25. The WorldWideWeb discovers Terrell Neuage

My first experience with the Internet was in February of 1995. Sacha was with me and we had heard one could find anything about anything so the first word I wrote in the search engine was “graffiti”. I do not remember how many pages showed up for it but there were only a few and none of them had pictures of graffiti – there were only some dictionaries like responses. Flinders Library had one computer at the front entrance that hooked up to the Internet. It was an experiment and there was a sign that told us about how the WWW worked. Sacha and I were not impressed but after thinking about it, I had an incredible revelation. This new thing – the World Wide Web – gave one the ability to tell the world about themselves. What if I were to put my picture-poems onto this WWW thingy? I would have an audience of millions worldwide and of course I would have to give up schooling and mass market my picture-poems – how would I ever keep up with the demand? I spent quite some time working on this problem and settled on the concept of supply and demand and cost. I would just charge a lot more for each one and limit my production to about one thousand a week. If I sold each one for $25 dollars, I would make twenty dollars apiece or about $20,000 a week. I would be a millionaire within one year. The prospect of such success and wealth sent my head spinning and I almost dropped my university course but then it dawned on me that I did not have a clue how to put anything on the Internet.

Within a few weeks of the first Internet on a computer at Flinders they had a room with ten computers all hooked up to the Internet. I went there with Kris and our four children and we all looked up whatever we could think of. Sacha was looking for graffiti art, Leigh was looking up baseball and Kris’ son, David was looking up cars. I do not recall what Kris and her daughter did except after about an hour Kris said she was bored and we all left. What I remember from that first day when we all spent some time with the Internet was that it took a long time to load up a page, especially if there were pictures on it. I began to have second thoughts about whether this would be the right vehicle for my picture-poems. But I knew it was early days and as everything electronic was moving so rapidly it would not be long before the speed of the Internet would be improved. 

I was so excited about the prospects of the Internet that I took out the two books the library had on it. I discovered one could create their own site and that there were companies that gave space for one to create their page. Our neighbourhood library, Noarlunga Public Library, also put in two computers with the Internet on them and that library was not far from our house in Hackham. I began spending more time at the Noarlunga and Flinders University Libraries. On the weekends that Lesia would take the children I would go to Flinders and stay until it closed at 11 PM. I was going to learn how to get my picture-poems on the Internet. I made my first “homepage” on the free server, Angelfire. I followed their template and had a colourful background and a little blurb about me; that I wrote poems and that I was an artist and that very soon I would have picture-poems available for sale. I even got myself an email account from a free email server called Hotmail. They had just started up and their ad said that one could have an email account for life, free, with them and that sounded like an incredible deal to me. The world suddenly was connected to me and soon my picture-poems would be available for the world to purchase.  (NO, I did not see that I was connected to the world, just that it was now connected to me. Hello Am I the only one this self-centred?)

I could barely sleep that night after making my first page and getting an email account. I was at the Noarlunga library when it opened at nine AM and I rushed to the computer in incredible anticipation. I imagined I would have hundreds of emails asking when my picture-poems would be available. Of course I had not put any up. I had just told the world about them and that I was a well-known artist who had exhibited in the States and in Australia. To my incredible disappointment and dismay there was not one email asking about my picture-poems. I had many emails but they were all about products to buy. It was akin to the rejection one feels of being adopted and I knew that one. I managed to compose myself and after a few moments realised I had only given it one day and even though I had read that there were millions using the Internet already it was still early days with this technology. I knew I had to learn more and one of the early things I discovered was that it was “keywords” that drove the Internet and that the search engine, Yahoo – which was the only search engine I knew about at the time, looked for keywords and when someone wrote the keyword into the search they would come up with all the pages with the keyword. I put in “picture-poems” and was very relieved that there were no results for that. I read more and studied the Internet with great enthusiasm.

