Snow country

25/12/2016 NYC ~ DAY 30 of trip

We wanted to leave early to have a day in NYC. But by the time we got laundry done, went out to dinner, and started re-packing for the week ahead it was ten pm Christmas Eve. We had gotten back to DC from Portland at six pm and we were tired from starting at 4 am as written in the previous blog, ‘Oregon – oh so legal now’.

While planning for this trip in Adelaide we thought it would be nice to spend Christmas day in NYC. It would be nice and quiet, everyone would be indoors with family having presents and dinner. And we thought, let’s book a hotel in the Wall St area, there will be no one there, everything is closed, plenty of parking on a public holiday. HOW WRONG WERE WE! Every ‘man and his dog’ was there. Millions of tourists had swarmed the city. We, also tourists, joined them like sheep. First Time Square. When we lived there we NEVER went to Time Square. “That is just for tourists”. Ha! Here we are, shoulder to shoulder with citizens from all over. Actually, after a short time, it got a bit tiresome, struggling for your spot on the pavement. We found us a nice little Indian joint at 160 E 44th St, called Minar. It looked empty, cheap, scruffy, our kind of place. We ate a delicious Indian meal, topped up with the inevitable mango lassis. Yum. We sat in front, facing the street, and watched the peering tourists reading the menu, then we gave them thumbs up and brought them inside……I recon about 8 people. We’re going back next week to collect our free meal. Just kidding. We have a soft spot for all things Indian as we plan a future trip there..soonish, hopefully.

Then on to the Rockefeller Centre and as you can see the crowd followed us. Taking the subway back downtown we checked out the new World Trade Centre, interesting. There is a tree which survived the whole tragedy, standing still, only metres away from the South Tower. Amazing.

A Callery pear tree became known as the “Survivor Tree” after enduring the September 11, 2001 terror attacks at the World Trade Center. In October 2001, the tree was discovered at Ground Zero severely damaged, with snapped roots and burned and broken branches. The tree was removed from the rubble and placed in the care of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. After its recovery and rehabilitation, the tree was returned to the Memorial in 2010. New, smooth limbs extended from the gnarled stumps, creating a visible demarcation between the tree’s past and present. Today, the tree stands as a living reminder of resilience, survival and rebirth. https://www.911memorial.org

There is even a free children’s poem eBook: http://tinyurl.com/hkldtgj

The new WTC subway stop is a strange, spectacular cross between a super modern cathedral and a high-end shopping mall. Locals complain that there are not enough escalators. We noticed that too. Back in the day when we used this stop there was a bundle of about 8 escalators, side by side taking one down to the PATH stop; now it’s just individual ones. Weird.

 

Our hotel was fine, Holiday Inn Express on Water St, though the heater was bloody noisy, and so I turned it off, and shivered all night.

26/12/2016 Monday ~ DAY 31 of trip

Next morning we negotiated a somewhat mild Holland Tunnel and went to visit Nancy and Larry in Jersey Heights. Nancy, an artist, has a house that looks like a gallery, full of beautiful, funky and interesting stuff. It was a great visit.

So far in our wanders we have yet to meet a Trump supporter. People are still in shock and concerned about the future. Our flight to Europe leaves five days before the inauguration – but we want to see the streets of DC though our airline won’t change our flight. We will have to watch the shenanigans from The Netherlands.

Oneonta, Monday 26^th Dec, day 31

The next day we started driving upstate and gradually the whole world changed from rust brown to white. There was no actual snow falling, but as we got closer to Oneonta, there was ice. This would have been fine on the highways. They are generously salted, and ploughed, but our GPS, actually both of them, decided to take short cuts, which we, like good little citizens, followed. Several times we had to turn back because the roads were closed., or completely covered with ice. We found out that you really can’t drive uphill on ice.

We finally arrived two hours later than we had promised at the home of Terrell’s sister, Susan.

Fortunately for me I had made a large batch of my special cookies (no, not special cookies like they make in Oregon) and that became a large part of my diet on this week’s trip. Narda found other things to eat but I am finding less all the time in shops that I will put into my body. It is not because my body is some spiritual vessel, or that I am opposed to the unpronounceable ingredients on packages under the term ‘nutritional content’, with their funny terms for sweeteners, salts, artificial flavours, factory-created fats, colourings, chemicals that alter texture, and preservatives and just some made up chemical terms that have no specific purpose.

My cookies are in some random amounts made up of: coconut flour, baking powder, flax seed, almond flour/meal, coconut flakes (pea protein powder in Australia – I have not found that here), almonds, walnuts, any other nuts I have, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, coconut oil, butter, stevia, almond milk (I prefer to make my own by soaking almonds overnight then taking their skins off – adding four cups of water and beating the hell out of them), though today I bought some organic processed milk – a rarity, but there was no time to soak) and if I have vanilla I add that and a half-dozen eggs more or less. My recipe changes at times dependent on what I can grab from the shop. I make about two-dozen rather large cookies at a time and freeze them. They lasted on this week’s trip until the last day when the last two tasted a bit funky. Narda is not opposed to them and says I should save them for me as I am a bit picky when it comes to food. Maybe she hates them and says to save them for my diet to be nice. (N:Truth is he puts peanut butter in them……eewww)

I forgot to bring our bottle of apple-cider vinegar (“with the mother’”) so my diet was already suffering and we did not have Chris’ Vitamix to make smoothies to pour over my cereal which is basically similar to the cookies except for the eggs and coconut butter and butter not included but I did have the nuts and seeds as I try not to eat oats or anything that would make my blood sugars go up or would cause Narda to think I have finally gone ‘normal’.

But that all was just a side-track to our immediate journey.

Our GPS hates us – both of them.

We had left New York City, visited Narda’s workmates from her NYC teaching days and were heading northwest to Oneonta, New York. We were already upset with both our GPS (Garmin) and the Google Maps on our phone. Both had gotten us lost going to New Jersey weeks earlier when we had to go collect my computer that I had left on a bus from NYC to DC (that pitiful, though happy ending, story was in a previous blog) and it would have gotten us lost getting to our visit in Jersey if we had not already known the way.

But now both the GPS and Google Maps were really mad at us. We were motoring happily along on interstate 86 headed toward Binghamton and yes, of course we would have to head east at some point but first one then the other got us on to some smaller road which led to a smaller road. Because it was getting to be late afternoon and the temperature was dropping to below freezing (-2 C or something below 32 F) and there was some snow or rain or drizzle falling we saw several cars that had slipped off the road and two that had just crashed. We got to another turn off and yelling at our directional devices, which by the way does no good, continued like idiots following their looney-bin directions, until we were stopped by some emergency vehicle and told that we had to turn around and go back because the road we were on was closed due to accidents. By now we were really getting lost and after finding this quaint little town, Walton, we were sent off onto even a smaller road – like one lane. We asked a man walking a dog how to get to Oneonta and he pointed to the road ahead and named a litany of strange sounding roads thereafter. He ended by saying that his mother was from England too. Not quite the right thing to say to an Australian and as Narda was driving and on an icy road she was unable to do a burnout but following the man with the dog and a mother from England and our GPS and Google Maps drove us forward until we got to a hill that we could not get up. We spent a long time turning around inch by inch and slowly headed back to the bit larger road we had been on to begin with. We got up to Franklin and instead of putting us onto the main highway (route 88) our Google Maps (by now we were so mad at our Tom Tom GPS that we locked it up in the glove-box) took us through many winding streets until we got to my sisters fifteen minutes before her son had to catch a bus back home in northern NY (Potsdam I think, on the Canadian border) but I did get to see Dustin before he left.

My sister… I was adopted in 1950 (already I was a bit old – like three) and did not locate my blood brother and sister until 1988 through a series of long and complicated adventures. See Leaving Australia, ‘Again’: Book 2 ‘After’ @ http://tinyurl.com/z6mzxof. My brother (in Hawaii) and my sister, Susan in Oneonta, and I shared the same mother. I have seen Susan four short times previous: 1992 with my two boys in Herkimer, New York, and in 2003 and 2010 or so with Narda in Oneonta. This was the first time Narda and I stayed with her and her daughter, Nikki. Her other daughter, Amanda and her two children came over while we were there.

Oneonta is a college town with the State University of New York College and Hartwick College flooding the city with hordes of undeveloped prefrontal cortex humans (there is an interesting article online “Understanding the College Student Brain” you can read after reading our blog). What is interesting in my world is Hartwick College.  I know one of the professors there whose daughter went to school with my sister’s daughter. He is the cousin of my friend Dell (who lived in Guatemala and we visited him a few years ago. I have the blog “Dell and life in general” @ http://tinyurl.com/zj6ppfr). I have always seen life as connections and links; synchronicity in real-time. The World Wide Web, invented in 1991, illustrates this so well. We live the future in the moment by links made in the past. Of course, no one knows how far ‘the past’ is. An immediate past, or a past forged in another time, perhaps in another life time even. No one knows. We go through life never knowing why we have such connections. Perhaps it is all just random stuff with no interpretation needed. Or maybe not. Whatever the caper I found myself at my sister’s who I did not know of until I was in my forties who lives next door to the cousin of my friend from my 1972 – 1974 New Orleans days. I find these connections all the time. Even at this moment as I write about my sister and her family they are all on Messenger-group texting back and forth and they would not know I am writing about them or that I have my phone next to me with their texts going back and forth. Life is cool.

I left Terrell with Susan in Oneonta and met with Diana, Cathy, and Ann for lunch in Cobbleskill. It was a really nice restaurant with a gift shop, taking up lots of rooms, a wine tasting cellar downstairs. So great to catch up with 3 wonderful women that I used to work with more than 10 years ago. We had so much to talk about, and yet everyone was the same, despite lots of water under the bridge.

In the process of looking for fulfillment of our state of hunger Susan told me about the cult group The Twelve Tribes (http://www.twelvetribes.com/) and their restaurant, the Yellow Deli (http://yellowdeli.com). Being an escapist myself from a cult back in the 1960s-1970s I was curious how a hippie-cult still existed. The restaurant was great; a creative and natural looking place, with great food, especially vegetarian. I had soup and declined the bread due to my low-carb diet and my sister and niece had a salad and some other eatable matter. They have these Yellow Deli restaurants in many places including Australia (Katoomba, the hippie area in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney).

Liking to have some say in dinner, Narda and I made a spinach soufflé and happiness was experienced by all. I got to know more of my family, my sister and her family. The fact that it has taken me sixty-nine years to hear stories of my mum and other members of my origins was good. Susan reckons we are one-eighth Chippewa Indian but without one of those DNA tests that are floating around the world I am not sure. I thought for a few days of doing a test to discover my heritage then decided against it. The reason being is that until I was in my forties I had no idea about my blood family and never identified with any nationality. With two passports I consider myself a world-citizen and that is all I need to know. Narda is a world-citizen too; born in The Netherlands, raised in Australia, lived in the USA for nine years and married to a Yank. Though she is Dutch through and through with about five-hundred years of pure heritage until I came along. So perhaps my people sold Manhattan to her people for some shiny trinkets – it makes sense; land for sparkly jewellery. I have five planets in Leo, I do understand. Of course, being of the Twitter – Internet generation (OK a grandparent of the Twitter – Internet generation) and having observed in horror the news of 2016 that especially the Republicans spun, without fact-checking I am sure the Dutch gave the Indians $24 worth of useless glass beads for Manhattan. After all it would have been on the World Wide Web if it had existed and Trump was tweeting. Luckily, I am not political and have no opinions about politics or its aftermath.

28/12/2016 Wednesday ~ DAY 33 of trip

We had the top floor, not the attic, but the top of the house with skylights which Narda pointed out were covered with snow when we awoke. I checked my phone to see if was or had been or would be snowing and no, no chance of snow. In fact, my phone said it was a sunny day. Luckily Narda was OK with going out and shovelling and warming up the car. We used to call it ‘hero of the dawn’ when we lived in upstate New York for four years and one of us had to go out and shovel out the car and defrost the windows so we could drive to Albany for work. And yes, I had plenty of ‘hero of the dawn’ episodes.

I like texting as much as the next guy but I think we take it to a new level when we text someone in the same house. Susan texted me to see if I was awake and what were we going to do for breakfast. She was downstairs and we in the upper room. Narda has texted her son too from our home in the basement (a nice little apartment) all the way to the third floor. When I see a couple having coffee at the local hip-shop I wonder if they are texting one another.

We left Oneonta and family at ten am and visited the last of my family, Jason, my nephew, from my mother’s side, in Albany. After checking in at the Albany Hilton Garden and leaving our crap we went to visit my cousin from adoption, Joyce and her son Derrek. Knowing they no doubt had different political views than us we avoided all political talk and had a nice time. Joyce had looked after my (adopted) father for decades and we were often in contact with her and her friend, Bud, as my father aged from 97 to 102. We had a few difficult times after our protesting about the war in Iraq and they’re in favour of it, but at the end of the day family is what matters and we sort of got past our differences. Joyce being five or so years older than me remembers me as a troublesome teenager. It is intriguing to look at someone and wonder what they remember of you.

We had dinner at a nice restaurant in Albany with my friend Kathy and her husband. Kathy was my first girlfriend when I was a teen and we have corresponded with her over the years. Being a real-estate person she helped us with our houses in Round Lake and now that Narda and I are becoming grey-nomads we are asking questions of others who have been travelling around doing the same. Kathy and Jim have a new mobile home setup and had spent the better half of last year in their caravan (RV to Yanks). Again, what do people remember about us? Do we change much in fifty-nine years?

29/12/2016 Thursday ~ DAY 34 of trip

We got an early start because it was starting to snow. An early start for us now that we are flirting with retirement is ten am. We were on the way to Woodstock, New York to see Marta (http://martawaterman.com/).  Marta too knows me from my teenage years as she was the girlfriend of my adopted brother, Robert. Marta has written and published a book about Robert along with the author Marc Seifer (http://www.marcseifer.com/), and me (though I am on the cover as one of the authors it was really Marta and Marc who put this together. I just offered some poems and photos and other artefacts).

Before heading south, we had to go see Liz, the real estate lady who sold our house in Round Lake, New York (http://neuage.org/house/) five years ago. She had found four boxes I had left in the shed. For years I thought they were some small boxes, perhaps of papers so I said the next time we were in New York we would collect them. Holy Cow! Four large boxes. Seventeen carousels of slides (each with 140 slides) plus lots of old books and papers. We put them in the boot (trunk) and drove off. Now we are not sure what to do with them. As we are on this little four-month world-retirement-visiting-folks-tour we have no room for anything more. I am sure there will be some discussion between the wife and me about this little matter in the sweet bye and bye.

Being in the dog-house is an expression of where one should be put. Chris texted and wanted to know if we had used the stove before leaving on our week’s adventure. They had gone to Tennessee for Christmas and we were the last in the house. Well it was me. I had eggs for brekky and somehow left the gas on and when they got home after five days away the house was full of gas. They had to wait outside in the cold with baby Liam for an hour. I would not be surprised if I get shuffled off to a nursing home soon.

By the time we got to Kingston the snow was falling at a steady thick rate. For a while there was almost a white-out, with the snow making visibility non-visible. We had Narda’s son’s car. We had managed to demolish his car several years ago in a freeway accident in Alabama, not our fault but still it happened coupled with the fact we had not driven in snow for five years made us nervous. Marta was unable to drive from her unploughed home on the back hills of Woodstock so we bunkered down at the Best Western just off exit 19 on the New York State thruway. Being hungry again, perhaps because we hadn’t eaten since morning, we found the Kingston Buffett. I usually am not too keen on Chinese all-you-can-shovel-down eateries but having had limited food choices for the week my needs for vegetarian low-carb matter was adequately fulfilled though perhaps not of organic status and we slept the night away dreaming of fulfillment. Well at least I did.

