Book One is complete on-line
3 - tofu

the original re-done many times tofu website is at https://tofu.neuage.us/ along with the famous tofu times. All that has been saved for historical inspection is Tofu Times August 1982, Tofu Times April 1982, Tofu Times June 1982

• January 08 – “Let’s start a tofu factory in Adelaide” 6:35 pm

Lesia asked what I was cooking so I proudly displayed my cookbook “The Joy of Tofu” or some such type of named book and waved the packet of white rubbery substance. “Tofu burger, tofu cheesecake, and a tofu milkshake.” Now there is probably a book called “Tofu for Dummies”.

“Yuck”

I did not care about her negative response; I was now a committed tofu person. It had passed my way more than a decade earlier when I was living in California in communes and doing the “right thing” by not eating meat and eating only all “natural” crap because my body was some sort of some kind of a temple. The fact that I ate “natural” foods and at the same time took enough drugs to kill a brown dog make my ‘temple’ a bit wobbly at the best of times. However, as far as the “natural” food trip I had swayed from my ‘hippie’ roots over the years and until now I had only experienced tofu as a distant passing substance that was not really a part of my daily consciousness.

The dinner was good - not great - a bit interesting - slightly unusual - but it was the start of something that would be a part of my life for decades, and of course still is91F . For close to a decade tofu was a determinant factor in my life, affecting others within my orb, affecting me greatly, and providing me with alternating cycles of hope, negativity, faith, anger, promise, despair, money, no money, and several other emotional and non-emotional things. Of course, as we all know I am now flogging an e-book about my life as tofu. http://tofu.neuage.us/

The next morning, I said, “why don’t we start a tofu factory?" 

I made many meals using tofu when we lived in Hawaii and one day Lesia said she did not think there was anyone making tofu in Adelaide and that maybe we should go there and make tofu.

I did an astrological chart on the idea, and it seemed like a good idea that could manifest and thus began the strange and weird life of a tofu manufacturer. I still have this idiotic bastard of a chart I did on that day, right here in front of me – even though I have travelled the world and I have been through so much in the twenty-three years since drawing up this chart on January the eight 1981 – just four days after Sacha was born. Of course, it had the same Jupiter - Saturn conjunction at nine degrees of Libra that Sacha had. As my understanding and learned highly esteemed reader would know by now this conjunction is exactly sitting on my Neptune – talk about delusion, huh? The telling aspect of how this would all really turnout was that the ruler of the chart (the ascendant), the Moon, in 24 Aquarius 45 and in the eighth house was rapidly forming a square to Uranus in 28 Scorpio 45, the ruler of the eighth which was in the fifth. That right there would tell anyone with even half a brain that some major shit would befall this idea in four years (four degrees forming and in fixed signs in fixed houses as if I had to explain this to anyone – it is so damn obvious) and sure enough four years later at the end of 1984 and the beginning of 1985 it did just as the horary chart said it would. I will get to that in a few paragraphs hence. Or not.

Ever since Lesia's announcement that she was going to return to Australia with Sacha and if I had wanted to see him again I would need to go back with her - we had been looking at what I could do to make a living there. At the time I had been doing a lot of house painting with Randy but our jobs were based more on 'good talk' than on a good result or any professional licenses - actually we did not have a license. Somehow, we managed to convince people we were doing a stellar job. The fact that we did not know all there was to know about painting - in my case, I did not know anything did not deter us from getting job after job. Of course as karma would play itself out, decades later whilst trying to renovate a Victorian house in Round Lake, New York, we would have the same thing happen to us. The ‘us’ was a different manifestation of a composite horoscope than the ‘us’ of 1981 – but one part of that composite horoscope – me, was the same. If we really are ever the same. Builders and painters, each with a better story than the previous asshole would not only do such a poor job on our house but they would overcharge us too.

Lesia doubted that I would be able to pull it off the painter caper in Australia, telling me that the country was very unionized and I would not be able to hustle anyone into anything without Randy's inspirational push. (I am writing this August 20, 2004, with Randy sitting across from me, during one of my rare visits with him, this time in Eugene, Oregon. Randy does not know I am writing about when we were together, some twenty-four years ago and in some strange abstract way it seems strange and abstract. He is sitting there watching the 2004 Olympics – I do not care about the Olympics. I was to be there in Athens myself but due to the events of August 16th, 2003, I did not go but I am sitting here instead in Eugene writing this.) Randy was a professional at getting people to believe him and to believe in him. He could have easily been a television evangelist and having hundreds of thousands of people sending him their life savings as most of them do. But at the end of the day Randy does have ethics and he would never destroy lives like the hustling ministers and priests do. Now Randy is content (somewhat) with selling antiques and etc. on eBay.