There was a lot to learn; aside of just how to make a page one needed to know about keywords130F and subjects and cookies and how to submit their page so it showed up in a search. It became clear to me that it was not going to be an overnight success and that it would probably take me the rest of 1995 before I would have myself in the position on the Internet to sell my thousands and thousands of picture-poems, so I concentrated on trying to finish my honour's degree and put in as many hours as I could learning about the Internet.

Kris was not very impressed and she could not understand why I would put my poems where everyone could see them. She said I was with her now and that the only reason I wanted attention for my writing was to attract females. This had come up in the past. I cannot explain my need to share my romantic poems with others or to sell picture-poems but I did. It is not because I was adopted, or wanted more girlfriends – though it is rather sexy having a woman like a poem. “I enjoy visiting exotic places on your body and sending postcards to myself saying “wish you were here”. OK, I did write that to Kris, I wrote her a hundred poems a day like this, but if a woman read this and fantasized that I had written this to her and told me and then asked me to write her somewhere between her breast and her thighs, I would waver – depending on the female. After all, we are all just passing through this life – at the end of the day are we not just sophisticated animals looking for another of our type to hump.

“I enjoy visiting…” https://neuage.org/picture_poems/laugh_in_french.htm

I did not think she was correct, I did love her, and I was not trying to get the attention of other females or at least I did not try on a conscious level. I do not care whether it is male or females who like my writing as long as they purchase the bloody things. She became most upset when I put poems I had written to her on the Internet as she saw them as her poems and she thought it was horrible that I would want to share them with anyone else. She hated the line from the 1960’s song, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you are with”, (Stephen Still: Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young) whereas my life is based on that line.

Of course, no one is going to put in the word picture-poem and then see my page and buy something. I had to find a way to get people to come to my site; actually my sites. I began to make many WebPages and I found there were other companies that were giving free WebPages. I set up websites with Geocities (and to today, ten-years after my first homepage on Geocities, it is one of the best free site servers; though now in 2015 it is defunct as Yahoo took it over and crushed it shortly after obtaining it in 2009. However, a start-up sort of geocities set-up and I put one page on their sort of geocities place as a directory last year:

http://www.geocities.ws/neuage/) and FortuneCity (another one to give up their free sites offerings – mine was/is at http://neuage.fortunecity.ws/)  and several others. It did not take me long to have more than one-hundred sites all dedicated to me (Last time I looked there were more than ten-thousand). But what I needed to do was to attract people to my pages. I started putting in all kinds of keywords from cities to objects. You name it I have used it as a keyword. My thinking was that even though I had tricked people to my pages they would be satisfied to be there. Soon my sites were on the first page of searches for everything from: “Australian artists”, “poetry”, “South Australia”, “Adelaide”, ”New Orleans” and a thousand other words and phrases. Persons, place, things, ideas – they were just keywords to get people to my sites. I use to sit in front of the computer with a dictionary. Kris thought I was going mad, that I was so desperate for attention. It does seem strange to put oneself on the Internet. Does anyone really care? I had another motive behind my actions and that was to come in contact with people I had not heard from for many years. With all the moving around I have done if someone wanted to find me there was now a way to do it. Lovers and friends I have had in Maryland, Hawaii, New York, California, Oregon and any other place I have been through or set up camp – there are so many people I have passed along the way and I have no idea whatever became of them. One of my first sites was for the Holy Order of Mans and I did start getting some correspondence from people who had been in the Order. As I was writing this now I looked in the search engine Google and put in “picture-poems”, there were 2,160,000 pages listed and to my amazement, I was number two.

For the search “poems from Adelaide, South Australia” I am the first seven entries and for just “poems from South Australia” I am the first three listed and this is May 2004, almost ten years later. Now in August 2015 I am not listed on the first dozen plus pages for anything. Shows how shit the Internet has become doesn’t it? But in all this time with the promise of riches and fame and finding people I have never sold one picture-poem and I have made contact with only six people from my past: It is now August 2025 - thirty years later - I have never sold anything - I am not even in searches - I no longer exist - on the internet - fuck you internet.