30/12/2016 Friday ~ DAY 35 of trip

We met Marta at a diner for breakfast and she brought us a set of Robert’s books. We do not get to see folks from our past that often as we all get so scattered over the place. We saw Marta about six years ago and before that in about 2005 and before that I knew her as my brother’s girlfriend in Clifton Park, New York, in the mid-1960s. I like the fact that time, friendship, spaces, have no boundaries.

So far in the first thirty-five days of our trips we have seen eighteen people from our (my) past. Four from when I was a teenager more than fifty-years ago, others since Narda and I have been in the States (2002 – 2010) and we will be seeing more from our working days in China that we will visit with here and in Thailand and Narda’s son in Cambodia and here we are living for six-weeks with Narda’s son and daughter-in-law in DC. We are getting snippets of people’s lives. We are re-entering lives. In a sense, there is little difference between going from room to room; there are these years in between but they lose all significance when we are together. Sometimes the initial moments are a bit awkward but soon we could have seen one another yesterday too, instead of years ago. Perhaps having social media connections helps us keep up with one another’s lives and it is more like we have never left.

We stopped at the Woodbury Outlet Malls at exit 16 on our way back to NYC. Crazy day to go, so many people there, it took us ages to get a car park, and even longer in a queue for a pair of trackies. But are nice trackies and I get to leave my old worn out ones, also bought in the states, here for car polishing cloths! ($20USD for nice Nike trackpants….maybe ..not sure…..if it was worth the wait).

After a way too short of a time with Marta and sharing stories of the past few years we got back onto a well salted and ploughed highway and got to Millburn, NJ in the early afternoon to see our lawyer, Marilyn, who had two stained glass pieces we had made. Narda and I had taken stained glass window classes about a decade ago in upstate New York and had made these two groovy pieces which were in the window of our house in New Jersey. When we sold it we forgot to take our pieces and realised when we were in Australia, that we wanted them. Marylin who was involved with our house because of some horrible tenants, rescued them for us and kept them for whenever we would return to the States. We have no room in our luggage for them, but we’ll see. The de-clutter course we took many years ago is just a fading memory now.

Being too tired to brave the last couple of hours to DC we stayed at the Clarion Hotel The Belle, 1612 N Dupont Hwy, New Castle, Delaware. We stayed here a couple of weeks ago. Nothing exceptional except the room was cold until we figured out the heating system so Narda rang the front desk and asked for a blanket. When Narda was told that housekeeping was closed (at 8 pm – never heard that one before) she asked Bobby, the front desk person, where she could get a blanket and he said at Walmart. I thought this was so rude that I wanted to write it up in TripAdvisor’s judgemental-thingy but Narda thought it could have been just a misunderstanding. I am not so sure. We were not going to run out at night and purchase a blanket while travelling because the motel would not provide one. My friend Randy who we stayed with in Eugene the week prior has never been in a Walmart in his life due to philosophical reasons. Where would he have gone?

31 December Saturday DAY 36 of trip

Left after breakfast about ten am drove around Wilmington – got lost thanks to our GPS from hell.

Took country roads until Baltimore then onto i-95 stopped at a Spanish supermarket with little written in English (in Washington DC) and got our sorry asses home in time to babysit Liam so Chris and Jessica could go out for New Years. First Liam then us – all asleep long before midnight. How can tomorrow be a new year? What nonsense. It is really just tomorrow. The first day after today. But many people do go bunkers about it all being a turning point. To us tomorrow is just the next new day to explore and be opened for an amazing time.

To DC about 2:30 pm

Made cookies and zucchini spaghetti had vinegar (with ‘the mother’) in my freshly squeezed organic lemon water and made a smoothie with almond and coconut milk, avocado and other nutritional stuff. Then I felt wholesome.

E-book storefront http://neuage.papertrell.com/
new photo-textual fun – HERE

http://neuage.org/e-books/

Liam meets Maggie and Mabel in Washington DC in the epic tale ‘Liam’s secret’ http://neuage.org/MM/ (free)

NYC – DC days 6 – 14 of retirement world tour reunions

E-book storefront http://neuage.papertrell.com/

Day Next 6 – 14 /December/2016

After too few hours’ sleep we positioned ourselves into the morning breakfast line at the only eating place open at 7 am in JFK where we were rewarded with a couple of eggs and a slice of tomato for fifteen bucks; they tossed in a bit of fish scraps with Narda’s eggs for an extra few dollars. After blowing our food budget for the day on the first meal we joined the Qantas flight that had originated in Sydney and fortunately had a half-empty full plane to stretch out and get a bit of sleep in.

Actually the breakfast was really good, and the fish scraps where smoked salmon and capers. Nice and salty. Can’t beat that!

Our New York days. We started off with no luggage. Somehow between Hawaii and NY our luggage went awol. So after settling in our back-of Brooklyn apartment (it was a hood, but hey, welcome! brought back wonderful memories of Joisey!) we walked to our local Sears and bought some stuff…coats..much needed, undies, sox and Terrell bought some gorgeous softie pants, made of some wonderful microfibre. He will no doubt live in them as much as possible. I will steal them when I can! Our luggage turned up the next day. So now we’re not sure how much Qantas will contribute to our spending spree. Got some nice stuff though, also in H&M in NYC. Winter clearance sales. (concerned with the fact we could barely close our suitcases and here we are with bags more).

I love New York. I love America and Americans. The two days in NYC were a treat. On Saturday afternoon we spent a couple of hours drinking Blue Moon beer (my favourite…with a slice of orange) with two wonderful friends and colleagues from St Lukes. One of whom has a gorgeous historic home in the middle of West Village (Greenwich Village), one of the only remaining wooden houses, pre-dating all the brownstones in the area.

We did spend quite a lot of time with our NY friends discussing the-end-of-the- world AKA the-president-elect. Grief counselling mainly!

And then there was our lovely lunch with Kay in a nice Brooklyn café on Henry St. So much to talk about. (We taught with her in Dalian, China; visited her and Frank in Yangon, Burma; and stayed with them in Chiang Rai, Thailand earlier this year.)

We have always found New Yorkers to be helpful to strangers, the guy in the subway who was listening to our conversation, and told us that we could not get off where we wanted to as we were on an express train. Or the guy at the street cart who made us coffee (good coffee), and 2 sandwiches for $8 in record time with a friendly well-wish. Or the guy on the street who asked us “how ya doooin”, not expecting to be told how. I thought they only did that in Jersey. Then there was the guy, one of the guys who walk very fast, saying, unprompted, the shuttle is this way. New Yorkers are again in post-disaster mode, the previous one was post 911. Think about it! They are looking out for each other.

The next day we went to the school. I got so many hugs and well wishes. I also met the new music teacher. His class remembered me; it was lovely. They remembered that I had banned the word “like” in the music room. I asked them if they say the word now, and they replied “yes”. So that was my profound impact on St Lukes!!!

The Air B&B apartment was nicely decorated, posters, candles, but lacked some basics..salt, sugar, a coffee maker, a TV, even no towels when we first got there. But it was a good spot in the back of Flatbush, close to Beverly St Station on the 2 and the 5 trains.

I feel really good today; sitting on the bus to DC. Can’t wait to see our loved ones there. This bus is nice, plenty of room, smooth driving. We were told by a consular office from Spain, while waiting to board, that this beats the train by miles. She says that the train is dirty, in need of repairs, and unsafe! Blimey. And the bus saved us quite a bit.

Had a great ride, that did not end so well as we left the good computer on board. BUGGER

When we got to our stop it was raining. Seeing our suitcases unloaded onto the curb to soak up whatever was falling from the sky we grabbed our coat and whatever crap we had taken onto the bus; and alighted. Running across or dragging our sorry asses more specifically with too much stuff to the other side of Dupont Circle to huddle beneath a bus stop we waiting for Narda’s son Chris to collect us.

Our travels of the past fifteen years have changed from doing a city; sometimes a country, in a few days to weeks in the same place. We get a chance to become locals. There is also my diet which is always a project. Having a low-carb diet is difficult but add the vegetarian trip and other sides then it is a project. Staying in the same place gives me the opportunity to put together my wholesome-time-consuming world. We start mornings with my cereal which is really seeds and nuts and Narda’s is oats and stuff then comes the smoothie. Earlier this year we travelled with a small ninja smoothie bullet setup (as seen on TV) so I could make veggie drinks in Thailand and Cambodia. We could not fit it in this trip as we are carting winter gear which fills every nook and cranny. But there is a proper large mixer for our usage here. Our brekky smoothie consists of yogurt, frozen blueberries, spinach, apple, orange or a grapefruit and a banana which gets poured over our cereal. I use what is left and add my day’s drink which is an avocado, almond milk (I make my own: soaking almonds 24-hours then taking the skin off and adding four times the water to the almonds), kale (I cook up a batch then freeze it and take a healthy amount each day), chia, LSA (not LSD – that was the 1960s – 1970s) and coconut milk/water. BTW, LSA is a blend of ground linseeds (flax seeds), sunflower seeds, and almonds. I haven’t found it in the states so I make my own blend of those things. Then of course to be healthy we need a litre of water a day so I have a one and a half litre bottle I fill and squeeze a lemon in it. All this preparation does not include making meals. Bottom line, we need to stay in a place more than a few days to purchase all the stuff to make my high maintenance diet. I made cookies my first day here in D.C. My low-carb cookies using almond and coconut flour with lots of seeds and nuts and stevia for sweetener. I think I am becoming a difficult traveller. Sitting here this morning with the flu or a bad cold from trying to switch from Australian summer to east coast freeze I am not sure how effective my diet really is. I have been on it for a year now and my blood sugars are often normal giving me that ‘hey, I am normal’ euphoria.

So I realise sometime in the evening that I did not have my laptop. Holy Cow! Utter and sheer panic we ring the Best Bus company and fill out their lost property form online. We stay up half the night changing pass words and I am trying to track my computer with my phone which shows where it was last – Dupont Circle. I had left it on the seat when I put on my cumbersome winter coat dragged from Australia through a week in Hawaii to NYC. I watched all next day, Wednesday, 7^th of December, but no one went online with the computer so I started thinking maybe no one pinched it and possibly it got turned in. But where? Best Bus has several depots and as of Thursday, two days since losing it no one seems to have a clue where it could be. Another night of little sleep as I worry about my laptop and whether anyone could get into my bank accounts or webpages and of course not being able to work in Photoshop or play with video creations is a bit of a letdown. But hey, we are in D.C. and what a great place to be.

We went to the police station nearby and reported it as lost/stolen for our insurance company. The police lady was really polite and a nice human being. She asked if there were any government files on it, this is D.C. so I supposed that does happen. I said no there were only some not nice comments about the president-elect which caused her to smile. Did anyone actually vote for this clown?

Friday Narda, Chris and baby Liam (see ‘Finding Liam’ in ‘Liam’s Secret’ @ https://youtu.be/Oy-g3Rpdibo) and I go to the Lincoln Memorial (which also featured in ‘Finding Liam’) then while at home, when Narda and Chris are off to the local playground with Liam I get that exciting email

Holy (organic-grass-fed) Cow! Life is good. People are honest. It was not a cheap throw-away laptop. We paid $2100 for it and the software is worth more than the computer. Usually I save stuff to three backup external drives and on cloud-servers but not for the couple of days before leaving it on a bus bound for New York City.

DAY 8 – 14

But wonderful to be living underneath Chris and Jess, our own little pad, we did shopping, twice, took a nice autumn walk, discovered the Ethiopian store and best of all made friends with Liam!!

What a little honey bun. He learnt his first Dutch word, Oma! And he calls Terrell “Rell”. Yesterday Chris and I went with him to the playground after picking him up from the day-care. Chris throws him up into the air, Liam laughing and then saying “more” or was it “again”? Me standing to the side hardly daring to watch!

Last night we took their little car, very nice actually, to….you guessed it Walmart.  I had no problem with the right-hand driving, but there were a few challenges; lots of traffic, darkness (it gets dark around 4.30pm, blimey) 4 way stop signs on intersections, impatient drivers honking…a lot. And in the car park not being able to engage Park, until Terrell figures it out. Phew…didn’t have to ring Chris.

Terrell and I are both down with the dreaded ‘lurgy’. Sore throats, a bit achy, and no voice to speak of (haha, pun intended). On Sunday we went to Chris’ church. Wonderful sermon I say without bias. A great community of young people and some older ones. We sat next to this interesting couple, she was dressed in gorgeous colours, I wish I had taken a photo, and was writing notes with interesting illustrations. Chris later told us they come from about an hour away and have 7 kids. I would like to meet them again. Last night Chris had another church friend over, we insisted on him eating with us, had some lively conversation. A nice lad, who had come to Chris’ church because of two, separate recommendations. So that’s pretty cool. When Chris left the room, the visitor spoke very highly of him as his pastor.

So here we are, snot, tissues, cold and flu tabs, and many naps. Nice little break to rushing around. They expect “artic vortex” weather later this week. We’ll see. If this is our last blog, then you will know that it was not good. J

Saturday, the tenth, up early and out the door, packed for an overnighter, heading to Hoboken to rescue my laptop from a life of ill fortune. I had this great notion that we could save lots of money by not paying tolls. Just a short nod to Pennsylvania over there to the left then swing back and plough into Jersey with dollars still in our pockets. I mumbled something about ‘just fifteen to twenty minutes out of the way dear’, ignoring Narda’s slight groan from somewhere off in the distance with some barely perceivable hidden though clearly intended thought pattern that suggested a not fully belief I was right.  ‘We’ll be there easily by one thirty’ I proclaimed; another groan in the distance. After all the distance, straight to Hoboken from DC is less than four hours on some hyper-freeway with tolls and aggressive truck drivers so how could a little detour be anything but short? I drove the first section heading out of DC up through Maryland toward Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It was great driving again in the States. We had recently driven to Melbourne from Adelaide and the ten – twelve-hour trip is so boring with little scenery beyond the common outback stuff one wishes they could avoid. There is a town every few miles here in Maryland and all the other States in the area.

We felt in need of a map. A GPS on the phone is great but nothing beats seeing a real map with all the towns and rivers along one’s way. Seeing a sign for a visitor’s centre I got off the main road which was not really a main road to begin with and drove and drove looking for the bloody visitor’s centre. I did discover we were in Carroll County and we eventually came to some outskirts to what seemed to be a large town. Most signs pointed to a Farmers Museum which for unknown reasons we were not a bit interested in. Once in a seemingly town centre we went to the library to ask for a map and take a pee. A friendly librarian sent us off to the ‘official visitor’s centre’ though of course being the creators of their own language in this country spelt it ‘center’. We got our Maryland map and I said, ‘and more importantly – where is a Dunkin Donut shop’? Being morning tea time it made sense to go to the ultimate American morning tea icon. Granted I have lived on this strict low-carb, no sugar diet for this year and I should know better but we did get our donuts and I did feel guilty and a bit ill but the quickly passing pleasure was kind of groovy. We left this ‘historic civil war’ town with their farmer museum and headed toward Harrisburg. It was early afternoon and getting to Hoboken by one-thirty seemed a bit of a stretch considering it was past one now.

Narda took over driving and I the navigation. Harrisburg suddenly looked out of the way so we took Route 27 through Cranberry/Manchester, Maryland and in Pennsylvania took Rout 194 until we got to toll roads going into Hoboken – long story short. We got lost because our GPS did not know about all the roadwork in Jersey and we rocked up at the depot, collecting our prize after six pm.

