide, now I do not recall how it happened – I managed to convince someone at the Adelaide Public Library to let me exhibit my picture-poems. They had set aside an area for artists to create a cultural library, and I was the first to place my work there. I had some thirty or so framed picture-poems of varying size and I believed this would put me on the artistic map probably even more than the artist-in-the-park did or what I was doing in Glenelg. There was not an official art opening – at the time. I did not have one of those primary rites of passages that any artist worth his crayons would have bestowed on herself. I just carried my pictures in and hung them around the library with price tags for each one. I had my pictures in the library for one month then it was time for some other hapless hopeless hopeful person. I did not sell one or have anyone contact me for any purpose whatsoever. It was just another temporary dent in my ego but I was tough and sallied forth and had a few picture-poems in an art show here and there. In all my displays I managed to sell one for $80, the most I have ever received for a picture-poem though I would not admit that to anyone because somewhere in my mind in some parallel/horizontal/above/below other-rain-proof-realm of manifestation, somewhere in another universe that for some odd reason I am not witness to; my picture-poems are selling well and for a lot of value. Whatever value is in those other realms. In my particular realm; value equalled money or at least some love and the money was not really manifesting, and love was in short supply until...

Figure 195  Leigh  signing my name in his school diary

 The fact is that from October 1984 until January 1995, except for the one-night stand in London on New Year’s day, 1985 and the misshapen moment I shared with a female body in Montbeliard, France, April 1992 I did not touch a female. I was not interested in getting into a relationship. After the nightmare slide of my most recent child-producing relationship that made me a prisoner of Australia I had not had any interest in getting involved with anyone. I had been gradually changing my mind though, and the more I entertained the thought of becoming involved in one last relationship before I died the more, I wanted to. I also did not want to get involved whilst raising children. I had seen too many reformed/reconstituted couples and the children suffered, society suffered127F . I did live my life for my children and for whatever it is worth, in hindsight that was not such a good thing. I had incredible bouts of loneliness and now all my sacrifices seem to have been wasted.
I like to wander
through your thoughts
with nothing on
except my kisses
as a guide

My first phone call to Kris was one of my favourite memories to that point in Australia. The children were in Adelaide with Lesia and I was in my second week of life in Hackham when we carried on our first telephone conversation. My ear was becoming misshaped; Kris and I spoke so long that first night. I said I would do her astrology chart if she would stop by. Kris was working at a beauty shop as a nail-manicurist specialist type of person. She came to my house Monday afternoon between customers. We discussed her chart for an hour examining her life and what was going on from an astrological perspective. I had already done a lot of work on our combined charts before she came over and there was a ‘she is the one’ aura to my thoughts. From the moment I met her I was smitten. Not since Carol Ann had I felt so much in love with someone. Whether we were suited to one another, or because I had not been in a good relationship since fifteen years earlier I do not know. Before Kris, whose name was Chris, but I did not like the spelling, so I changed it to Kris from the start, I had only been in one full on relationship and that was Carol Ann. I never considered my relationship with Lesia as being anything more than an error, perhaps something karmic from ill-fated previous lives, or for when I am not embracing reincarnation bullshit perhaps it was a learning experience, or when I am not believing

Library art show Adelaide

 that it could have just been nothing at all that I read way too much into. All my other relationships were just passing time on earth type of experiences with occasional needs and desires being fulfilled or at least partially fulfilled.

Combined charts are one of the more interesting aspects of astrology. Relationship charts are the only thing I have found of much value. I can never work out what is happening in my own life with progressions and transits, but I do find validity in comparisons of charts. Currently I find the “Magi astrology” method of chart comparison the most accurate but before I began studying with them in about 2000, I used several methods to gain information on relationships. Firstly, and I think this is the most important chart – the chart of the first meeting is looked at.

The first meeting chart is based on the idea that we meet someone when we are supposed to and in that moment the future of the relationship is forged. I spoke about this at the end of Part 1 when I met Lesia. I had gone through a series of events to get myself to Sydney and Lesia had too. I met other people including a female in Sydney that I was going to be involved with and there were my three lovers in New Zealand but for whatever reason I ended up getting involved with Lesia and my life became irrevocable from that moment on. The chart for when I met Lesia describes this and I have noted transits to that first meeting chart that have corresponded to events in our life. Our first meeting chart and our combination chart show a couple who lived a tragic life. Individually we are not who we are as a couple therefore we need a chart to show the couple, and this is the combination or composite chart. For example, the Beatles on their own may have had some minor success or even one or two of them may have had a lot of success in their career in music but combined they became what they were. If there was a different mix, astrological theory says they would not have been anywhere as near successful as they became.

The Magi astrology mob highlights this principle with the music group, Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles etc. and how it was the combination of characters that made them the group so successful. Individuals grouped with another individual or several individuals become something else. Bonnie and Clyde together became outlaws, which Bonnie on her own may not have become. Of course that is after-the-fact speculation like all after-the-fact speculation is. The right mix of humans will accomplish a lot and looking at anyone that is in the news whether currently or in historical relationships will show this.

One of my three point four zillion ideas for a project is to write a novel based totally on astrology. I will take a random date and have someone born on that date and all the people they meet, the events in their life, their lifestyle and worldviews come from reading of their astrological aspects. Even how the story unfolds will be based on the character’s astrological charts. I will have no preconceived plan or plot. The main character may be an artist, a criminal, or a sports person – I will not know until I pick the date then I will tie it to what is happening historically at that time and the aspects will “tell the story”.

I have been planning to do this for about thirty years but as life would have it, I never have the time. However, I will have the time soon, as soon as I finish this short story of my boring fucked up life. I received news that the examiners passed my PhD thesis two days ago, December 22, 2004, after beginning it seven years ago, so that should give me a bit of extra time. We have just bought our second house, an old Victorian mansion in Round Lake, New York128F that we will begin restoring when we return to the States after New Year’s, and I am working two jobs: teaching at university and I am the Director of Technology at two private schools but otherwise I will have some time. 

24. Adelaide South Australian influencer [not]

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.