33. life philosophies by/of Terrell Neuage

I had a rather stable relationship with Kris though we broke up several times then got back together. I am not sure what our problems were but by the end of 2000 we were no longer a couple. The last time I had any contact with her was on a flavorless unfavorable (though of course there was a lingering lusty full-bodied, Australian Shiraz sort of aftertaste) afternoon in October of 2000 (it is now August 31st 2006, or April 28, 2015 for this current edit prior to making an e-book of this mess). We had an argument over something. We decided to go out to dinner and try to patch things up. It was a good end. I was not expecting anything. We were just on and off and she complained heaps that I was impossible to talk with – though I am not sure what the fuss was all about. Our last time together we went to dinner in Glenelg and I dropped her off at home and we kind of kissed goodbye and she made the ‘I need a break for awhile’ type of statement and that was it. Now it is November again – six years later, about the same amount of time we spent together and so much has happened since then it is difficult to recall it all. When we met I was starting my honour’s degree at Deakin and Leigh was just getting going with his baseball and Sacha was doing fine and learning how to do some rap and a bit of graffiti. In the six years we were together I did not leave Australia whilst in the past six years I have traveled around the world ten times.

When we last saw each other Leigh was close to signing a professional baseball contract, Sacha was in Queensland or was it New South Wales? I was in my second year of PhD that I thought would be done in one more year – it took another five. Since I last saw Kris I have been told I have high blood pressure, hepatitis C and diabetes and heart surgery and then there is what happened to Leigh. Since the last time I saw her I have lived in the States for ten years and China for three years and the last time I saw her I had no idea I would be ‘leaving Australia’. Some things are the same – I am still making lots of webpages, actually that is the only thing that is the same.

This is one of the remarkable things about life before we enter the human-machine age. I had no idea firstly that I was never to see Kris again or that life would be much different. I was a poor single-parent now I am just poor. However, one of the best things that ever happened in my life was to break up with Kris. This is the way of life before the computer implant age; we get to make decisions based on non-reality. Based on emotions. In the human-machine age decisions will be performed not due to emotions or chance but to exact scientific reasoning with pre-programed results. Of course who is doing the pre-programming is the problem.

I was finally working for some money. Through the Family and Community Services of South Australia I was taking care of several children. There was ‘N’ who had a rough start to life. The story is that at the age of ten, ‘N’ went to a neighbor and asked for some food. He was looking after his four siblings all younger than him. He was bathing them, including a couple in the two and three year old range, and feeding them until there was no food left. Apparently the parents were nowhere to be found. They were both drug addicts and the mother was often out turning tricks. The neighbor called the ‘authorities’ and the kids were rounded up and taken off to white suburbia. ‘N’ and his siblings were Aboriginals through the mother; the father was a bit of a mixture of various ethnicities.  So I was ‘N’s mentor. We would go out and play baseball – he had never played before. By the time I became the good factor in his life he was thirteen. I was with him for a couple of years. Leigh was one of his heroes – he wanted to be like Leigh and sign a large money contract with a professional baseball team.  ‘N’  was good. Many said he was better than Leigh at that age. We use to go out and play ball with ‘N’ pitching and me chasing after the ball as he was too fast for me to catch. Leigh was too fast too. At the same time Leigh was 17 and almost daily he was dragging me out to catch. I feared for my life every time. We even tried putting me in a chair in the backyard with Leigh using tennis balls. I still could not catch him; I had black and blue marks on my arms from missing (and this is with tennis balls) and I never once caught his curve ball – I would try so hard.

They use the curve ball analogy about life don’t they? We perceive a straight forward motion in our direction then just when we think we have it in our reach the bloody thing changes direction. I try to be an unconditional thinker though it is so difficult. Often I will attempt to deflect thoughts, actions, beliefs even directions I am headed knowing they are just other’s perceptions attempting to fuse with others and adhering to me. We are such magnets for everything else. I work hard to go through the moment pretending I have never heard of any religion or anyone else’ moral structures or some other philosophy but it is impossible. I realize every belief by anyone is just passed on by someone else and someone before them and there is none that is any more valid than another. I must develop my own beliefs, my own superstitions but how is that done?