Having dinner not far from Hoboken at a turnoff from the interstate (toll road) we decided to get to Delaware and booked Clarion Hotel The Belle in New Castle, a fairly adequate place. We got there around 10:30 pm putting to rest my thought of getting to Hoboken at 1:30 pm and to a local country motel by five or six pm. Oh well.

What we remember from our old tromping around the States days is the included breakfast. With my diet I am quite limited to an apple or some such nonsense though Narda liked the bacon and other brekky stuff. Being a lover of covered bridges; we used to search them out when living in upstate New York (2002 – 2006), and found Wooddale Bridge over Red Clay Creek at Wooddale in New Castle. From there we managed to get home by 2:30 pm Sunday taking toll roads so we could go to Narda’s son’s church thingy.

Feeling ill from colds we lay about and had lovely retired days for Monday and Tuesday. Today, Wednesday, we are headed out to Baltimore; taking country roads, looking for covered bridges, seeing some of the places I lived in 1975 – 1979.

Dell and life in general

This is really about my friend Dell and a tribute to him but I do wander in about Dell in particular as I am tossing in some updates about travel between China and Australia this past month as I do not have the time or inclination to write a separate blog about before last week. I am sure Dell would understand that my narrative goes astray at times. We both lived those kind of lives that seem to go off track, whatever track we were on.

• Dell died today 19^th July 2014 at 9 AM.
• In real-life terms he died in May 2013.
• When does actual death occur?

Below – one of us is not Dell – San Pedro, Guatemala 2008   Death of someone else to us is really when we become conscious of the event.

Before our knowing we are still speaking/thinking of the person; even nurturing them in our thoughts which if we believe we are all connected the mind begins asking “what then becomes of those thoughts/feelings/virtual warmth rays we surround another with? We die when the last person to have known us in real-life dies. There is a difference between the death of someone we have had moments with and someone that has died we did not have any interactions with such as a cut-out character viewed through non-touchable media; sort of a part of our psychic DNA. I worry about my parents because of this kind of thinking. My father died at age 102, I will be 67 in a couple of weeks, there are very few people left who knew him and when we die off then he dies. People exist through memory but only live via shared experience. Of course we all have a different view of someone dependent on our interactions with that person. Even names are changed and they live as those names. For example, Dell who was Dell to everyone that I know and we seldom heard any other name was known by his birth name to his cousins; Delbert, one of whom recently told me that he did not know that he went by the name of Dell. Of course we did not know his name was Delbert and maybe how we knew him would have changed if we had called him Delbert instead of Dell. Perhaps there have been ten-billion people who have lived and died and now there are seven or so billion more all destined to be remembered to someone for a moment then forgotten. I never understood why people grieve or experience loss when someone they have never met but who they may have seen on TV in a movie, read a book of/about goes belly-up. What? Someone can not take from us that has never met us therefore it is impossible to have a loss. Maybe a virtual loss, a mental loss because someone who was writing great scripts no longer is around to continue to enchant us but really how selfish? It is when someone we have encountered and shared and bounced around with leaves that a part of us leaves. That part of us that only the person who has left would know – they took it with them. I know this as I have had two mothers a couple of fathers, girl friends, a son, brother and friends die. People take from me. Each one another piece. I wish people I knew would stop dying.

I think it is because I have Saturn conjunct Pluto conjunct my Venus that I get these losses. And with my Moon in Taurus in the 8^th house of death of course I get emotional but with Mars conjunct Uranus in Gemini in the 8^th I can still intellectualize about it. And of course I do not believe in any of this astrological mumble jumble so it is easy to dissect my chart and then dismiss it. And now with transit Saturn in 17 degrees Scorpio in my first house in conjunction with my Jupiter and exact square my Sun – damn I’m screwed. But tonight with the moon in 29 Cancer conjunct my Mercury and going on through Leo tomorrow this is the time to write about my friend Dell. It was that Saturn making all the constriction on my Sun in Leo that shoved me in a hospital again last month in Hong Kong to get a party balloon put into my heart valve (get it Party Balloon – I’m a Leo). Back in October 28^th when I was in Hong Kong with Saturn at 13 degrees 8 minutes Scorpio it was squaring my Saturn and Pluto both at 13 degrees and five minutes of Leo and I had five stents. How astrologically spooky that was. I tell you I tore up my chart after seeing that. Well not really but I should have. Back to Dell in a moment… But I have left Hong Kong. We had stopped in thinking I should visit my cardiologist who had put four stents in my heart area six months earlier. Surely just a short ‘how ya doin’ mate?’ would suffice. He lined me up for tests to see how I was doing. Lots of them. A day of tests. Machine after machine. Each one leading to another. By late evening after a full day of tests good ole Dr. King says there are concerns. Doctors saying stuff like this is a concern. The next morning he says I need another endogram. ‘The Endogram works by occluding blood flow in the arm and then gauging the post-ischemic pulsatile component of flow and the artery’s largest volume change…’ I hate these things. They put a tube up through the arm starting at the wrist and into the heart area. I just get a local in my wrist and I feel it all. There are big monitors to observe what is going on… for three hours. I get a balloon or two stuck in and told this is a new cardiovascular disease. Yeah go tell someone who cares. Last October I showed the DVD of the procedure to my film class and some liked it. Patrick showed his 8^th grade science class that was working on a unit on fiber optics, so the movie of my heart being poked at got a showing in a few classes at Dalian American International School. After a few days and some ‘moments’ with our insurance company I was patched up and sent on my way. I have left China after three years and I have left Hanoi and we had a great time in Laos if following the lives of old people as tourist could at all be interesting. I like Laos the people in general seem content and not so attached to the slavery of western style consumerism. I did my part and kept to purchasing fridge magnets; not overly consumptions but enough to give me a memory of Laos. A third of the population of Laos live below the international poverty line which means living on less than US$1.25 per day. Laos is a low income economy, with one of the lowest annual incomes in the world.” According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laos). How is one to feel in these situations? We surely have no restraints with spending money wherever we go so I am sure there were a lot of people who got more than a buck twenty-five out of us before the week was over. “As of 2008, Laos is the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in the world. An average of one B-52 bomb-load was dropped on Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between 1964 and 1973.” How forgiving humans can be. A few decades later and they are happy to have the Yanks come spend money along with people from the rest of the world. My how places change. We did the sightseeing adventures Luang Prabang, Kuang Si waterfalls, Wat Xieng Thong temple, Tat Kuang, Si Bear Rescue Centre and taking a ferry across the Mekong. Staying at the Thongbay Guest house (http://www.thongbay-guesthouses.com/was great. It is on the Nam Khan River with views of the Phousi Mountain.Narda and I had a cabin and Narda’s son, Brendan had a cabin next to us. I would suggest that is the place to stay if one were looking for a place to stay in Luang Prabang.

A few youtube videos I made from Laos

• Laos to Viet Nam = http://youtu.be/Kyt7Zemce7A
• Thongbay Guest house, Luang Prabang, Laos = http://youtu.be/0PTVJDWWzbg
• Luang Prabang = http://youtu.be/n__sSjhgOIM
• Luangprabang wander = http://youtu.be/Cc9mDSpdFP0
• KuangSi Waterfall Luangprabang = http://youtu.be/edWAc1YnmSk
• Hanoi rain = http://youtu.be/KQI_azAdBAM?list=UUYMgCOx4h9v6Q2r2AJwpeJA

I have said a few times I think maybe Dell died but there was no one to confirm or deny this. I felt this for more than a year. But should we trust our feelings? In 1973 (maybe it was 1974) I went through a time when I heard my birth-mother calling for me. I was a street artists in New Orleans at the time and I knew nothing of my birth-mother as I had been put up for adoption in 1950. I confirmed the date I was feeling my mother had died with my sister who I met at the end of the 1980s and it was like the same month. I do not remember the details at the moment. In 1973 or maybe 1972 – do dates really mean that much after a few decades? I met Dell, or rather he met me. I was a street artist selling my picture poems in front of Jackson Square in New Orleans (know little about the image below except it is me with a passing horse in the background and a passing girl next to me. This is the only photo I have of then and 40 years on is a long time to remember much though I think I have seen that horse before.

(from “Leaving Australia, page 120 – re. 1973) January 27^th took three …. painted 160 pictures – took two hours to do it and two hours to clean up. END OF VIET NAM WAR – Dell stopped in, brought some good LSD. (have no idea what that could mean – 7/26/2014 – but surely it was not me or the me who I have become)

I was selling picture-poems

alongside Jackson Square

in New Orleans

reading astrology charts to the lovely ladies

(telling each how well our charts matched: “my Mars to your Venus – what a night we shall have”)

and selling esoteric sacred secrets to the Christians

when I saw her standing there

reading my picture-poems She said what my poems said shouldn’t be said she came and told me that every day at noon But I paid no attention (like any man would) Until the day she took me to her home somewhere north in the constellation of Andromeda (the chained lady)

I met her anthropomorphic parents

a tree and a shirt

Then I awoke twenty-years later

in this small harbor town

on a large island North of Antarctica

where I began selling picture-poems (poems saying what shouldn’t be said) in a park

again

(come and purchase your picture-poems at Rymill Park on Sundays in Adelaide that

aren’t rainy or windy 9-5)

But I watch for her like a criminal does for justice

knowing someday it will all make sense

and I will be like everyone else

free of me.

4-17-94 Victor Harbor South Australia

A lot of what I write about Dell below is edited (after all decades later I am a member of today’s society and much of the experiences one has when they are younger are best left on the shelf) from a 560 page book (150,000 words) that I wrote some years ago; ‘Leaving Australia’. I made two leather bound copies, one for Sacha and one for me. It is a large book (A4 pages) with lots of photos and poems and having two copies seems excessive but I am an excessive person.

“Dell was always a bit of a scary person. He was a bit Gothic, a bit strange at a time when everyone was a bit strange. Dell was several years older and better off materialistically than the rest of us. He was the only one I knew who had a car. He dressed better than the rest of us. He had better… (I will say recreational enhancers for here but in “Leaving Australia” there are different words) I think he worked on oil-rigs for a few months at a time, making large amounts of money. Dell had a spider web tattooed on his hand which I had not seen on anyone else then or even now. In the 1970s, it was not so common to have tattoos as it is now when to be different from others is not to have a tattoo such as Narda and I who are different because we do not have tattoos do not have.

Dell has been a friend for the rest of my life and I saw him several months ago (this is from “Leaving Australia written years ago) before he went to South America. He believes that America is becoming a police state and that it is safer living in one of the small scary countries below Mexico. Dell defies logic when it comes to living. He just keeps on living no matter what. He has been knifed in foreign cities, he has taken heaps of drugs even did crack for a while but did not like it. He was in a Mexican jail for a year (and liked it).

One afternoon I went to Dell’s apartment and he invited me to friends who lived on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain. Before leaving the city, we (in “Leaving Australia again I am not repeating what is written there but there was an altered state involved). We drove across Lake Pontchartrain Bridge, which at the time was the longest bridge in the world, 24-miles, in a dense fog. I will always remember that drive as being the most frightening of my life. I was … and I am sure Dell was too but we got to where we were going and I spent hours throwing up from the fright of the ride and …. I stayed overnight wherever it was we went to party and got a ride during the day the next day with someone else. I did not see Dell for about a month. He use to come and go in people’s lives. Often I doubt he even knew where he was going or where he was. He lived in the moment better than anyone I have ever met and to this day I am trying to get to a point where I totally live in the moment.

I know that Dell use to visit me in my constantly moving houses (something that has never changed in my life even to this day in July 2014; Narda and I have lived in eight houses in three countries the past twelve years and there was a time when I was a single parent that my boys and I lived in ten houses in ten years in South Australia).

I remember that I was intensely studying the Qabbalah – Kabbalah and the occult. I was very intrigued by Aleister Crowley. Good old Alex had been in an Order too, very similar to the one I had been in. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was one of the early occult orders that believed it was part of the White Brotherhood’s plan. Alex though went his own way eventually. He believed he was ‘The Beast’ and went by the number ‘666’. He wrote several books, ‘Sexual Magix’, (The sexual magic of the Ordo Templi Orientis – a Thelemic Order ‘OTC’) and his motto was ‘do what thou will shall be the whole of the law’ which he wrote he says whilst in a trance. I had many of his books and I still have one on astrology and a little white book on ‘The Law’. I used his brand of Tarot Cards and I thought that he was really quite the dude to follow.”

Obviously all that is in the past and the only reason I thought of Crowley was when I was unpacking boxes that had been in storage for 12 years while we lived in the States and China.  I saw piles of astrological work I had done over thirty or so years and lessons from the Order I had been in and boxes of astrological and occult books. I kept them because I seem to keep everything. I have lost interest in all that is metaphysical for quite some time. I enjoy living in the moment and not trying to interpret what is going on or what could possibly happen. I am amazed at how many astrological charts I have. I used to do them on everything. From when I first met someone to when I thought up a business idea or any other idea. What I have realised is that my life has been far more successful since following astrology than while doing so. I even have lots of subliminal tapes none of which really made a difference in my life. It seems my life has gone the smoothest the past decade without any of this stuff. For example this morning, the third of August, seven days before turning 67, I got up at 5:30 am and worked on this blog. Twenty or thirty years ago I would do an astrological chart on what I should do today or try to see what would happen this week. I know what will happen this week; whatever and then some more whatever and I will face the whatever and deal with it in whatever way I feel like at that whatever moment. I do not need to have an iChing reading or Tarot card or mediation or read a chart, tea leaves, or my palm. The sun will rise the sun will set and in between I will do stuff and have a variety of thoughts.

I saw Dell in June 2004 and again September, 2005. He was always trying to get me to read his astrological chart. I never would. I no longer lived in the New Orleans mindset and no longer believed in much of anything except lets live in the moment and enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ70yXtLHvc (http://neuage.us/travel/2010/SanPedroTruck.html) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xecdib_san-pedro-la-laguna-horses_travel

I had lost my cell phone (mobile phone) on this particular day that I had gone to Lake George with Dell and Narda and when I got home, I used another phone to ring my phone in hopes that if someone had found it they would tell me where it was. I thought that maybe I had lost it in my day’s outing to Lake George. I rang for a couple of days and finally Narda went to the shop where we bought it to buy another one and she tried one more time and Dell in his spacey distant voice said, “hello”. It turns out that when I had visited Dell at his motel after our day out so he could show me his art he was putting on his computer that my phone had fallen out of my pocket into the back of the chair I was sitting on. Dell said he frequently heard music coming from his chair, my ring-dial, but did not know what it was so he did not look until, after hearing it so many times he decided to investigate, he finally looked and saw it was a phone. That really sums Dell up. A cool person but a bit spacey.

To continue on this moment; Dell had been living at our house in 13 Second Street Round Lake, New York but being a night person and our needing to sleep so we could go off to work in the morning we could not have Dell banging around the house all night. We put him in a motel up along Route 9 on the other side of Clifton Park, a fifteen minute drive. He lived there for a couple of months though we did not know why except he wanted to be near us as Dell never seemed to have many friends in the world.

His motel room was more cave like and defied how one would think people should live. It was a bloody disaster zone to be specific. Aside of no clothes seem to ever finding their way into drawers there were boxes of unfinished meals, half drunk bottles of alcohol, cigar smoke and really no where for a visitor to sit comfortably. The shades were always down as Dell liked it dark all the time. He would usually have no shirt on and his long stringy hair to his waist would give one an impression of caveman. Dell was always very underweight. In the midst of this disheveled person and an extremely messy room Dell would be sitting cross-legged with his 17-inch Mac-book. There were partially completed paintings all over with paint on the rug on the furniture on the table and even some on the canvas he was working on. What was out of place was the computer. If you can imagine a caveman living in a messy cave in a cave-time era working on a laptop then you have a picture of Dell’s environment. Then one day he left. I do not recall him even telling us. The next we heard was a letter saying he was in Guatemala.