I feel sorry for people who rely on books and videos and subliminal and motivational tapes and spend their money and time at seminars and lecturers trying to become a better something or the other (so you can imagine how many people in the world I feel sorry for at any given n moment). Having a good projectable image is a birthright it cannot be artificially induced. We are not all created equal – we should have equal rights, but we are not born equal from a personality view. We are the prisoners, heroes, champions, liberators of our birth charts and only those who have been born to be celebrities or wealthy or suicidal or wankers will be that. Some people are born with an army sergeant mentality – the ultimate salesperson is born that way. There is no way to develop it. A wimp will never be able to command attention. The skinny guy at the beach who gets sand kicked into his face then goes and lifts weights and takes muscle pills and shoots up steroids and listens to subliminal self-help tapes and quotes a lot of positive quotations will still be a wimp long after the muscles have taken over the body if the person was born with a wimp’s personality and soul. A positively born being would never have had the sand kicked in his or her face to begin with no matter what they looked like. For example, Randy who has always been a skinny runt of a guy had a “don’t mess with me” attitude. I saw a large beefy local Hawaiian put his hand on Randy because he was angry at Randy for something and Randy said, “don’t you ever touch me again” and the guy just turned and walked away. I have seen local Hawaiians make mincemeat out of a white mainlander before, but Randy could command respect no matter who the other person was. It is the classic David and Goliath story and I am sure David did not listen to the local travelling guru giving lecturers on living a more positive life if only he would buy several overpriced books and listen to a few videos and subliminal tapes. David was able to follow the voice within, whether referred to as God or the Self or whatever, and created his destiny because he had the astrological chart for it and Goliath did not. I am saying that we are stuck with being a loser even though we are – but we can benefit from being a loser. For example, no matter what I do I will still be me at the end of the day, and you will be you. A person can have a sex change, be saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, become a Mormon, Muslim, Jew, alcoholic, Democrat, movie star or successful author but behind the external bullshit we are who we were when we were born and nothing can change that until we leave the body and life we are currently living. And no one really knows what happens after this end – and of course there are as many beliefs to what happens to us as there are humans, proving that no one really knows for sure. Just as everyone has a different experience of the sex act, I am convinced that everyone has a different experience of death. There is no consensus. All we can ever hope to do is to find a method of coping with who we are and that is the use of all these various worldviews.

The events that have happened in my life, especially those of August 2003, I wish so much I could have not experienced but they were out of my control and all I can do is find a world view to help me cope with them. I use to have a set of beliefs that I thought would help me through anything but now I find my belief systems give no help for me to cope with the moments as they pass by so slowly. I am me, at the end of the day, and nothing can lessen or change what I had to experience. Yes, I can make up reasons and philosophies or even take an “off the shelf” belief system but I know deep within me that I feel what I feel and I experience what I experience solely because I am me and nothing can change that. However, saying that, I am finding some comfort in writing my little story of my insignificant life – in hopes that somewhere in these thousands and thousands of words I will discover why my life is shit.

Lesia was not impressed with the house painting jobs. I would only do them when I had a day off from my Queens Hospital job and sometimes after work. Randy and I had a propensity to snort cocaine before we started working and when we came home. We would also go through a bottle of Tanqueray Gin and by the end of the moment – probably before bed – I would be quite intoxicated, and I think Lesia was quite put off by our behaviour.

Figure 109 My parents visited us May 1981 - Hawaii: (my opinion of Lisa, blocked out her face) holding Sacha and my mum and dad over from Clifton Park NY

Contrary to the ridiculous rumour of Roland Barthes that the author is “dead” I, as the author, am alive doing well and adding bits and pieces to the story that I want to reveal. Yes, you, as the reader, have immense power – power that I can only dream of. You, the reader, can scoff at what I write, call me nuts under your breath or out loud for that matter. You can skip paragraphs, skip whole pages or do something as loathsome as speed read my story. I do what I can to make it difficult to speed read – mainly by creating various literary fields of constructs that prevents speed reading – but to say what that is would be to give a way my secrets of getting the reader to read each word – or at least each sentence in order to make hide or hare of what I have to say. Blimey, I have spent all this time – years – writing, reviewing and putting together this story. My audience has always been you two. I have no intention for you two to use some speed-reading technique to cruise through my story because the story is my life. It is our life too. I have had to go through it slowly and event by event, thought by thought and if I could have, I would have jumped through sections of events and thoughts in order to get to another construct of thoughts and events, but I was not able to.

Tofu would become a major part of my life for the 1980s, both good and horrifically so and twenty years later I am still making tofu cheesecakes but now I make them at the end of each semester for my students. But as all things start somewhere the business of tofu entered my life in May 1980. Lesia and I collected recipes and ordered as many books on tofu as we could find. We bought The Book of Tofu, by Shurtleff & Aoyagi and learnt how to make tofu. In June 1981 we sold our belongings, packed what we wanted to send and put them in a container, and sent them on a freighter to Australia.

4 - last days

BOOK ONE complete on-line
Return to Home Page of Book Two

Book 1: Leaving Australia, 'Before the After'

• Focus: This book covers the earlier part of Neuage’s life, detailing his journey from childhood through various phases up to a significant transition point. It explores his experiences as an adoptee, a hippie in the 1960s, a member of the Holy Order of MANS cult in the 1970s, a single parent in the 1980s and 1990s, with a 10th grade education until the age of 44; then a student pursuing higher education from 1991 to 2010, culminating in a PhD and being a professor and teacher in New York, Australia, China.
• 

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.