In a few years only AI will be making webpages and stories - none of us will exist as authors or creators.

"The Death of the Author" is a seminal essay by Roland Barthes, published in 1967, which argues against the traditional literary criticism that relies on the author's intentions and biography to interpret a text

• Tracy – Lynn’s daughter, who I corresponded with for a couple of weeks, she was living in Baltimore and said she still had picture-poems that I had given her mother twenty-five years earlier. We wrote back and forth but it ended fifteen years ago. Don’t know why.
• A woman who bought several picture-poems  in 1974 wrote me that she 3 of my poems

I sent her one of my books that I had printed with more than 800 poems a decade earlier in Victor Harbor and I never heard from her after that. However, I thought it was cosmic at the time that someone remembered me and still had my picture-poems after thirty years.

• Two fellows that remembered me from New Orleans wrote and I met them in Chicago in June 2004 on the way to Ireland - one of them my wfie of the past 25 years - see future stuff - and I visited in 2024 when we were doing a house-exchange in Chicago - the people from that house stayed at our house in Adelaide.
• Desiree Eva, Carol Ann’s daughter
• Beverly from my last days in Baltimore before teeing up with my children’s mother and going off to Hawaii then to Australia in 1980. We corresponded for a few weeks in 2009 then she said she was happily married and did not want to communicate with me again/ But then over the years she kept getting in touch with me until finally in 2024 I blocked her on all social media.

Following my page on picture-poems, I created a page about the Holy Order of Mans. At the time, there was nothing on the Internet on the Order. I wrote a brief summary of the Order and my experiences in it. I invited others who had been in the Order to submit their name and address so that I could start a page, ‘where they are now’.

This site has been created to keep an up to date profile on the work of folks once in and still involved with the teachings of HOOM, and for what is being done as a group consciousness to help where we can. You do not need to join/subscribe.  This e-group is open to all to post on, who are interested in following the teachings of HOOM or who are looking for someone who was once in HOOM.

I had more than one hundred names and address of ex-Hoomies after six-months online. I made my first electronic group on the server, Yahoo. It started well, there was a time that I had more than one hundred people signed on, and there was a lot written daily. It was interesting to see all the stories written and for months, there was a good dialogue between participants. However, some ex-Hoomes began putting others down and being quite insulting. Just as the Order had broken down and new streams had begun decades ago, new e-groups began and people grouped against one another. I eventually closed down the group when there were too many people acting too stupid for me to be bothered with. I moved the group to http://au.groups.yahoo.com/group/HOOM-prayers in mid-2002. I visited the site several months ago in September of 2004 but aside of that I have lost interest in anything to do with the Order. 

Within a couple of years of my first HOOM pages several other people who had been in the Order started their own Order-copies and put up WebPages. These break off groups remind me of the designer-copy-watches one purchases on the streets of Hong Kong. They have a look and feel of the original but at closer inspection one can see they are bogus and the two-dollar price tag is a bit high knowing they will only look fine at a distance.

HOOM breakoffs

• Christ the Saviour Brotherhood,
• The Gnostic Order of Christ ,
• Science of Man ,
• American Temple,
• Foundation of Christ Church 

There has also been a growing collection of books by ex-brothers, sisters, priests and Teachers from HOOM:

• The Journey: From the Finite to the Infinite, Master Timothy D. Harris
• The art of healing, Mark Earlix
• Seven Pearls of Golden Force edited, Rev. Martin Swason
• Bread Upon the Waters, Br Peter Reinhart
• Sacramental Magic in a Small-Town Café, Br Peter Reinhart
• Ultimate Things : An Orthodox Christian Perspective on the End Times, Dennis Eugene Engleman
• The Saint Nicholas Secret, Dennis Eugene Engleman
• Pilgrimage to Paradise, Dennis Eugene Engleman
• The Word within, Peter Bowles
• Leaving Australia, Saint Terrell of Downunder

26. Baseball discovers Leigh Neuage

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.