To backtrack just a bit… when Dell arrived the first time in Clifton Park in about 2003 to visit us; we were living in a trailer in a caravan park across from my father who was 98 years old at the time… he rang me to say he was at a petrol station nearby but he had lost his keys. I walked over and we spent hours looking for his keys which he had in his hands when he stopped to get petrol and to ring me to get driving instruction to our home. Somehow he had lost them which made me wonder how in the world did Dell get from place to place in life? Dell had a van that he lived in when he did not have a home to live in. He eventually drove it down through South American and had it when we visited him in Guatemala. His worldly belongings filled his van and we had to empty it to find his keys which turns out he had dropped between the car seats when he had gotten out to ring me.

Narda (well Narda more than me) spends huge amounts of time on keeping track of our life of where we are going; for example if we are going to Burma or Thailand or Paris and etc. she does a lot of research unlike Dell who is just where he is. I supposed I was more like Dell and only because of Narda there is some sort of order in our life. I like both life styles; having a sense of where stuff is and what to do is good, but the chaotic whirlwind life of Dell and that I lived all my life until I met Narda is cool too.

To add one more little story before going back to the original time-frame I was working in (1973); one time I was with Dell in Walmart in Clifton Park (the really big supercentre on Route 9) and Dell as usual had his shirt unbuttoned and being the skinny person he was with his long hair and a knife hanging on a string around his neck he was enough to startled anyone. I looked up the aisle we were walking in and a lady with a child was walking toward us and as soon as the woman saw Dell she grabbed her child and turned and quickly went into another aisle. I have always found that so humorous. Dell does look frightening and not what one expects to see in your local shopping centre but if one knew Dell; he was really quiet, peaceful, he was strong about his opinions and his anti-society views but he was in a morbid sense a great person to know. I always enjoyed being around Dell. He made me feel human and regular. Dell could just have easily spent his life as a monk on the top of a mountain but with a laptop and his paintings. Most of us see road blocks ahead of us and drive around them but Dell would just drive through. Dell was not self-conscious or worried at all about what others thought of him. If anything he really was shock value personified. We see celebrities who put on their makeup and who try to look outlandish and be weird in public but they just do that for the publicity. Dell was just real. I often thought if I could be ten-percent of Dell it would be his lack of caring what others thought and just do what I felt like doing in the moment.

During the summer of 1973, Dell was driving to his parents in New Lenox, Illinois. I wanted to see Carol Ann and Desiree. Carol Ann was living with her parents in Mokena, a few miles east of New Lenox so I went with Dell. I stayed with Carol Ann, Desiree, and Carol Ann’s parents for a few days. Desiree was seven years old and she only knew me through the stories Carol Ann told her. On a footnote to Carol Ann who I joined a cult religious order with in Hawaii in 1969 and was in and out of for another decade I am Facebook friends with her daughter who is about 46 now. I spent the first few years of her life with her. I was at a concert in 2002 in NYC when Carol Ann’s sister rang me and said that Carol Ann had died. My once-long-ago circle of friends gets smaller each year.

Wichita Kansas HOOM 1975

I returned to my Order in April 1974 and lost touch with Dell for a year but somehow we connected. I was in Wichita Kansas in the Brown Brothers of the Holy Light (really) and celibate branch of the Holy Order of MANS. Another side-note; I never did very well with the celibate part and was constantly getting myself in strife. Nevertheless there was a time when I really tried to toe the line. I had been successful with doing the ‘right things’ in the Order in San Francisco then Cheyenne Wyoming for a winter. I was in Wichita when I had two visitors both of whom did their best to get me to leave. Firstly there was Robyn Harper (who died about fifteen years ago without getting to Australia to visit. She wrote many times saying she was on the way but never made it.) who tried all her best feminine persuasions to lure me out of the Order but I was determined and sent her on her way back in 1975. We had been close in New Orleans but I was working toward becoming a priest and I wanted that more; at least at the time. Dell showed up a month later with mind-altering substances none of which I was interested in. He had a lot of convincing arguments for my leaving the Order but I stayed on.

 

Before the Internet era how people kept track of one another over the years is a mystery. I did not hear from Dell (that I remember now) between winter 1975 and 1983. In 1983 with my first wife I was in the States (we lived in Adelaide, South Australia) visiting tofu factories (I was a tofu manufacturer for eight years in South Australia, see: http://tofu.neuage.us/) when we stopped in New York City. Dell was living in a bit of a rough area down by the Brooklyn Bridge on the top floor of a tenement building. Nothing unusual about that as I have done that many times but what I remember from Dell’s apartment hearing neighbourhood sounds such as a baby crying all night, people screaming at one another, sirens on the streets; and building on both side of his building were burnt out. The wife and Sacha (age about one and a half) and I moved to a hotel after that. I had been at an astrological conference in New Zealand in Sydney at the start of 1980. While in Sydney I met someone I did not get along with and for some stupid reason gave her my address in Towson, Maryland where I was living at the time. After the conference I went back to Towson and low and behold the person I did not get along with at the Sydney astrological conference rang me saying she had driven across from LA to D.C. and wanted a place to stay for a day on her way to NYC. I was in the process of moving back to Hawaii at the time and had nothing left in my house except a bed which we agreed we had to share but under no circumstance would we touch each other. Five days later we basically got out of bed and drove to San Francisco. Half way across the country we began to argue and realised we just had to get away from one another. The woman I was with (who yes it is true rang me a month later when I was in Hawaii to say ‘guess what?’ then she was there in Hawaii and we had Sacha then one day she said if you want to see your son anymore you will have to go back to Adelaide with me, which I did, and as this is not about that part of my life I am now telling suffice it to say we had Leigh then separated and my children and I lived in our tofu factory then on a farm in Mt. Compass then Victor Harbor and a bunch of other places for the next twenty years) anyway we stayed with Dell somewhere out in the country on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I dropped her off at the SF airport and stayed with a female friend of Dell’s. I remember she was a Pisces and she helped me forget my recent traveling companion or at least until she rang me when I had gotten to Hawaii saying ‘guess what’? I kept in touch with Dell after going back to Australia after he we had stayed with him in NYC for a night. He never mentioned coming to visit like my other friends. He did write letters. They are very difficult to read and I try to piece them together almost one word at a time. His handwriting was amazingly difficult to read. Years later when we could communicate via email I still had a hard time reading his writing because his spelling was so bad. His letters were always about trying to get to Europe until around 2000 when he started speaking of then moving to Guatemala. What I could make of his letters were that life was always difficult.     

I would like to have my friend, Marc Seifer, who is also writing a book about my brother, Robert Adsit to look at Dell’s handwriting some day. Marc is a handwriting analysis specialist. He has published many books including the Definitive Book of Handwriting Analysis, Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2008. When I was visiting him in Rhode Island a few years ago he was telling me about my brother and how his handwriting showed that he was a genius. I showed Marc my handwriting and he did not say much. Oh well. Though I would like to know what he has to say about Dell. Not to worry I have always believed that my friends were cooler than me and that is OK. Dell was always an artist. Like 97.6% of artists he wanted to be known for his work. The only image I have is of a painting he spent more than a decade on which I will show further below. Dell was a night person and would sleep during the day and paint all night. Several of his letters speak about some slides he took and sent to galleries and that usually no one replied to. He was excited for awhile saying a gallery in New York City was interested in his paintings but nothing came of that. I do not think Dell ever had a show anywhere which has always been such a sad thing in my thinking. He did a lot of work which now a year after his death I do not believe exist anywhere. He had a large volume of work in storage in Illinois. There is such a fine line between one who is a successful and famous artist and one who creates for fifty – sixty years almost daily then has nothing after they die for anyone to see. My brother was an artist (http://neuage.org/robert_adsit.htm) who did a lot of work and fortunately Marta Waterman http://martawaterman.com/ along with Marc Seifer http://www.marcseifer.com/ are writing a book on him which gives him a live-on sphere of influence to others or at least those of us who were and still are; if the dead are still alive within us, being influenced by him. I know the artist mindset or at least I believe so. Since being a street artist in New Orleans I rarely have had a time when I was not creating something. Like Dell I have a large body of work, like Dell no one sees my stuff, unlike Dell they still exist; in my closet I have boxes of picture-poems and on a ship between China and South Australia there are more boxes. I have put some on our wall but because I share a home I can not put them everywhere. Narda http://narda.us/ has suggested we do a whole wall just of my picture-poems (http://picture-poems.net/) which is really nice but I won’t do it. I am hanging out for a gallery show like Dell always was and like my brother often did.

After 1990 Dell was living in NYC we went to visit him in Chinatown; actually we went to visit my brother (who died of AIDS two years later) and my father and a few others in the States, but he wasn’t home I don’t think, the front door was missing and there were many broken windows and a lot of graffiti on the walls. We did not go inside as it was all too spooky. Dell then said he would meet us at Grand Central Station but didn’t so we went back to my brother’s and then took the Amtrak to Albany. It would be the last time I would see my brother. A week later my children and I went to Europe for awhile then back to Australia.

Dell wrote me for the next decades, and when he got onto the Internet we stayed in touch. Dell was not happy with politics in the States and said it was all getting too difficult and insane. He was particularly unhappy with Bush – Bushes actually. I have never paid much attention to politics so I was not a good sounding board for Dell. He moved to Guatemala and started saying we should purchase a piece of land next to him. Narda and I decided to visit him and we had planned a trip with two other people who Dell and I had wandered the French Quarter of New Orelans with back in 1973-74; Randy Dandurand and Shane (now Mariya Fields) but when it came time to go only Narda and I went to San Pedro la laguna, Solola, Guatamala. Lake Atitlán Aldous Huxley famously wrote of it: “Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Atitlán is Como with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Atitlan)

Guatemala trip 2010

What is it about friends that lives deep in our consciousness that we will not reveal even to ourselves? I think one aspect could be comparison. Perhaps it is part of our DNA something to do with survival. We immediately compare ourselves to others when we meet even for a few seconds; friend-foe, sexy-give-it-a-miss, potential this or that; of course I do not do that but others do. I can feel/see/sense it when I am shopping, being a tourist (I am always a tourist – never being settled; on my gravestone someone will write ‘tourist’ probably because it is obvious that I never did anything else on this planet except be a tourist. Though I stayed away from tours, I did a lot of sightseeing, had heaps of opinions about too many things and as any tourist probably a bit too loud, too flashy – except now in old age I just drag my sorry ass from destination to destination.) I have a few photos of Dell but no video. I was saying to Narda this morning that we must take more video. Of her aging parents, of friends and family. I should have filmed Dell sitting in the motel room with his laptop, or in Guatemala. I have video of Guatemala but not with Dell in it. Now days with Instagram and all it is so easy but I do not think it is being saved long term. What I find so frustrating about the Internet is how lousy a retrieval system it is. I can not find anything on Dell and all that I can find about my brother is what I have put up. The Internet does not replace correspondence such as letters. It adds to correspondence a bit; I can find emails from Dell but none from my brother who died just as the Internet was coming into being. I have some emails but not many from my son who took his life and left little behind even though he was a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers and his baseball card is available on Ebay all that exists are the many pages I have made for him. http://neuage.org/leigh.html I have no video of Leigh even though I was a single parent and raised him. I have heaps of photos. Now I take videos all the time and have several hundred on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/neuage09, https://www.youtube.com/user/tneuage and a few other places though I forget where at the moment. But letters trumps all the electronic correspondence. They show who the person is through their writing style, even how much pressure a person puts on the paper, according to Marc Seifer. Dear Dell We will be in Guatemala city June 17 – 19th and two nights in Panajachel at Hotel Princess  It looks as if we will arrive in San Pedro toward the end of the day Monday the 21 st of June. We will come across the lake from Panajachel. And that we did. Global Nature named Lake Atitlan the ‘most threatened lake of the year’ in 2009 (http://blogs.egu.eu/gfgd/2014/01/30/field-research-in-guatemala-3-environmental-hazards-at-lake-atitlan/) 

Back to Dell in a moment

now back in Adelaide August 2014

We signed up to do relief teaching and thought maybe we would get a day or two a week. We have been relief teaching since the day after and that put off our getting settled into our home today I had reception and grade one; reception is the same as American kindy. Walking in to say good day to 29 children as their teacher walks out (she had a conference to attend) is always a humbling experiencing. As there is often difficulty with saying good morning Dr. Neuage between about K and 2^nd grade I say they can call me Dr. N. That always works fine. Of course they think I am a medical doctoring dude and I have given up trying to explain the difference between a medical doctor and an academic doctor; not sure if academic doctors are surgeons or not so we go through the day with me being Dr. N. I have not had a kindy class since Ross Global Academy in NYC five years ago when I would have a computer lesson with them once a week. I have never been left with a class full for a day. They were beaut we read a story, watched Hansel and Gretel and made gingerbread houses, played outside and on computers. There were a few tears here and there: someone said someone else would not play with them, another said someone said something rude, another said another said they were weak there were a few spills and we went through a few band-aids but overall what great children. I am unable to edit video in Adobe Premiere or shoot some good chroma-screen footage or philosophize about anything at all. There was a point when I took them out to the play area and so did a lot of other classes and soon I realised there were no other teachers and I was surrounded by at least a hundred children many of whom had issues about someone not playing with them or someone saying something they perceived to be as unkind. My favorite as always were issues with not knowing what to do. Hey we are on a playground with playground equipment and a hundred children and you are asking someone who will be 67 in two weeks what to do? I would just say, “go play” and they would say “OK” and be off. And I got a PhD to come up with these lines? Eventually some other teachers came out and stood around talking with one another so somehow I became the go to dude for issues. I think it is a bit rare having a male in primary or maybe they are amazed someone so old is still walking around. One stray child probably about grade five of six followed me around telling me all the words he knew that Americans spell differently. OK so we leave out the u in lots of words and use a z instead of an s. Yesterday I had grade two and they were like taking the best children one could find in a country and putting them in one classroom. We had a great day and actually they enjoyed learning. Last week in a different suburb I had a class where they took all the worse kids in Australia and put them in the same class. How do they do that? Those children did not want to do any learning activities and spent most of the day wrestling, running around and yelling along with using toys for unguided missiles. I have been called back some more as they say no one wants to work at that school as a relief teacher. I wonder why?

I have a history of being surrounded by children. When I was a hippie in California Eileen Busby and I lived in Glen Ellen. Glen Ellen has a bit of fame from Jack London who write such things as ‘Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang‘, ‘The Sea-Wolf’, ‘The Iron Heel’, and etc. We lived on this side road of about six houses that was named Hippy Hollow. All the other houses had single mothers with children and as the mothers were often in states of consciousness that impeded their parenting children would come over to our house for meals. Often we would have five or more children eating a spaghetti meal I had made. There were also times when a mother or two would go into San Francisco – a few hours away – and not return for a day or two and their children would camp out in our lounge. We had a pickup truck (a ute in Australia terms) and being one of the few people on Hippy Hollow road with a vehicle children would pile in the back and off we would drive. We never got a ticket for having people without seat-belts in the back of our truck or perhaps there were no laws about that then. Today taking a third-grade class a boy asked if it was true that kids in high school are allowed to have sex. I replied that I was from American and was unsure if that was allowed here, trying to be a bit diplomatic about the subject. A girl answered that yes they were allowed to have sex in high school. I moved us on to another subject but there was a continuing discussion about this among several of the children. Maybe I should stick to reception and first grade they do not come up with these kinds of questions.