It is all such a rip-off. Life is so much to no avail. We live we die we are forgotten. Today I was looking at the tired faces of farmhands in a painting done in the 1850s, hanging in the Brooklyn Museum. The name of the painter did not stick in my brain and I surely did not know anything about the tired looking peasants in the field. But they had a life they struggled to do the right thing to be honest and all the crap one believes they need to do to keep their role in society proper. They may even have believed someone else’s twisted notion that because they were honest and believed in some dude who had lived and died in the past they would live in bliss for eternity. They were probably of the Christian faith and thought that their belief the mythological Jesus would get them to heaven, but truth be told and reality be known they are just dust and long forgotten with their one shot at life and they blew it by believing in shit. They should have just partied their butts off and fucked everyone in sight and lived the only real reality – the moment they had and let go to never have another thought in the universe ever again. That was all a bit of a depressing thought so I went and looked at some African sculptures and laughed at their silly superstitions and then went home and wrote this.

Of course we can Google the question ‘when will Jesus return’ and get lots of information (About 121,000,000 results as of 28/04/2015). One of my favorites is:

“I know the date that Jesus will return!

I figured it out! The math was always there for people to see, but in these last days, God has seen fit to reveal the truth to me, His chosen prophet, of the exact day that Jesus will return! I am glad that He gave me this insights, especially since the name of my blog is “Till He Comes.” It is privilege to be the first person who knows when Jesus will return.

Jesus will return on March 5, 2014!

You might be wondering why I know this is correct and why God chose to reveal this to me instead of to you. We’ll I’ll tell you why…”
Holy shit!

As a bit of a side note today is 28th of April 2015. Gosh did God fuck with this dude’s brain? Where is Ray Kurzweil’s machine people?

When everything is going nowhere and nothing is everywhere there is not much left but to change it all and that is what happened in my life more suddenly than I was aware of until now when I look back to then and the changes of then that made now so different from then. The moment becomes cloaked in a mist without enough vision to see through.

I have never had much of a vision. Kind of just fell forward through life and got to the next place without plans of any sort. Left home in 1965 or was in 1964? Somehow got my sorry ass to New Orleans then ended up in the cult order, The Holy Order of MANS – got out of that and back in. Got an Australian knocked up had a couple of kids began university at age forty-four or so and now I am living in Brooklyn, New York. Holy Shit.

In about October 2000 I attended the last supper, With Kris. See Jesus was not the only one to have a last supper but does that cat ever get a lot of mileage out of his meal. What did they eat at the last supper? Well I know; it was unleavened bread because he was a Jew dude and some tofu because of course being the Son of God he was a vegetarian. At the time I had no concept of it being the last time or just a series that ended. We had met on New Year’s Day 1995 in Glenelg. She had stopped to read my picture poems and we were still together toward the end of 2000. There had been a few times that I thought we would not continue but we slugged on. I had not attempted any other relationships though I had a few silly interactions on the Internet in chatrooms. Of course she was upset and thought flirting with someone online was the same as offline so I didn’t do it anymore.

Kris and I went to dinner on a two-for-one coupon. I had a government car from my job at FAYS, a new Holden Commodore. It was the best car I had ever driven, and considering I no longer had a car as the last one we had was defected by the police for so many things wrong with it (smoke pouring out the back, the driver’s side door did not open and I would have to climb out the passenger side, there were some malfunctions with indicator lights and a long list of other faults.) A policeman had stuck a label on the windscreen with the long list of faults and I had seven days to repair them all. Not having any money to spend on fixing up the car – which I had bought when my father was visiting seven years earlier, I had given it to Sacha and his friends to do what they wished to do with it. They spray-painted it all, including the windows.

The funniest thing happened soon after they did all that. One of Sacha’s friends, a son of a cop who was always in trouble, including once being busted by his own father, of course the cop father did not know that when they burst in on a house full of drug dealers that his own son would be there stoned out of his money whilst doing a drug deal. Nevertheless the son spent a year in jail for drugs. Anyway he was driving the defected car with spray paint all over it and smoke coming out the back one afternoon when he went to collect his dole money at the Colonnades Shopping Centre. Sacha said he knew it was our car and who was driving when he first heard it and saw the smoke coming out the rear exhaust. He left the car running, went in to collect his dole money then drove off. Sacha thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Weeks later I asked whatever happened to our car and Sacha said he saw it at the bottom of a hill on its side. So having a new Commodore to drive was quite pleasurable.

