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Sunday, January 13, 2013 Campus Village, Golden Pebble Beach, Dalian Development Area, China

Those were the days….

Has the best already happened?

Everything is one’s perspective I suppose.

It is not really an age thing because that would mean I believe I have experienced the best and these are some sort of twilight spans of space and time segments of dwindling consciousness and that is not true. Every day I think is better which is good at 65.

I was thinking as I watched another show today on global warming, food shortages, over population, water disasters from not enough to drink to rising tides from melting ice cubes in the Arctic how fortunate I have been to have had a run through the planet the past few decades. Some of the stuff I was able to experience is no longer possible.

1.      We use to have races; New York City to San Francisco – hitchhiking. We would take turns with whatever we had in our backpack, hitchhike from the Lincoln Tunnel and meet days later. We would race back too. I cannot recall the exact time taken – something like three or four days to get to San Francisco and I do not remember winning or losing. It with the late 1960s and SF was the place to be. So was Greenwich Village. I use to go back and forth to New Orleans too and spent several summers as a street artist in Jackson Square in New Orleans. I have written a lot of this in a book, “Leaving Australia” of which I made two 550 page bound copies; one for me and one for my son documenting a lot of the experiences along those travels. What I was getting at is that in today’s world is this possible? Travel of course is easy as we do that all the time being in New York City every year for the past twelve years as well as Australia and many places in between including but not limited to New Orleans and my past stomping grounds of San Francisco, LA, Hawaii, Oregon and new stomping grounds such as Utrecht The Netherlands (about six times in the past decade), Paris a few times and of course Australia. And our little airport at Dalian here in Northern China I have flown out of nine times in the past two years. So maybe these are the best times even with all the planetary problems. But are we free to have no money in pocket and stand at the Lincoln Tunnel and hitchhike to New Orleans, Miami, LA, San Francisco? I arrived in Honolulu in 1969 with five dollars, girlfriend and year old Desiree and somehow we moved forward in those days. Unfortunately the girl friend died and Desiree is 44. Desiree and I looked so good back in 1969 – how did the world change us.  When I travel now it is with too much and we are always sure we are cashed up and we actually know where we are going and have hotels booked, all of which was outside of my consciousness back in the 1960s and 1970s as well as 1980s and 1990s.

2.      I lived on a beach on the island of Maui for about six months and though it would not behoove me to be descriptive of the experiences I had at Makena State Park in 1970 I was surprised to see there is a webpage about this place from that time, “At Little Beach, hippies' naked legacy endures” (http://www.moolelo.com/littlebeach9.html). Gulp! I lived for a while in a commune called Banana Patch.  So how has the trashing of the environment the few past decades been a game changer? Will the melting ice wash away “Little Beach”? Is it because I have aged a bit since 1970 or has the world changed that living on a beach with nothing is not doable?  Oh! By the way that stupid line that people parrot that if you did the 60s you do not remember them is just a stupid line. I did the 60s full on without hesitation or regret and I can say most definitely I remember them and when someone is saying stupid things to me in the workplace or I cannot sleep at three in the morning I think back to those days and watch the moment dissipate in a puff of smoke. My hallucinations then are of the person in front of me being a cartoon character and I go on with my life. Did I do the 60s? Yes 100%. Do I remember them? Yes 94.6%, which is as well as anyone remembers anything. I remember them clearer than I do last week’s events. I am still me from 45 years ago it is just the vehicle that carries that me around which is tattered and held together with rubber bands, superglue, and a bit of tape and toothpicks.

3.      One can always change their name. I did. Went from Adist to Neuage – told about it in an earlier blog - http://neuage.me/2012/09/08/just-call-me-%E7%89%9B%E8%85%BE%E7%84%B6/ we can change jobs, partners, beliefs, homes, looks…. So much, but the world has become such a conservative place the past couple of decades. People are holding on to the same religious superstitions believing an outside force will protect or offer a better place after death, or staying in the same home and job and staying with the same partner even when it is not synchronous. People are more insecure now than ever before. I do it too. We hang onto our properties in New York and Australia when we should dump them and be free of material possessions, we hang on to our material possessions. I still have some of the stuff I dragged around in the 1960s and 1970s. My few prized possessions back then are now in boxes somewhere; in a shed in Australia or in the top of a shed in upstate New York or in the attic space in our house in Jersey City. I have like two-thousand picture-poems stored in a shed; I suppose if there were ever a run on my creativity I could always start doing gallery shows without much effort except to dig them out of storage. Now I have more than a thousand picturepoems online http://picture-poems.net/ probably the safest place to have them until they get hacked, the Internet fails, the government finds something subversive and clogs/deletes/changes the words to funny words that make no sense – oh wait I already do that… Below with picture poems in Adelaide, South Australia 1995

4.      Ideals we all have them but we change them I once thought astrology would give me answers – did that one for forty years, even got on the world stage sort of for a bit (not sure where this article appeared but they got my surname wrong, should be Neuage)