San Pedro

We decided to stay with Dell in San Pedro instead of staying at a hotel. Guatemala was a part of a world-trip that summer. Narda and I were teaching in NYC and not being soccer fans we got a bit swept up in the World Cup of that year. We watched games of Australia and The Netherlands in San Pedro, and while driving through France, seeing the final in front of the Eiffel Tower with thousands of Spanish fans (Narda had her Dutch flag wrapped securely around herself) with Spain beating The Netherlands 1 – 0 at the end. Of course this last World Cup in Brazil we watched as we traveled between China, Hong Kong, Hanoi and Laos only to see The Netherlands not quite make it to the final. We saw the previous World Cup of soccer in Istanbul sitting outside watching Australia get thrashed by someone. I only bring this soccer stuff up as a shadow of our life that summer of 2010. We do not follow soccer and Dell was not interested but Narda and went and watched a few games at a pub in town. We were in pubs because we could not really eat at Dells. He tried to make his home comfortable for us and we did appreciate that. We spent our first day at his house cleaning his kitchen which kind of embarrassed him but it was really beyond what we could cope with. Dell built an incredible house. I have never seen anything like it. He had bought land on the side of a hill and there was no road to his house only a path. All material for his house was brought up by horse and on the backs of the workers building his house. Dell had drawn out a plan for how his house was to look. He did not have an architect look at the plans until it was almost done.
With a large portion of the house done Dell asked an architect to look at how it was going and the architect said it would all collapse without pillars and braces. Dell had the pillars put in – see below for the lounge;

Dell had a beautiful view of Lake Atitlán but he had bars over his windows and due to mold and dirt it was impossible to see outside the windows. He wanted to leave Guatemala for several reasons. One was his health which had been going downhill for years. He had something wrong with his back and to be able to walk without pain he would carry rocks in a bag over his shoulder which of course gave him quite a strange presentation. He said he was always in pain. He spoke of wanting to go to Berlin. He had been there the summer before and stayed with a lover or a friend, I could not sort which, but the person did not want to see Dell ever again. This happened many times. I think I am one of the few people who stayed friends with Dell so long. I remember my friend, Linda, who lived in Lake Charles in Louisiana who wrote me back sometime in the late 1970s to get Dell to leave her house. Linda was one of our friends in New Orleans and Dell had written me if I knew someone he could stay with while he worked on a painting. I had stayed with Linda earlier and thought she would be fine with it. She wrote me that he insisted on having the lights out and that he would just sit in her lounge all night staring at the wall. He even had a falling out with Randy when he stayed with him in California. They each told me different stories so I am not sure what happened really. But Narda being the caring an nurturing person she is felt sorry for Dell and we both tried to make our stay with him good. And Dell tried too. He was depressed as he has been every since I met him back in 1973 and he was very anti-religious which he has been since I met him but we all tried to make the best of the visit. For Dell it was very important because no one had visited him in the seven or so years he had been in Guatemala. We brought him lots of stuff like cigars, an ipod and several other items such as tea and herbs he was unable to find locally. His cousin in New Lenox had loaned him a thousand dollars so we could bring him things.

Dell had sort of a toy-boy, an 18-year old who we thought was hustling him and we had a bit of difficulty adapting to. He gave the toy-boy the ipod which we were opposed to but Dell said he made him happy and it was all a mutually beneficial situation. The toy-boy was a street person whose parents had kicked him out of the family due to his sexual persuasions. Having always been strongly heterosexual I have not understood really a lot of what people are on about. My brother died of AIDs, Dell just always did his thing and I never thought much about it, and being a non-judgmental person for what people do with their lives I don’t put any thought into stuff like ones sexuality. However, I still felt Dell was being taken. Narda looked the other way when she showed photos of her sons and Dell said ‘I like that one’, gulp! OK so why do we hang around people that we do not understand. I use to say with Dell that I am amazed that he stays alive for so long. I think I have studied Dell for forty years, probably not something to base friendship on but not knowing anyone that is so different from every life style I have known or people I have known I am just fascinated by him.

At the end of March the rains from Tropical storm Agatha triggered a landslide. Rocks and mud came down the San Pedro volcano. We were quite concerned for Dell. He wrote that the mudslide was meters from his house but that he was fine. We set up a donation centre at St. Luke’s School in NYC where Narda was working as their music teacher and collected several boxes of shoes and clothes to take with us to San Pedro. The shoes and clothes were new designer stuff still with labels on them. St. Luke’s has lots of celebrities’ children at it so there was a great pouring out of help. Unfortunately we were limited with luggage and ended up taking a suitcase and a half of stuff with our meager poor persons personal clothing stuffed in between the good stuff to give away. Due to Dell’s strong opposition to anything to do with Christianity we could not give it to a local church-mission place but we did find someone who was a part of the relief efforts and we gave what we had. We toured the path of destruction next to Dell’s house. I do not know if his house would have withstood the onslaught of huge rocks tumbling down the mountain – though he did have a lot of concrete involved in building his house.

His house was huge. It was three stories with each story being about fifteen feet high. There was no railing on the stairs and the toilet and shower was open with no privacy which Narda was not thrilled about.

Dell’s primary complaint was the government had cracked down on drugs and there was not much good cocaine around any more. He was also concerned due to the mold everywhere and the effects it was having on his paintings.

He was quite excited when we there about one painting in particular. I probably would be the only person in the world who would know when Dell was excited because he does not give any outward clues. He was working on a painting when he was staying with us in Round Lake New York. He showed it to us and said he had been working on it for years and it was to be his masterpiece and he would sell it then buy a house in Paris and we could come and stay with him. When we were in San Pedro he told us how he had spent a lot of time recently working on his painting to have it finished while we were there. He had been working on it for more than a decade. We were not allowed to see it right away as he had little more to do on it so his 18 year old toy-boy showed us around town for a day and we went and watched soccer another day and another day we took boat rides around the lake until the last day we were there he was finished and he brought us up to his balcony to show us his painting he had worked on for ten years. We did not know what to say. He told us it was the universe or actually many universes exploding and life was beginning in various areas of the painting. I would say the canvas was about 36 inches by 36 inches maybe a bit bigger. He was reluctant to have me take a photo of it but I insisted and I am so happy I did as it may be the only record of its existence.

Dell wanted to sell his house so we brought up a real estate agent that we found online living in San Pedro. The person was amazed and simply told Dell he had no idea how he could sell it. There were not really rooms. Upstairs there was sort of a lean-to structure with a bed and a few shelves. Narda and I stayed in there the week we were at Dell’s. The bed was uncomfortable the house was shocking but to this day we both say we never slept so well. Narda and I are really bad sleepers in that we wake up many times during the night which means we wake each other up. Rarely in the thirteen years we have been together have we slept through the night without waking at least once if not many times. In San Pedro La Laguna at Lake Atitlan we slept through every night and felt so rested the next day. I usually have to go to the toilet more than once at night – OK so I am old – but either because we slept so well or I was terrified of the stairs with no railings but I did not get up once. We spoke about how well we slept to other people we met and they said the same. Lake Atitlan is known for its peacefulness. In such a dangerous country it is something to have a place so peaceful. Before seeing Dell we stayed in Guatemala City – one of the most dangerous cities in the world according to web reports – people at the hotel we stayed at said we should not cross the street after dark unless we had one of the armed hotel people with us but we did to go to a restaurant down the street. At the restaurant there were two men one at each door with machine guns – that is how dangerous the city is. We were told it is dangerous to walk around in the daytime too but we were told that in Mexico City and we stayed during some horrific drug feud squabbles. We own a house in a rough area of Jersey City and lived there for three years. Like Dell we just go forward until we are unable to anymore.

Dell built his house like a fort because he had been robbed so often and even this peaceful part of Guatemala was really dangerous. There are no buses in San Pedro so one gets about hitching rides in the back of pickup trucks; similar to the songthaew in Thailand. It seems dangerous but it is fun. As Dell lived on a bit of a back road and his van was parked in storage in another town the only way to get around was on horseback or in the back of a pickup truck. Narda and I did ride horses through the coffee fields one day but that was more as tourists than transportation.

One night we just could not eat what Dell had – nothing against his kitchen – well… but I being a vegetarian we will suffice it to say we wanted something else so Dell and Narda and the toy-boy and I walked down the hill; which in itself was quite a project as it was always muddy and steep and we are all old, well except for the toy-boy to the road. We walked for awhile when Narda saw a pickup truck in front of someone’s house so with Dell shaking his head no and me say ‘it is OK she does this kind of thing all the time’ Narda went to the door and asked for a ride into town. Of course we do not speak Spanish and Dell was back on the road looking embarrassed and they did not speak English but it was obvious what Narda wanted pointing at their truck and pointing in the direction of town and besides it was starting to rain. To our amazement; well Dell and me – not Narda she usually gets what she goes after (at St. Luke’s School in NYC the teachers have a saying, she worked there for five-years ‘what would Narda do?’) they agreed and we all piled into the back of the truck as well as about five family members and off we went. The end of the story is that we got a good meal in town does not matter as it was getting there that was fun. We found another pickup truck to take us back home and we climbed up the steep hill in the mud and rain and were happy to be back home. We were concerned about the scorpions in the house. Dell had said just watch for them. He had been bitten twice. The first time he said was quite painful the second time he got high. We were lucky I suppose as no scorpions bit us

Antigua Guatemala

We decided to go to Antigua for a few days and I forget why but Dell was going to meet us there instead of go with us. We had come out from Guatemala City by car for a hundred dollars US as everyone says the chicken buses (really old USA school buses painted up) are very dangerous and we had read so many stories online about people being robbed and killed and beaten up on them that we did not take any. But to save some money we took a van to Antigua with about a dozen others. The others were young people traveling around South America. In the three hour or so ride we heard lots of horror stories about travel in Guatemala. I know Dell said once that he was driving along on a back rode and a bunch of bandits tried robbing him at gun point so he threw a bunch of money out the window and drove as fast as he could.

We stayed at the Four Seasons at Radisson Villa Antigua Resort in Antigua Guatemala. Not because we are snobs or rich; it was just affordable and we needed a nice place. Dell arrived a few days later and rang that he was in the lobby. Now picture a five-star hotel with its fancy lobby and in the middle is Dell with his bag of stones over his shoulder because of his back pain and a tattered bag with his clothes all of which obviously need a wash and – well there he was. We went to the front and collected him and as we had a two-bedroom apartment for that week or it was less than a week but for ever how long we stayed it was all quite good. Dell said he had not stayed at such a place for decades or did he say ever? We toured around Antigua the best we could – Dell could not walk a lot but we had lots of laughs and we even watched a soccer game with The Netherlands at a restaurant.

We really did plan to go to see Dell again. We were with in June – July 2010. The next summer we went to Ecuador then on to China to live for the next three years – until a month ago actually. We did not tell Dell we were going to South America as he would have wanted to meet up with us or have us visit him. He was quite stressed and we just did not know what we could do. I started making a webpage to help him sell his house but we could not come up with what his house could be used for. We thought maybe some new-age centre or a place for a craft/artist person. The view is amazing but the house is just so huge and strange. We wrote back and forth and thought maybe after our China tour we would go to visit meaning like now. I had said to Narda for the past year that I thought Dell was dead and I was feeling quite sad about it. There was no way to contact him. He did not have Internet on at home and could only use it when it went into San Pedro which was maybe once a month or so. His phone at his house did not work. His cousin said that he had put it on my Facebook a year ago that Dell had died but I did not see it. Facebook is banned in China and I would view it rarely using our VPN.

Dear Terrell and Mrs.–

Glad I found the correct email address for you.

Delbert died in an accident at his home in May 2013.  He had locked himself out of his house and was attempting to climb the outside wall to get in.  He fell, as I understand it, from between two and three stories.  A neighbor heard his cries and went to help.  (I didn’t even know he had neighbors.  I thought he was out there by himself in a remote area.  He never spoke of neighbors.)  A doctor and others were called to help.  In the process of taking him to town, he had a heart attack and died.  The death certificate indicated thoracic trauma.

A person from the US Embassy in Guatemala contacted me about three days after he died.  It took them that long to locate my information.  He informed me about the accident and that deaths were handled differently in Guatemala than in the US.  No refrigeration, no embalming, etc.  The heat and humidity had bad effects on the body and burial was done as soon as possible after death.   He is buried in a cemetery in Sololá in an unmarked grave.  A grave can be rented for 6 years and then the person is either buried like Delbert, or rented again.  It was not possible at that time to dig him up and ship him home, so he is forever in Sololá.

I do miss him.  Miss the unexpected phone calls.  Miss hearing what is going on in his life, mostly problems.  His legs and back were bothering him and causing him considerable pain, and I cannot understand what possessed him to think he could climb a house in his physical condition.   We will never know.

I hope all is well with you and your wife.

Karen

 

How is it we think ~ dwell ~ feel someone that is not in the physical and create in this moment with them? I do it. I am influenced by my dead son, by Dell, by my brother Robert, by my son, by girl friends; not all at once of course but I can be writing or talking or going through my day then suddenly this person from the past influences me and I change or add or morph – whatever I do at that particular moment. I disassociate with the moment, even sometimes with myself and associate with someone else. But I do not become who I was when I was with them but maybe who they are now being with me if there is life after life where the dead can embed themselves into now.

 

All my dead family and friends keep asking me

for favors

Last night one of my dead girl friends

asked me to feed her dead cat.

8-25-94 Victor Harbor

here is to you mate:

Delbert L. Crowther

• January 22, 1940 – May 11, 2013
• New Lenox, Illinois
• New Orleans, San Francisco, New York City, Paris, Berlin, San Pedro Guatemala and so many places in between

Mariya Field There are many things to have been said about Dell and I also was part of the Musketeers who knew him in 1973. I was a teen run away on the streets of New Orleans, Terrell, Randy and Dell were my protective, loving, quirky, generous big brothers. I was never afraid when I was with them, and trust me the streets in those days could be brutal. Dell had a way of making silence beautiful. He introduced me to some of the most amazing and haunting music I ever heard, all on vinyl, he loved a good glass of vine, some serious pasta and an evening with a few of us contemplating the universe even the darker side at times.. (Terrell will remember a late night trip to Charity) . A few years ago I received a somewhat rambling email from Dell mentioning this coffee house on Royal street called Until Waiting Fills it was a true artist hang out (Like only existed in the 70″s) and over many cups of tea or carrot juice we contemplated the magic around us….Dell’s life was a bit harsh at times, he followed no known path he definitly was creative, different,, smart and loyal….and I hope wherever he landed his spaceship he can listen to his Voltaire and drink some killer red wine….Cheers dear brother

Durand Dandurand Dell was so different from anyone I’ve ever known. Dark and moody, always interesting; he did what he pleased, even if he was living in your house. Very strange guy, but I always liked him. A toast to you, Dell!

Softball and Wedding

Videos associated with this blog:

Wedding http://youtu.be/hXTnilDBg1Q
Temple visit http://youtu.be/a8QCaHBe9tA

Part 1 Softball

April 19 – 20

I thought it was last weekend but then I was wrong; so I thought it was the week prior then the weekend prior to that but now looking at the date it was a month ago. When yesterday was a month ago and last weekend was closer to tomorrow and tomorrow in reality does not matter as it has yet to manifest then living in the moment has been actualized. It is really the goal of human existence; if not stated then at least alluded to in one’s subconscious or super-subconscious or maybe even in the collective mind that we work so hard at denying exists so that we can have our alleged individual-walled off-tweeted minds but it is a trick. We really do live in the moment.