FAYS, Family and Community Services, was something I had sort of fallen into. Kris had been a volunteer for them a few years earlier and in 1998 with nothing much to do in life beyond raising two boys and working on my PhD something that could actually pay real cash and provide a change in pace and a car to drive ‘clients’ around in all seemed like a good thing to be involved in. We took some courses on reporting abuse and how to work in the system and soon I had a couple of boys to look after a few times a week.

FAYS was set up under the Family and Community Services Act 1972 and the Children's Protection Act of 1993.

These children did not have a good start to life.

I took three boys out a few hours at a time; usually four or five hours on weekends and some days after school. They all lived together with a ‘house-mother’ in a new house in the suburbs of Adelaide.

1. The first one was ten-years old and not from an easy background. He had been found sleeping on boxes years earlier in an alley in Brisbane when he was six and his brother was four. They had both been born drug addicts and alcoholics and now were under the care of the South Australian Family Court. The younger child had been adopted and lived with his new family in the Adelaide Hills. I took the one I was in charge of to visit on Sundays. It was difficult because the younger child had lots of toys and a lovely home and the one I was in charge of, all of ten years old, lived in a group home and felt unloved. I got him, as I did all my children in life, involved with baseball, and he like the two years he played tee-ball at Southern Districts Peewee Ball Club.  He was not interested in their baseball program, as he got older. I spent three years looking after him for about five to ten hours per week.

 

7. The second child I was like a big brother to, though I got paid and I was way too old to be a brother to, was fourteen. He was from a sexual abuse situation – one of the worst cases in the Australian history I was told. We too played baseball and he was on the Southern District’s team for one year but did not want to continue the second. His biggest moment came when he almost hit a home run – it went way over the fence but was foul by a few inches but it gave him confidence that he could hit a ball that far. He made some good catches in the outfield too but most of the time he struck out. We would drive around heaps, as I did with all the children. I learned how to do burn outs in the Commodores that I would have and I basically would drive them like a racecar. We would go on dirt tracks in the countryside and really go fast. We were assigned cars and sometimes I would get a smaller one but I complained saying I was tall and needed the larger cars. Cars were seldom more than six months. I only ever had one small ding with the car, chipping off paint on the side. I hit the gate going out of the FAYS car park but I was able to find some spray paint that sort of matched it and no one noticed. I made the most of the cars and would take one home for the weekend and would drive Leigh to baseball and do all my shopping. One night, when I had left the keys on the dining room table, Leigh took the car out for a few hours with his friends. I was upset until he returned. He was sixteen and on learner plates so we both would have gotten into a lot of trouble if caught. Workers for FAYS were only supposed to be using the car when they were taking a client out – but since I didn’t have my own car I got away with it. We had to write down our mileage and as I would drive for hours at a time with one of the kids. No one questioned why there would be so many kilometers on the car come Monday morning.

 

5. During the week I was only supposed to pick up the kids from school and take them to baseball and return the car. One time though I stopped and collected a car because it was raining and I did not want to get wet going home. The cars were locked up near the Noarlunga Train Station and I had a key to the gate. I had been in Adelaide working on my PhD and usually I walked home from the train station, a fifteen minute walk but when it rained I would just grab a car from FAYS and then return it the next morning before the social workers and other in-charge type of people got to work. It was one of the few things, apart from getting high too much in the 1960s and the 1970s, and stowing away on a ship in 1967 that I had done that was not a really socially acceptable thing.
16. ‘N’ was my most full on child to work with. I think he was thirteen when I met him. Big strong Aboriginal boy that had, like the other two boys, a rough trot in life. I told his story briefly above.

Over the course of the next two years I would meet the parents, both of whom were in quite bad shape. I had been through this years earlier living in Victor Harbor when I looked after a fifteen year old friend of Sacha’s. His mother was a heroin addict too and she had gone blind then died. I do not understand why some people try drugs for years like I did and then move on in life and others get bogged down and watch their life deteriorate.  I have not had a bit of alcohol for more than two years, or smoked a cigarette for more than twenty years or had any LSD, opium, hashish, marijuana, methamphetamine or any other such stuff for decades. I surely am no goody two shoes gone moral and socially correct I just got bored with getting high. ‘N’ and I used to go for very long drives, for four and five hours, being young he liked going at high speeds on outback roads and I would bring the car back Monday morning covered in mud.