It is not that I stopped believing that there was anything to astrology but that I just grew out of it. Having been astrological free for a decade I find living in the moment and not perceiving the present as a particle of some over-seeing deliberation by higher selves, and thoughts masking as planetary overlords affecting our lives is really fun. As we know not only did not the world end according to the Smurfs who believed in the Mayan Doomsday scenarios or we have not gone belly up as the pathetic David Ickie followers believe clinging to their constant updates to our doomed lives and the overtaking of the reptilians and on and on – how does he sell out his appearances in Australia and New Zealand – are they that nuts? But what is different and what I am on about in my line on ‘those were those days’ is that people are more fearful. We were fearful of Richard (Dick) Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s (don’t change Dicks in the middle of a screw vote for Nixon in ‘72) all the way to sticking pins in Voodoo dolls in New Orleans – a lot of good those beliefs did, but that was a different fear. We were afraid the communists would take over, and I just had a great three weeks in Vietnam and live in China – so much for the commies… but they do block Facebook and Twitter and even my blog at neuage.me which is really just a backdoor into Wordpress which of course is blocked and that is all pretty evil. Is it going to get better? Life? As always there are the two forces of forward and pushback. The forward momentum is giving us better medications, which I wish they had done before my brother died of Aides in 1992 – now they would have the stuff to have kept him going.   What is kool is that some folks are writing a book about him from his artistic days in New York. http://neuage.indiko.com/robert_adsit.htm So maybe these are better days with medications. The internet is great for communication and I have put over 500 youtube pages and thousands of travel photos that no one will look at but I do. I have many thousands of my own webpages and sometimes I will spend a couple of holiday hours looking at my picture poems, essays, blogs, videos and other stuff. I like books for reading better and I rarely watch television – sometimes for a few moments every  few days to see if the world has gone belly up yet.

5.      I work more. Heaps. Probably another facet of youth – don’t do much work, just play, party, be irresponsible for 40 years than try to get on board with social games. The older I get the more I work. When I was a single parent I did not do much work – I played with my kids a lot and we traveled too. We did three overseas trip to the States and one to Europe too and another time a trip around Australia in a camper van with my 87 year old father over from New York. We had a pretty laid back child-parent life. I wrote children’s stores made tofu in my factory see - http://tofu.neuage.us/ made webpages from 1992 – well I still do, have more than ten-thousand. There is something obsessive there. It give me comfort like nothing else does,

6.      I was a good parent – we didn’t have the money thing going well but the three of us had one another.  We were really quite happy, even when the kids were teenagers, though of course there were some hiccups but in this photo we look serious – one of the rare moments when we were. By some standards, like my current wife, when we first met, she interpreted our home as a bit of a disaster but we were happy We all dreamed, I wrote them stuff, I thought I should have been parent of the year, at least gotten a trophy or a plaque but I was always in court fighting the witch of a mother over something or the other, usually money, which is too bad as it tinted my children made their bonding with money unhealthy. My son in Melbourne with his BMW sports car and $1700 racing bike does not quite support my anti-material stances though he is doing great stuff with youth. My other son, the one who played for the LA Dodgers, http://neuage.org/leigh.html, I still talk with him often, ask his opinions, garner his insights tell him how sorry I am and how the past ten years since he ended his life a month after turning 20 are difficult for me, all the moments, everyone, empty, moldy, but filled with memories. I made a Facebook page for him and more than 250 of his friends are on it. Once in a while I will pop in and see what his generation is up to. Most are having children. Leigh would no doubt be a pitcher still for the LA Dodgers – he would have been successful. The Dodgers were going to bring him up from the minors to the majors the next season they told me that at his funeral. So many of his friends write how they miss him especially on his birthday even now ten years later.  I stopped astrology after he chose to leave and any other metaphysical belief and embraced everyday reality which makes understanding easier and clears my consciousness knowing that my beliefs structures fogged my thinking with prior thoughts of the way-it-is and other people’s delusional falseness. A couple of decades ago I would have been insecure about living where I do now in Northern China with my Uranus conjunct Mars descendant line going right through our house. Of course the way they drive in China even without this configuration we are no doubt cactus. We had a big truck knock us across a four lane freeway in Mississippi last summer, totaled our car and we did not get a scratch. I had a Mercury MH line go through there – lucky I don’t believe in any of this anymore.  

7.      Living like a gypsy does not seem viable anymore – creative living in a conservative insecure world is narrowed down to practical tenureship in the local community – probably in a high rise.

Below gypsy Terrell in the 1970s.

8.      And what excites me today? this very day, Sunday, January 13, 2013 is that when I was looking up some of my past webpages (what else does one do at five in the morning on a Sunday) I found my pages from Geocities backed up. Geocities was a free web host in the 1990s. I made thousands of Geocities pages, about me of course – hey I am a Leo and I was adopted. I have divine reasoning for my behavior. Yahoo bought out Geocities a few years back and nuked it making us all pay for pages which of course we did not do. A truly saintly mob set up a site http://reocities.com/ that took all the Geocities pages and changed them to reocities pages. I like my sites from the mid-1990s and I will be spending all day today, Sunday looking at all my old geocities pages and changing the g to r in my sites to include the new url. For example, http://www.geocities.ws/picture_poems/tango.htm, http://www.geocities.ws/picture_poems/romantic/hunger.htm Hundreds of old sites raised from the dead – I wish my son would do that.

9.      In today’s world we give less freedom to our children. I see this as a teacher. Kids all wanting to get into great universities though I am not sure why. Parents getting into tens of thousands of dollars of debt usually for life. When I taught university classes at University of New York in Albany, New York I could always depend on my first couple of Monday morning classes to be easy as the students would be so out of it after a weekend of partying with their parent’s credit cards they did not need no learnin’. Still overall students are more conservative everyone so worried about the future. No one gets to do stupid things for a bunch of years and not worry about it. Like I was in a cult order for a decade, I did not worry about the future, I still don’t. My wife plans for retirement but I am not sure what that means. I am thinking about writing a letter to my dead son today and that is as far as the future is for me. Those were the days, these are the days that I will write about in the future as those were the days. Life is good. The planet is just having a bit of a cough and needs to get over herself.

Here is to you earth!