It is simple physics that what exists is existing now and not tomorrow and not really what did exist because that is what did and what is, is the magic of now. Part of the magic of now though, as humans, and maybe animals – how would we know? Is that we can transcend now and live elsewhere without living there. So I am thinking that it seemed like last weekend but it was not and that is fine because there has been so much good stuff since what I am really going to write about at least at first here that I have not had the opportunity to write since that great weekend because of all the other great moments since. Narda says I use way too many words to get to the point and because she is much smarter than me I suppose that is correct so I will get on with it.

In between or during, on top of, along-the-side of, those great moments are the mundane though thought provoking due to their life changing results moments; such as packing. It is close to moving-on to the next experience in life time and to alienate myself from what I believed in the paragraph above and just a few moments ago I am thinking and probably trying to live a tad bit in to the future because what we have been doing will be reflected in our future. For example what do we toss, what do we ship, what is carry-on luggage, what is dragged along with us stuff? A minor problem, well not problem but more of an issue is that all our belongings; I need to rephrase the part about all our stuff as we have a shed full of stuff in Adelaide, Australia that has been in storage for about 12-years, we have furniture and nicknacks in our house we our renting out in Jersey City and stuff in both of our houses in upstate New York that for some reason we have not really gotten rid of and we actually avoid any conversation about whether we should get rid of because it will just cause stress and no one wants too much stress in their life so we put the ‘we-have-crap-to get-rid-of’ bag over our consciousness and go forward into the weeks, months, years and now decades of whether we should have a conversation about bringing our past into the future.

For now we live in the moment – the ideal space – and what we collected and stored in the past can just stay there for now. I am not fond of packing unless of course I am packing to drag more of my past into the future then I am a real fan of packing. Back in the mid 1980s when I was a single parent in Australia living on a farm in Mt. Compass out on Tooperang Road (on the Fleurieu Peninsula) – the photo below is where my children and I lived from 1986 – 1988 – the years get blurry sometimes but strangely enough alive enough to feel like last weekend too. I even moved my tofu making business here – see my never-ending ~ ever-evolving e-book on making tofu and raising children with stories such as when the cows came and ate all my tofu-burger mix for the week at http://tofu.neuage.us/ what I do notice about this picture and where I live now in China is the blue sky and white clouds; all so different than the polluted skies and air we have here.

our home in Mt Compass South Australia from 1986 – 1988

Back in the mid-1980s my children and I packed boxes and I said the next time we open them we will be in New York. It never happened and those boxes of toys and clothes stayed packed and we moved them from place to place; we lived in ten homes in about 12-years; not the easiest life being a single parent but overall it was good. Of course my children at the time were about five and seven years old and the concept of storing and dragging memories and loot from place to place was not really a manifest destiny at the time other than what they saw in one place was magically transferred to the next; not magic for me as I packed and lugged then unpacked to give our home in so many places that seamless ‘it is home’ look. Not that it is now thirty years later makes me any different. I read recently in an article about designing responsive web pages that fifty percent of our personality has genetic causes meaning I obviously inherited the need to hoard from those who came before. [Prinker, Steven, ‘How the Mind Works,’; in Aarron Walter’s article on ‘Redesigning with Personality’ in Smashing Magazine.}

That weekend ago; I looked forward to it for a month; actually now a month later I am looking back at it a month; sort of the midpoint between now and then and the month before when I first decided to play in a softball tournament in Kunshan (a bury burb of Shanghai). “The ‘Zhou City Cup’ slow pitch softball Kunshan Grand Prix; 25 teams from across the Taiwan Strait…of intense athletics.” Source: China News  –  Views: 7-Times (four of those times was me, showing how popular this article was in a month’s time in a country with a billion plus people http://www.vhteam.cn/feed/en_1996233).

The population of Kunshan is 1.647 million (by 2010) according to Wikipedia which is more people than Adelaide, South Australia which is the fifth largest city in all of Australia with 1.203 million people (2010 – I know I counted them) and which we are moving back to in five weeks. Kunshan is a small town in China. To get an idea of how small it is The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that at least 15 mega-cities with 25 million residents are now in China (all of Australia has 22.68 million (2012). Kunshan is, like most of China, a construction site with highways all over the shop being tossed in.

The fact that most of the people on our team were half my age had Narda asking ‘are you sure you want to do this’? There were seven of us English garbling folks; five from Dalian American International School and two that work at local international companies. The rest of the team were Taiwanese. We have been practicing with them on Sundays for the past year and last year when I had a bit of a heart problem and got sent off to Hong Kong to get four stents put in some place in my heart area they got together and signed a softball with all their names and no one thought I would or probably that I should play with them again. The doctor said whoa but four weeks later I was out there chasing flys and hitting the ball all the way to the pitcher – OK so I am the worse player on the team but I am also the oldest.

Actually I do not look that terribly old – the next oldest is ten years younger and most are in their 30’s with Brandon there at 24 and some in their 40’s. So to recap; one in the sixties (66 and in another two months 67 – yippee), one in his fifties and the rest just young.

It was a hoot. On Saturday it rained all day so we just slipped and skidded around and I even got a hit and got on base – what a dude. I was the catcher as they probably thought I would have a heart attack if I had to run after the ball and I did make a few good plays. We lost by heaps the first game something like 17 to two, and won the next. On Sunday we lost one and won one and did not do well enough to make it to the next round so we only played four games. For whatever karmic reason that we get what we get in life we got the crap field with lots of mud holes.

We played at the Kunshan Zhoushi Middle School and it was closed meaning toilets and any human related facilities were not available. We managed to get our bus driver to go off and find a Starbucks and bring us back large cups and luckily I brought enough sandwiches for two days because the box lunch that were provided looked and smelt pretty foul being composed of meat from indeterminable origins. Or to say I did not see any cats, dogs, rats, birds, bats, flies, butterflies and etc. in the area could be a hint of what could have been in the lunch boxes. We had fun though and we all laughed a lot and the younger ones had not problem with making fun of one another.

We stayed at the Crown International Exhibition Hotel Kunshan for the weekend getting in Friday night after mid-night. I knew for weeks that enough sleep was not going to be on the agenda. Narda and I usually go to bed at nine pm and we are up at six but this weekend Narda was a bit concerned that I would not have enough sleep – even my wife thinks I am old. Sure enough I was up and down for breakfast around six am on Saturday and off playing by eight. The others had stayed up a couple of hours more to have drinks. Saturday night I was determined to be asleep by ten but first we were all off to the KTV attached to the hotel. If you have never been in China and have no idea what KTV is well I suppose one could Google it. Basically you get a large room and it is to sing in on the lowest end of the scale. It is not a front for prostitution (they say) but where one pays to have a girl sit with them then according to how much you pay then you get more. Girls are led in, in groups of 5 – 7 and if none are chosen the next group is brought in.

A person will even announce how much a girl to drink with you is; in the first group it was 500 RMB for a girl to talk with you and have drinks which were extra. One group we were told was 700 each as they were some top sort of girls whatever that meant and then one group was a special at only three hundred per girl. In the short time I was there I counted six groups of girls. Us baseballers were just looking at the TV and laughing at the songs and drinking. Well I drank water as I stopped drinking alcohol about seven years ago. I was told several times not to take photos but I did anyway and took video clips until at the end when I was taking video in the hall I was escorted out by three tough looking dudes who had no smiles between them. I am not making any youtube type of clips for various reasons but here are some images I took off of the video clips I managed to get.

The girl in the blue flight suit was kind of in charge – there were a couple of them and when someone chose a girl – the Taiwan players were keen the girl would turn over some electronic device to the girl in the blue which I supposed was an expense account-tracker.

 

The TV in the background is the karaoke screen. I do not remember if the hand in front of me is telling me once again to put away my camera or if it was choosing a girl. After some people looked aggro at me with my Nikon (especially when I had a zoom lens on) I took photos with my iPhone and sent them to Narda (hey guess where I am?)

I took video in the hall because it was such an impressive place with stained glass and lovely furniture and I thought no one could see me but I was quickly escorted out of the building – but here is an image from a video of a hall:

I thought it was all quite interesting from a cultural anthropological position studying the primordial role and development of the reptilian brain of sports players. Everyone was having a good time drinking beer, singing, and me watching until a female sat next to me and started saying ‘hello’. I did not want to be antisocial but I was not interested in talking either. And further more she did not speak English and she was young enough to be my granddaughter. I don’t want to sound like abnormal as a sports player but I was thinking maybe I should get a blanked to put over her as she seemed very skimpily dressed for the air-conditioned room and she could easily catch a cold then she may be missing school. I could have asked her why she was not home doing homework but again there was a language barrier. I have no idea why she was sitting next to me trying to talk then I realized the Taiwan dude next to me, I am sure, paid for her for me. He asked me if I could speak Chinese so I could talk to her and he assured me she was good. Good in meaning she gets all A’s at school? Or she sings well in the local church choir? When I went to take a sip of my water she took her glass and clunked mine and said something and I smiled and said, ‘sorry dear I have to go’. Gosh things change when one goes from being in their twenties to their 60’s. So I went back to my hotel took a sleeping pill and slept from nine pm until feeling refreshed Sunday morning I was ready to play ball.

The first time I came across a KTV was when three couples were in Dalian for the weekend our first month at Dalian American International School. We had all started at the same time; now three years later, one couple: Frank and Kay are in Burma – we went to visit them a few months ago and the other: Jean and Sean, are still here. We had no idea what we were walking in to and we sat down and these scantly dressed females came in. I think it is about karaoke as there is always a large television screen and you get a microphone. We got into laughing fits and left. That was my full KTV experience until Kunshan. Everyone was going in the evening after dinner. Dinner was quite the event with band and singers all in a large Chinese-style-over-the-top-chandelier laced room.
Reason for doing.
Everything we do is because of.
Conscious or not.
I was conscious about why I was going to play softball with a group of energetic young folks. I do not socialize much here and rarely have socialized much anywhere. My idea of a nice weekend is creating a new webpage or doing some writing, making something in Premiere or After Effects, having a play in Photoshop; I have had a subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud suite for the past year and there are not enough hours in a week to learn and create in all the programs and do all the wonderful things I try to squeeze a few moments in a day out of to make something. I am fortunate to have a job where I can use lots of programs during the day at Dalian American International School. One of the creative parts of my job is DAISlive which is our in-house news show that I do with my middle school and high school classes. I try new animation and video features each week. The rest of my position is ‘technology integration coordinator where I work with teachers and we create stuff using film in courses from literature to science and we use designing and CAD programs so I will miss all this creative buzz with students and teachers. But outside of school I do not do much with others except of course Narda. I am lucky for many reasons but one of them is she likes to spends stacks of time on the Internet looking at real estate or on Skype with her granddaughters or sons in their various places of residence (Hanoi, Adelaide, South Australia, Atlanta, Georgia) and now as we are moving back to Australia she is looking on Gumtree (Gumtree is Australia’s answer to Craigs List in the States) for furniture so now at 5:30 AM I get to continue to write.

OK drifting is so often common in my thinking which manifests in my writing too often and to wander off to the actually point of playing softball at a tournament at the age of 66 almost 67 six months after heart-repair and a few aches and pains acquired from who knows where?

When Leigh was fourteen he went on his first out of town baseball tournament. He went to Melbourne playing for a spot on the U-16 National Team playing in St. Louis Missouri. (sites I made at the time: http://www.angelfire.com/hi/U16/australia.html and http://leigh.neuage.info/u16.htm). He did not tell any of his friends that he was trying out for the national team because he did not want to say he did not make it. He was ready to keep going though and had a week’s clothes and his passport with him. I had spent a lot of time in family court getting permission for him to go as his mother did not want him leave Australia thinking that in someway I would run over there and keep him there. By this time in 1997 I had been a single parent since 1984 when Leigh was a year old and Sacha three and a half but we had already been to family court heaps (we managed 66 times in court during the course of parenting, mostly over money and my wanting to take the children to the States to see their grandparents which I managed to get permission for twice). He made the team and helped Australia to get into 4th place in a field of 12 countries. There were a lot of away tournaments following that from playing on National Schoolboy teams to Australian National Teams, a World Cup in Taiwan, a series in Africa and the Under 18s World Series in Canada (http://leigh.neuage.info/u-18.htm) and on to playing for the LA Dodgers. Leigh was constantly taking a bus, train, flight to somewhere to play ball. Sacha had left home the last couple of years Leigh was home before Narda and I too left and went off to New York to live in 2002. I would clean Leigh’s room and sit in there thinking about him traveling around and try to visualize his life on the road. I often made web pages for whatever team he was on or tournament he was at. Between 1997 and 2003 Leigh got to travel a lot. So my going off with a team and playing in a tournament was exercising ghosts and mind-spacings I have had for a long time. http://neuage.org/leigh.html says it best.

I was successful with my travel. I would not do it again but taking a flight and buses and staying at a hotel and wearing Leigh’s baseball cleats and using his glove all put me in the right place and I have cleared a bit part of my life and now I can drift off into old-age knowing that I too played ball in an international tournament. Riding with the guys on a big yellow bus – I think if Leigh had stayed on the planet he would have thought this was kind of kool – of course he would probably be a big-time ball player but hey we all have to start somewhere and getting on the bus to the game is the first step. It has been a month now and no scouts have rung me like they did when Leigh was a teenager when scouts from Atlanta, Arizona, Minnesota, and finally LA though there were others whom I have forgotten all visiting me because of my son. Maybe I did not do well enough or it could have been the language barrier.

We got home after midnight or early Monday morning. Somehow I managed a couple of hours of sleep and then I was off to school. Needless to say it was a day of being tired. The downside of working where you live – or nearby, as Dalian American International School is a five minute walk to Campus Village where we live, is that it is very tempting to go home and have a nap which I have not done in three years but it is reassuring to know it is possible.

Part 2 Wedding

May 10 – 11
Vivian has worked with us for the past couple of years. She teaches Mandarin at our school. She speaks English very well and as she lived in Minnesota for a few years she is quite Western sounding. When she sent out the invitation to the whole school 27 of us signed up to go to her wedding in Liaoyang. At first we thought we were at the wrong venue because the photoshop folks had kind of made Vivian look not like her but sure enough we were at the correct place.

Liaoyang, another close to two-million people town has wide streets and is known for its petroleum products; maybe not widely known, I had no idea what that meant until after a weekend there. It is is one of the ‘oldest continuously-inhabited cities in northeast China’ according to Wikipedia.

I had not been out of town for almost two weeks since going to play ball in the international tournament down in Kunshan as us sport players who are constantly on the road just have this need to go to the next town. We took the fast train up which only took 1 hour 40 minutes and cost 143.5 RMB (23 US dollars). The fast trains in China are one of the best things in this country. They are exactly to the minute on time,very comfortable, cheap, clean and of course fast. The ordinary trains are quite budget.

The hotel, Grand View International Hotel was good and we had a view across the town.

This was our second Chinese wedding and they never fail to entertain. See http://youtu.be/hXTnilDBg1Q for this wedding and http://blog.neuage.info/?p=35 for my blog about a previous wedding which also at http://youtu.be/PJoDYbCswC8.

After the wedding we spent the day touring. On Sunday we stayed together with the group that went up and Vivian gave us a narrated tour but on Saturday when the wedding and brunch was over, all before noon, Narda and I went off in search of the local pagoda in Liaoyang White Tower Park. Guangyou temple, first constructed in 1145 houses a giant statue of Buddha made from sandalwood. From my observation it was about four stories high and as always he looks quite happy.
There were heaps of interesting images (just a smattering are here) including a series of creatures holding up Buddha’s foot.