‘N’ idolized Leigh and set his goals to become a professional ball player. Even though Leigh had not been signed and was only sixteen we all knew he would sign soon for big bucks. Leigh had gone past 90 miles-per-hour already during a trial with a scout for the Atlanta Braves. ‘N’ did not have Leigh’s speed yet, he was two years younger – but he could hit the ball a long ways for his age and he was fast. Eventually ‘N’ got into an Aboriginal gang and drugs and ran off at age fifteen to Sydney to try and find his father who had left suddenly from Adelaide. I do not know what became of ‘N’ or the other two children I looked after and I am sure they have forgotten me and have no idea what became of Leigh.

I pulled into Kris’ driveway thinking I would be coming in to her house and we would have our usual love making Saturday night. Instead she said ‘I need a little break’ and I was not sure what that meant but I assumed that was the end of our relationship – just like that. In fact it was. I drove back home and threw a ball with Leigh, made him some dinner and went and played on the Internet. By this time, late 2000, I had thousands of free web-hosted webpages. Every free website that existed I signed up for. Each one I used Neuage as the sign on name. I had passed the more than one hundred mark of free websites by the end of 2000.  There are only a few of the ones I started in 1995 still in existence; geocities (which is now yahoo-geocities), angelfire and indiko (the best by far and the only one that has never put any banner ads on my pages). Geocities, Angelfire, and 50megs I still have several sites for each up but they all have ads.

I never saw or heard from Kris again.

People enter and leave our lives or is it the other way around? If we believe in other life times perhaps there are ongoing interactions. I stole your shoes in 1243 in the shadow of some stupid Irish castle and now in 2007 you steal my Nike sneakers at the gym while I am taking a shower.

But it is never quite so easily defined. Yesterday (Sunday, June 3, 2007) I was at the Bang on a Can Marathon listening to the string quartet Ethel at 9 pm when my phone vibrated in my pocket. Nothing unusual to get a phone call for most people but for me, my wife calls me and that is about it. Running into the hall adjacent to the concert I was listening to the person ringing me saying she was Carol Ann’s sister. I did not even know she had a sister, just the brother who collected us from the airport in Honolulu in 1969 and who has spent the past decade in prison accused of killing his wife. Apparently Carol Ann had three sisters and three brothers showing how little I actually knew about one of the most important people I collaborated with on this planet this time, if one’s love life is considering collaboration. This particular sister said she had met me in Hawaii – something I did not recall. Her news was that Carol Ann had died a few hours earlier, probably from a heart attack. Desiree, Carol Ann’s daughter had my phone number from when I had tracked her down months earlier through an Internet search.

I seem to be going through a string of deaths in my life, my father having been the most recent prior to Carol Ann.

I had not seen her since I drove up with Dell in 1972, and I had not heard from her for a couple of decades. She was supposed to speak with me a few months ago on the day Desiree was getting married but that never happened. It had been my intention for decades to go and visit her. My memory was of Carol Ann the 1960’s flower girl and four decades later that is still the only image I have of her. I do not have a single photograph of her and I doubt that I ever did. It seems such a waste that we did not have mobile phones in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. Three decades that could be still here visually and virtually in front of me. Considering how now people get a photo or a clip of every move their child or lover or family and friends do then post them, pre-smartphones is almost a vacuum in our history.

The best part of saying goodbye and never having contact with someone again is that we hold them forever in our final memory of when we saw them last. This happened with Kris. When she said she needed a break in October 2000, I assumed we would be back together within a few months – though seven years later and not a peep of a communication between us is good, as I will always have the last viewing as the best. My last view of my father was OK though lying in his coffin at the age of 101 and nine months.

I made my first entry into the guestbook I had set up for the Holy Order of MANS a decade ago;

Last night ex-HOOM sister, Carol Ann --- (Hawaii Centre 1969 - 1970) died. I joined the Order with Carol Ann and her baby daughter in December 1969 in Hawaii. Randy 'lured' us in at the time. The Order was a horrible influence on her life as it was on most people's lives. Letting some egotistic person or group of people control another's life with falsehoods has been the cause of much suffering throughout history. Some people never survived HOOM and some were lucky to see through their selfishness and delusions - unfortunately there are still the cult sects of people who believe they are carrying on HOOM's 'work' and destroying lives as they go. The weak are always sucked into these types of cults.