We climbed local hill tops to temples

And wondered how a controlling country like China keeps track of 1.3 billion people and saw our answer in the park; they send children out on patrol missions in little vehicles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And that is it… probably my last blog written here as we ship everything off next week to Australia and we are off soon after: firstly to Hong Kong to have another peak at my heart then to Hanoi and on to Laos and sometime in mid-July we will regroup in Adelaide and a month later our shipment of crap will arrive and by then we will be looking around wondering why did we move back to Australia.

 

 

 

 

 

Embedding Thailand

Embedding Thailand

home        Blog Index     previous blog

videos for this blog:

• train to Hua Hin http://youtu.be/tjxnVU4FoGk
  

• King of Thailand passing by http://youtu.be/XvOScADNIKQ
  

• Bangkok at night and the Chao Phraya (แม่น้ำเจ้าพระยา) River http://youtu.be/ykrkrZ06zH8

• Cabbages and Condoms and Bangkok protests http://youtu.be/3lXhsVCd19M
  

Three years ago our school, Dalian American International School, gave us our spring break unfettered. Professional Development, as a Common Core (a favorite buzzword at our school) active-learning-function, should be embedded within school-time, according to values held amongst staff, was separated from holiday time. Professional Development of course is part and partial of instructional education and as the name implies (professional development) is a segment of what enhances the teaching environment which is what people pay to send their darlings to our school to learn. Three years ago the EARCOS (East Asia Regional Council of Schools) conference was in Bangkok and as usual went from Thursday to Saturday. Spring Break holidays followed the next week. As our school gives us a thousand dollar stipend for PD we usually use it for a conference and the thousand dollars US comes close to paying the airfare, the conference, and the hotel. So naturally when the conference is during school days prior to a holiday why would we not combine them? which we did three years ago and about half the teachers pissed off on a Wednesday went to a conference in Bangkok then on to holiday the following week. I think we went to Viet Nam that year after the conference. Which made sense as our airfare was paid for most of the way by going via Bangkok.

 

Not to worry we made do and Friday right after school we were on the way to the airport, one hour away, with Jolly from our Jack-controlled fleet of drivers. Being five o’clock in Dalian add a 45 minutes but we were in flight and arriving in Guangzhou before mid-night. We chose to get out of town thinking we would get to our sea-side town by Saturday noon and to have five-days before being burden with the great mind minds in the educational world; should not be sarcastic here as there are always a few guiding lights at these conferences though a large quantity of ‘look at how great I am‘ presenters too.

Staying at the Pullman Hotel at Guangzhou Airport, a five minute walk away from the entrance to Gate A – International is the best way to start a holiday. Yes, there are soft beds in China and large soft pillows. Even at top hotels we find hard beds waiting for us but not at the Pullman and five thirty Saturday morning came just too soon for the comforts one craves at any age. We got to Bangkok and taking the Airport Rail
Link (06:00-midnight) that connects downtown Suvarnabhumi International Airport with Bangkok we were at Hua Lamphong Railway Station (สถานีรถไฟหัวลำโพง – ah the joys of cut and paste), or for those of us who struggle with any language of any sort, the Bangkok Railway Station.

(my youtube video for this is at http://youtu.be/tjxnVU4FoGk).

The train station is a typical older big city Asian place. The toilets are horrible (bring your own tissue – and be prepared to squat if squat action is what your body needs to do), there are restaurants, we ate at one upstairs that was very grubby but the tofu stew I had was fine though I suspect that like most meals was heavily laced with MSG which makes me more hyper than usual which is fine after a cup of coffee and a long train ride. The noon train was fully booked and the only place left on the next train at 2.30 was first class sleeper which sounded groovy and comfortable and elitist and we bought on for those moments of merging with the chosen and higher echelon of whatever social grouping we were to be embedded with. Eventually we were off to Hua Hin; promoted as the closest beach resort of Bangkok, located 281 kms away.

Hua Hin Train Station The photo of the Hua Hin Train Station below is the next day.

We brought snack food with us which was good because I was unable to eat the dead-animal-laced meals that were on offer but we did have drinks in the restaurant car and a good view of the landscape which was mainly flat and rice fields (see the video). The upper crust we were on board with looked pretty working class or below which probably coincided with the fare of about $15 US. So this was not Amtrak and the sleeper car definitely was not what we expected (see image above) but was actually our seats folded down with a pull down bunk on top and a thin mat on top and curtains. OK so it was mid-day and we did not need sleepers but we thought it would be a hoot (I think it was me that was thinking in turns of ‘oh boy this will be kool‘) to get the beds made up and I went off to find a porter type of dude who made up the beds with pillows and sheets and the half inch piece of foam that would serve as our mattress. Of course as we live in a world of ‘hey they are doing it so we should do it too‘ and of course with us being the only westerners on the train obviously we knew what we were doing so the people across from us did it. They had a child of about five who thought it was all a big Cubby House and chattered the whole trip (six hours, two hours longer than the advertised time) and climbed between up and down bunks.

Then the next seat did it and soon as shown above the whole car was one big sleeper and it was only about four in the afternoon. Not to be a trend-starter for no reason I climbed up on the top bunk and promptly fell to sleep for about an hour and I was not even sleepy to begin with. But I tend to relax and go to sleep quite easy. I do it on airplanes; often being sound to sleep from starting on the runway to waking in the clouds – maybe something about my level of consciousness being played out there. One of my stranger times I suppose was going to sleep whilst the dentist was drilling a few months ago, they woke me up a couple of times. And forget massages – Narda will tell me that soon after they start I am snoring. The bad part of my sleeping habits is that I awake a few hours later, like around one or two in the morning wide-awake ready for the day and I just lay there, usually quite frustrated for a couple of hours before going back to sleep. I tend to fall asleep always within half an hour before it is time to get up.

Nevertheless we got to Hua Hin station about 8.30 PM with the people who we had arranged our airbnb waiting the extra hours for our arrival. In contrast to our smartypants idea that leaving Friday night would have our toes in the warm waters of Thailand and away from the still freezing weather of Dalian was quite in error in judgement as some others left our school Saturday morning and once at Bangkok Airport took another flight and got to their beach side resort early Saturday afternoon with us leaving a dozen hours earlier and getting to our destination hours later than the others.

We stayed in a small apartment owned by a Dutch couple@ the Tira Tiraa Condominium (http://www.tiratiraahuahin.com/). The whole joint is full of Northern Europeans, lots of Danes and Germans who live there for several months at a time and of course Narda was thrilled and the word retirement came up multiple time. (It sound like an echo off of a distant mountain filtered through many layers of resistance in my brain stem scratching against the reptilian part of my brain.). Good western restaurants and we went to the ‘S & S Indian Restaurant’ which is listed a Ranked#9 of 348 restaurants in Hua Hin in Tripadvisor and we ranked it as number one of three restaurants we ate at which of course is a higher ranker but not as credible because we are no-body. We had several eats at ‘I Rice’ which was only a block away and we ranked it as number two out of three though Tripadvisor Ranked it as #70 of 348 restaurantsin Hua Hin. Forgot where we ranked number three, I think it was where we had breakfast.

The Tira Tiraa Condominiums have a wonderful large swimming pool and we made use of it and a gym which I made use of everyday. The rest of the time we wandered around, took a random bus to Cha Am which is a distant extension of Hua Hin and is full of Northern European tourists beneath kilometer after kilometer of umbrellas. See below:

Songthaew, taxi truck

As we usually do we took random tuk tuks to places we did not know including this random bus that went to the next town, Cha Am. The town centre is nowhere as nice as Hua Hin so we started down the road to the beach (see umbrella infested shore photo above) on a very hot day and fortunately were able to hail a taxi truck (“songthaews”) most of the way. We walked all the way back to town which was miserable, taking an hour in the noon-day sun.

We got the bus back toward Hua Hin but being the tourists that we are and having read about The Venezia Hua Hinwhich online (http://www.theveneziahuahin.com/) and on our tourist map boasted its significance: “The Venezia Hua Hin: The inspiration of this magnificent project came from the charming of the world famous river city named ‘Venice, Italy’. Venice is known as a city that massively uses water transportation by using the canal as a traffic channel through out the city. In addition, the Venice has also preserved traditional stores with beautiful sculpture surrounding of the canal area. These charming can be compared to one of the most charming in Thailand, Hua Hin.

Hua Hin is the major tourist destination and long time famous city in Thailand. As of the fact that Hua Hin is currently regarded as the prime tourism potential in terms of rapidly and steadily growing in the business and numbers of both Thai and foreign tourists. As the distance between Hua Hin and Bangkok, it is very convenient to travel as same day trip between Bangkok and Hua Hin; It takes less than two hours by car. Hua Hin, the city of relaxing place for living and visiting supported by surrounding many major attractions. Of course, huge buying power of over 65 million people across the country and oversea visitors.”

We loved being in Venice and all the other places of Italy we have wandered about in so a day at a Venetian Shopping Centre – of course, why not?

Holy Cow! The shopping centre had to be the most tacky and ill conceived place I have ever seen. To make it even more idiotic they charged 50 baht to get in; OK so it is only $1.50 US but the nerve… Surely it was built by the Chinese as I doubt any other country could have come up with such a stupid concept. Due to the heat being in an air-conditioned mall was a relief but what a bunch of stupid shops. Everything was so overpriced and the place so empty.

There were mixed styles; some I think were suppose to mimic Italy in someone’s twisted dream and some just did make sense. I think they were a Thai copy of Disney, not sure. There was a sort of Christmas theme happening too I think even though we were in the middle of March.

A Christmas theme in the sense that there were reindeer or horses with horns and trees with lights and packages beneath. I doubt whether the builders/designers had ever been to Venice. It was even more tacky than the The Venetian Macao (see my blog of Macao @ http://wp.me/pcHIf-iz). We discovered that we needed cash and the ATM did not take our Chinese Union-pay Card (most countries and ATMs do including in Hua Hin, Bangkok, Burma and etc) but not at this strange place which was good as Narda had found some wings she was buying for her two-year old granddaughter and a soft sheep. We had just enough cash to get on a bus back to Hua Hin.

Once we had dragged our sorry asses out of the air-conditioned mall and alongside the sun-killing highway we waited and waited though it was only 20 minutes for the bus. There was no shade and I tried entertaining myself and Narda (she was not entertained) by making fun of a bullock in the paddock next to us.

Not to worry we got home had dinner at ‘I Rice’ and had a swim in the pool and Narda talked about retirement and I checked out the bandwidth which needless to say was a lot better than what we get at Campus Village back home in Dalian which is close to non-existent. I am not sure whether it is funding cuts at our school that has gotten us less bandwidth or the fact that the Internet mainly filters through student housing first to keep them happy or if it is because of the government. No one is enlightening us on why our Internet in China is so much worse than it was two years ago. So I hastily uploaded YouTube clips of our travels so far on this trip. And of course posted to and read Facebook and Twitter and other sites banned in China.

We walked along the beach in Hua Hin stopping at the Hilton Hua Hin Resort & Spa because when one wants a proper toilet a western hotel is the place to go. The Hilton did not let us down and we rested in their beautiful lobby overlooking the sea (picture below)

(http://www.centarahotelsresorts.com/centaragrand/chbr/) which was formerly the Hua Hin Railway Hotel (when it was affordable). The lawns are amazing with sculptured bushes and all the old world charm in the lobby before whatever bad-tastes-tourism’s wrecking ball has done to the beautiful places of the world. If we were not staying at the Tira Tiraa Condominium and had three-hundred dollars per night to spend on
lodging we would have stayed at the Centara Grand Beach Resort Hotel. Narda says we will stay here for a week to celebrate our twenty anniversary of when we did the ‘M’ thing back in 2001 so we have seven-years to save our coins in a jar and by then if the world has not gone on some crazy end-of-the-earth bang we will stay at the former Railway hotel.

 

We went off to grab a photo of the train station and inspect more of funky Hua Hin – which is good at this moment in time because it is not filled with tourists like the other resort areas in Thailand.

There are the retired and semi-retired who have homes for months at a time (Narda’s direction for us – just make sure there is fast Internet and I will be OK) but for packs of tourists, not yet. Narda had a bag she bought in Yangon a few weeks ago that needed repair so we stopped at a sewing place. I looked down the road and saw all the traffic stopped two blocks before the one round-about in town. Walking to the one round-about in town I saw traffic was stopped in a directions and the road crossing town was empty except for police and military lined up. Not having a clue as usual I went out to the centre of the round-about to take photos and video and cops from several directions came running toward me waving to stop filming so I went down the street and behind a pole began filming again; see http://youtu.be/XvOScADNIKQ, turns out that the King of Thailand was going to his summer palace which is just outside of Hua Hin. The people lining the street were chanting and waving Thai flags. It was all rather quaint. Narda was nervous that I would be arrested. Actually I am a bit of a journalist as I have a BA in Journalism from Deakin University in Melbourne and having never really had much chop at using it in a real world situation I thought this would be a good time to get a story but in actual fact there was no story to get as apparently the king spends a lot of his time at his Hua Hin home.

Narda always says we need to live somewhere beautiful, it does not matter whether it is in a poor area or – well I think a poor area is what we can afford and Thailand is so full of beautiful places but it is gradually, like the world itself getting overrun by… well I suppose it is people like us. We all want to live in a beautiful place and not in polluted choking places like most major industrial areas. But we bring our industrialized values with us which is stuffing up the once beautiful places. I don’t know what will happen to this planet in the next couple of decades but from first hand viewing it does not seem as going too well. Of course we would just be happy with a reasonable shack with some solar panels, a veggie patch and some chooks on a beach somewhere in Asia but then the water rises and a tsunamis comes or radiation from North Korea or everyone is running out of drinking water and food and gosh…

We took a bus back to Bangkok. It was a 22-seat-coach to Suvarnabhumi Bangkok Airport, comfortable and less than four-hours. A lot better than the train. I slept most of the way, not sure why as I was not sleepy when we got on at noon but I seem to sleep wherever I am.

We arrived Bangkok in the evening and caught up with Kay and Frank our neighbours last year here in Campus Village and recently our host at their home in Yangon, Burma and a few others grabbed a foot massage, I fell to sleep and snored and Narda in the next seat woke me and the next day Thursday we were at the EARCOS conference.

I of course attended the tech ones such as ‘Innovate now or become irrelevant’ and about Digital Badges which has merit but after digging around in it there are too many companies just in it for the money. Of course education is about money and when you get into private schools and narrow that down to international schools the flow of money overrides it all. I attended too many sessions that were in essence a sales pitch either to take a course to get credit but of course these are paid courses and what more do I want to add to a PhD I am not sure but this is perhaps where open badges comes into play. That we can get cred for whatever we do. But then again to issue badges costs money. Ryan our elementary tech person is working on it and has already issued me with a badge;

though somehow I think it misses the educational systems hierarchy of sustained learning. I in turn made him a badge with something about educational rapping as he is our local rock star (Cronkite Satellite) and in fact I filmed the video for one of his songs for a you-tube clip – http://youtu.be/sOide6Bf140 and I have been doing some chroma-screen (blue screen) work with him for projects in our video suite at school.

Back to the conference – so presenters seem to be focused on selling their courses or selling a web-based program. The venders all line up in the lobby but all we do is taking pens, thumb-drives, bags and other crap on their tables. One presentation I went to was identical to what he presented at the last couple of conferences I have been to. The good part of these events is to hear the lingo I suppose, though I do not feel I moved forward with anything useful. I have known about digital badges and questioned their usefulness years ago. I am on-board with them and once we figure the java scripting for them I will issue some for my film class. Of course they will not have the currency that one issued by a university or the United Nations will have but I will at least have my students mindful of earning more in life than grades.

Narda and I took a river cruise and of course as usual got lost.