Terrell Neuagehttp://neuage.org

I am not sure what it is I feel. In some ways I feel she is lucky, her journey, whatever that means, is over. I have often thought of writing a book about her but I never will because there is not enough time. I am almost sixty now and I started my first book about her in 1970 and added to it for a couple of decades before losing the whole bloody thing in one of the ten house moves I made with my children between 1985 and 1995.

CAROL ANN

I'm coming to see you my lady past
coming to you with memories
of when we were young
of when we were old
of when we were together young and old
together
i'm coing to hold you my lady gone
coming to you with wandering thoughts
of who have we been all these years
of who will we be this time meet
of who was it that we were in some
distant memory long ago
i'm coming to you my lady changed
coming to you without any notice
of why i've come so far to see you
after these years have separated our
dreams so far that we forgot
what they were.
12-16-72 Illinois

My hunger for you
grew so great
that I ate
the castle
i was building
for your
(Hawaii 1970)

I promised you the world
before I realized
that they
were going
to charge (change)
me for it.
(Hawaii 1970)

Carol Ann’s sister sent an email the day before I was leaving for overseas (22 June 2007) wanting me to share anything I could about my memories of her; I had told both the sister and daughter, Desiree Eva, that I was writing a bit of a memoir and if it ever was finished I would send them the whole thing; when I am a bit more settled (perhaps after I turn sixty in a few weeks) I will finish this story and send it before trashing the bloody stupid thing.

Toward the end of 2000, probably late November I joined several online dating services: “RSVP”, “absolute”, “friendz”, “All-In-One”, “Australian Matchmaker”, and more than a dozen others, most of which are no longer online or like many of the free web-hosting services I signed up for, are now pornographic sites.  I wrote about how I did not want to meet any insecure grasping females, that I wanted someone who was not possessed by the moral-religious-political-social structures of the world, and on and on. I have no record of my rant but I received a few responses; well that is the male ego part of me, actually I got two responses in November and another at the end of December.

The first response was a real nut case living in Queensland who declared her absolute love and loyalty to me after two emails. She had been in some religious cult; Scientology, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventist, one of those idiotic groups and she was just generally screwed up though I do not remember the details. I have heard so many stories from so many people over the decades that the name of the religious organization escapes me. She had been raped since a young girl by people in the group; as so many people who are in religious groups are.  After a few weeks she started talking about driving from Brisbane to see me so I stopped writing. She did get as far as Melbourne and it was close to New Year’s (2001). To hopefully stop her in her tracks I told her I was going to be out of town. She emailed me off and on for the next few years though I never saved her letters or even recall what she had to say. The next girl I met online lived in the Blue Mountains a few hours from Sydney. She liked to talk about sex, which was fine with me. We spent Christmas 2000 together, online. I made arrangements to see her early in January 2001. Leigh would be playing in a national game in Sydney at that time and I would go watch him play.

Christmas  2000 alone

27th December I was online at my office at the Magill Campus at the University of South Australia when I saw my third and the final contact I would have from someone about my online profile

From:      RestlessDancer@rsvp.com.au
Sent:       Tuesday, 26 December 2000 9:37
To:           terrell.neuage@unisa.edu.au
Subject:  hello to you
“Bloody hell, that’s an intimidating profile. You’ve got my interest. I’m a Gemini, don’t really know what that means but I’m interested. My current uni studies are slowly moving me into the left field. Next year one of my subjects is transpersonal counselling.

From:      Neuage, Terrell – NEUTY001
Sent:       Wednesday, 27 December 2000 14:49
To:           RestlessDancer@rsvp.com.au
Subject:  restless dancer on the seashore

2001

Narda/restlessdancer / PhD / Leigh signs and goes to Florida 

• January 1 with Narda first time
• February 1 working at FAYS with Johanus and Nitram
• 15th to court with the witch
• 24th Youth Sports Award – accepted trophy for Leigh 
• April 15th to Vero Beach leave Sunday 7.30 PM
• 16-17 Orlando and Vero Beach
• to NY
• 26th return to Adelaide
• July 16 – 19th houseboat

Earth Clock of Life.

34.