Don’t ask me how one gets lost on a river but we did it. We were told we could get off wherever we wanted and catch a river-taxi back. After an hour I was busting for a loo so we got off at a stop that looked useful and that was large enough to catch one back to the Shangri-La Hotel where the conference was. Off of the boat we realised we were kind of nowhere and we after walking found a bustling centre of whatever suburb we were in and after using the loo and sitting on the pier until the sun set we asked a chap about when the next boat back to the Shangri-La Hotel was. OK so there was none because the last boat stopping there was the one we were on and the ones we saw going by were only stopping somewhere where we were not. The man write out what buses to take – and as all people do with us either because we appear to be old, and possibly are, or because they think we are deaf they say the instructions louder over and over. Saying stuff louder in a foreign language does not make the meaning any clearer.

This happens often in China, people just say stuff slower and louder like we would understand it. So we dragged our sorry-asses to a bus stop asked some people where to get the bus got on and rode for a very long time until we got stuck in traffic and grabbed a taxi. We were rushing to get to the Shangri-La Hotel because they were having their conference dinner at the pools and by the river night. We have been to these before and the food is not too bad; a little light on the vegetarian crap but for meat loving Narda there was plenty. And of course it is free tucker and we figured we would catch up with the rest of the 18 teachers from our school and others that use to work at our school and are now elsewhere but still being sent to these conferences being in Asian schools and all but we saw like two or three people. We ate as much as could shove in, had a few
drinks and that was it.

We went to the Cabbages and Condoms restaurant with a group – see below and that was good. The restaurant at 6 Sukhumvit Soi 12, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok 10110, is a bit of a condom crazed place. Their profits go to help poor people and it is all very interesting. We gave our condoms back that they give at the end of the meal saying ‘look at us do we look like we need them?’. Some interesting things are shown below –

Now back home shopping in the Jinshitan market Saturday morning bundled up.

We have twelve weeks left here before our little three-year journey in China is over then we go to Hong Kong to check my four stents put in awhile back and on to Laos for a couple of weeks and back to Australia after a twelve year absence. We went to New York back in 2002 for a couple of years but that turned into nine years and then three here. I am sure we will be back in some other country within another year or two.

 

Today was good; Sunday the sixth of April. I practiced softball with the Taiwan team this morning as we get ready to go to Shanghai for our
tournament in two weeks. We had a whole school bar-b-que at Campus Village; something we will miss in the future. Last night I had the whole gym to myself and shot baskets whilst listening to the Delta Blues station on my iphone. Being a fan of anything from my New Orleans era of the 1960s is incredible so many years later. Yes, I will miss this place. And even better, tomorrow, Monday, is a holiday; tomb sweeping day. Yes, I will miss this place.

 

Langkawi wowie

video for Langkawi at http://youtu.be/xjsETcPNtNI

Not to be confused with Maui wowie or anything to do with Hawaii except what a great place Langkawi is.

Left home. Home was back there. Back there was Ao Nang. We had made ourselves at home so quickly. Like within hours. We left the motor scooters out front where we got them two-weeks earlier. I re-read the local tourist magazine ‘Passport Magazine’ again paying particular attention to the section about ‘motorbiking in Thailand’ as I had ignored it before we rented our motor scooters; “Statistically, Thailand is one of the most dangerous places in the world to drive (or ride)’… the article goes on to say a lot of scary stuff about how many people get killed a day, especially tourists riding motor scooters. Not to worry. We survived for two-weeks on country roads and highways with others who seemed to have little regard for us or who cared whether I stayed alive to write this blog. After all I had survived heart surgery in Hong Kong two months ago and I have survived three major car accidents any of which I should have been killed in and I survived the 1960s and 1970s and of course the following decades but it was the 1960s that was the most challenging as all people in their 20s come to realize that if they can get past their 20s they will make it a bit further.

Narda got our home from searching on airbnb.com and it was one of our better finds. The price was reasonable; a whole house for $22 US a night and the scooters were six dollars US a day. Of course we did not pay for insurance for the motor scooters. What could go wrong on a little thing like that? The house was basic but being in a quiet forest area at the bottom of a cliff we found it our kind of home. There were a few things that were different than living in Campus Village back in Dalian; such as the huge rats that would run along the rafters and clang around the roof at night until I would throw something at the metal roof then they would quiet down for a bit or until I put in earplugs then they would not seem so bothersome. We learned on the first day that no food could be anywhere not even a crumb. Ants of various sizes and the red ones do bite would be so quick to be there – like spontaneous combustion – well that is a stupid analogy but they did appear suddenly. Of course anything edible would bring forth the rat families. They even chewed up the sponges we washed dishes with no doubt being tricked by some foot smells on them of course there were spit out chewed up bits of sponges further down the way; stupid rats.

The frogs were OK though the first time I heard them at night when I went outside to the loo – well not outside outside but outside to the loo that was attached to the outside of the house; I thought someone was saying hello in a deep voice so I kept saying ‘hello’ back until I realized there was no one there. After a few nights of freighting myself in the middle of the night I realized it was not a human saying ‘hello’ but a frog I stopped saying it myself to no one at all but to frogs. It is the dumb things we do in life that no one knows unless of course we tell them, which I would never do, that are funny but they are only funny to ourselves if we do not tell someone else and a problem I have is that I will tell someone something that I think is funny and they don’t so after many decades of being a self-appointed-comedian I am thinking about call it a day with my humour and I will learn to laugh at other people’s jokes instead of my own that no one else thinks is funny.

And there are the cats who live nearby that hang out at our door for affection or food or maybe even both but who are too lazy to chase away the rats or who are afraid of them as the rats are the size of the cats. They must have been given attention by the previous tenants as they believe; there are three, that they can just waltz into our home when they want and meow. We did not feed them during our two weeks thinking they would go away but they didn’t. This morning I gave them a bowl of sweetened condensed milk as we had a tin left. We developed a taste then an addiction for sweetened condensed milk back in Hanoi a few years ago and now only drink coffee with it in. Narda said they would get sick from such rich milk but I gave them the tin full anyway. The kitten of the trio took to it right away but the older cats only had a bit. Blimey, I am getting bored with writing this…

This is always a writing dilemma; keep my audience, which is me, interested, at least to the end of the paragraph. I do not believe in astrology and I have written about this in length before, but as a non-believer I will just add that part of my writing dilemma is having Mars conjunct Uranus at 25 degrees in Gemini. (really very interesting is that Uranus was discovered when it was at 25 Gemini in 1781 and here I have it at its returning point in 1947; holy cow – see http://www.stariq.com/Main/Articles/P0000270.HTM for the meaning of Uranus) I suppose that if I said and that conjunction is in my 8^th house you would say ‘well this sentence is dead in the water’. Get it? 8^th house being the natural house of Scorpio, a fixed water sign. My 8^th house is ruled by Taurus and I have my Moon in Taurus there as parts of my fixed cross between Moon opposite Jupiter all square my four planet conjunction in Leo in the tenth. Go figure!   So all that is why I no longer believe in astrology; of course it is obvious with my Neptune in the 12^th and Neptune rules my 5^th house which is the natural house of Leo. I once gave presentations at astrological conferences on ‘The fifth house and self-realization‘. Thus is life; a series of miss guided belief systems we cling on to try and explain why something or why we are the way we are.

Our house, probably a shack by some definitions; had lots of open windows, all without screens. So besides the rats and the talking frogs and the ants and cats we had heaps of mosquitoes. Fortunately we slept under a mosquito net and we had lots of mosquito coils and mosquito spray to slow the bites. I showed a picture of my knees well bitten on the previous blog ‘next’. Obviously with everything we could do we could not keep from getting bitten. Not to worry if we were getting any diseases from them I am sure we would have them now.

We did like our little house though. We had a lazy time. We even developed a routine of walking to the main road, about twenty minutes, to get coffee at a local outdoor ramshackle bamboo hut then across to a market for a liter of water each and back home to get our scooters then off for a bit of a ride.

In the late afternoon we had a swim, and either we would go out for dinner or make something at home and watch a couple of episodes of ‘Sons of Anarchy’ which I find rather dumb, predictable and over acted but we have the series with us. There were other routines too such as the rats having a party at two or three in the morning – I would throw something at them, whatever I could find, so there were often shoes or other items that flew out the window when I missed the ceiling and there was the call-to-prayers about 5.15 every morning. What is that about? Considering we live on a country road with a house on both sides and one across the road then nothing for a long way why such a loud production each morning? I am not a music person like Narda is a music teacher and musician but to me ever who was doing it seemed really off key. It did not sound as musical as what I have heard when we were in Istanbul or KL or other Muslim entranced places. Nevertheless I never had a good sleep so part of my routine was taking a nap every afternoon. Narda saw this stay as a trial toward retirement but I hope retirement does not have so many rats, mosquitoes, stray cats and talking frogs and ants and calls-to-prayer.

Really. Do those prayers really change anything? As a researcher of many belief systems and a down-to-earth human being I would say nope.

And the king, what is up with him? Photos of him everywhere sometimes doing various activities and of course he is on the paper money. We learned this from a previous time in Northern Thailand a few years ago that it is best not to even mention the king. I think of the prime minister of Australia and how everyone just makes fun of him or her or whatever is in office. The same with the president of the US everyone seems to have a go at him. And the king and queen of the Brits get dissed often in Australia but not the king of Thailand. My favourite photo of him is on their one-hundred baht bill with him holding a camera. Maybe he is a photo buff as I have seen large paintings of him with a camera around his neck. It is a Cannon and I have a Nike so we are on a different page. He probably was not a hippie either nor does he hoon around Thailand on a motor scooter or stay at $22 US a night digs with rats. What is the point of a king? But the people of Thailand seem to think he is an OK chap. We have read and been told that if you drop paper money with his image on it and it starts to blow away do not run over and put your foot on the money to stop it as one can get a fine or go to jail for that.

Our lives are governed, controlled? By turns taken. We are sitting on this crap ferry because of a direction taken not meant to be taken or at least by the conscious part of what we think we use to control the directions we take in life; our brain. We researched and decided to take a train from nearby; probably Trang, down to KL; about a day and a half. What we have read was that the overnight sleeper through Thailand is great but the train through Malaysia is air conditioned and quite cold but we still wanted to do the ride. We rode our scooters to Krabi Town – half an hour from home, to purchase a ticket. We had read we could buy one in Krabi Town. When we got to Krabi Town we came to an intersection that we could not get across nor could we turn right which was the direction to downtown where we wanted to purchase our train ticket to KL. After sitting too long and getting freaked out by the traffic, and remembering the article about Thailand being one of the most dangerous countries to drive in,  we went left thinking we could make a U-turn and get our sorry-asses downtown. There was nowhere to immediately make a U-turn and in fact there was a foot high barrier in the midst of Utarakit Road for a kilometer or two.

When we did get to the U-turn we thought it was another one of our synchronous moments because right there at the U-turn was the Government Tourism Office. The dude in there printed out a train timetable for us and in the midst of our excitement over getting a train all the way to KL he rang someone whom he sent us to so we could purchase our fun ticket. I wrote about our Muslim travel-agent chick in the last blog, ‘Next’ so I will leave it to the fact that she was not sure how to get us a train ticket but she could get us on a ferry to Langkawi and from there a flight to KL. She made it all sound so groovy and pleasant we left singing her praises – me singing off-key like our neighboring call-to-morning-prayers chanter or whatever they are referred to as.

So here we are sitting on the Tigerline Ferry. What a horrible little piece of junk it is. A fast ferry? Not sure about that. The webpage and brochure shows a two level deck and the ticket lady that convinced us to go this way instead of by train said there was a café on board where we could order food. All that is close to that is some deck hands selling beer and water from an esky at the front of the boat. We are sandwiched into our narrow row – four seats on either side of the row with little leg room on the first level with scant air conditioning. There is a pool of liquid in front of the loo door coming down the aisle. The second level is upstairs as all second levels are – but it is outside with a small covered area. They have sold twice as many tickets as there are seats so the top is covered with folks sitting on the deck in the glaring sun. it is also very loud as the motor with two smoke pipes pouring out thick polluting smoke are up there too. The boat is old, rusty and filthy. There are a lot more people than there are life jackets and we have noted where the kick-out-windows are in case this thing goes down. The ferry we took from Phuket to Ao Nang was first class compared to this. The ferry we took from Dalian to Yantai was more like a small ship had state rooms and was cleaner than this. This boat should be condemned and sunk or used for target practice for the military.

Maybe it is because we are old and get grumpy over things. I do not see anyone complaining, just Narda and me. We started off with a mini-bus from Ao Nang to Krabi. When we got on the Tigerline Ferry mini-bus there were already six people on it and we collected four more in Krabi. They were all in their 20s. A different mix than when we took a mini-van tour in Phuket with a van full of folks from India.  These kids were quite the mix: three males from South Africa, a couple from Denmark, two girls from Briton, a girl from Germany a couple with an accent I could not work out and us wherever we are from. Young travelers are good and they just accept the way things are. Young people just think of sex and beer no other part of the brain has kicked in yet so conversations are limiting usually. Travelers are a little easier to speak with but with large signs advertising ‘beer pong tonight’ in the backpackers where we collected some I think all people in their twenties are pretty much the same. Narda said I was an original hippie from San Francisco and the British girls seemed impressed. One asked if I wore flowers in my hair. I am not sure about that but I did have hair to my waist and I did live quite the hippie life in San Francisco at the end of the 1960s. And I suppose at other times along the way.

Maybe I have gone full cycle or full semi-cycle. Life is cyclic often and we do end up where we were though we should be at a higher place on the circle than we were the first time around.

I dropped out in the 1960s as many of us did; tune-in, drop-out, turn-on then kind of tried to integrate myself back into society raising children and teaching in universities and K-12 schools for the past 15 years or so and now we are dropping back out gradually. I think some refer to it as retirement.

Kids today; not sure how different they are. We all had long hair and dressed quite colourfully in the 1960s and now the thing is to have tattoos and piercing. People in their twenties have lots of tats. At the beach it is so noticeable of course as these are not Muslim kids but Western kids in a Muslim area thought no one seems to care. Some tats are picturesque but some are look like a drunken sailor had a go with some needles and ink. And the piercing; belly buttons, lips, eyelids, ears, tongue, checks, and probably some areas that were barely covered. Other than the tats and piercing and the music adolescents or whatever the next stage is now are the same as they/we were in the 1960s.

Before my generation there was not much happening for folks in their twenties, just wars and farm or factory work. The main difference now is that these kids are not part of a big war movement like we were in the 1960s and the protest movement has moved from the streets of developed countries for the most part to developing countries like in the middle east. There seems to be a big protest movement in Thailand or at least in Bangkok but as I only have seen glimpses of headlines for the past two-weeks I am not sure what the beef is. Where we are there is no protest and all the westerners are out having a great time. It seems that a large number of people in Thailand want to shut down the country on January 13^th. We left Thailand two days ago on the seventh so we are good.

My son has a huge tat across his chest and probably by now lots more. He turned 33 a couple of days ago and in my opinion is now too old to get tats. I Skyped him and told him I got married when I turned 33 and had him; he may do the same this year following in my style though hopefully with a better marriage experience than I did when his mother and I got hooked up for some unexplained reason.

I have told the story before so will not get into it again; we met at an astrological conference in Sydney, she visited me in Maryland a few months later – we hated each other from the get-go but being young as acted and still in our twenties even though we were in fact in our 30s and thought of little more than sex and beer as all twenty years think only of… so she went back to Adelaide in March of 1980 (after the two of us drove across the USA from Baltimore Maryland to San Francisco drinking huge amounts of hard liquor as we drove for four days and at the end I deposited her at the SF Airport; which should reinforce the message not to drink and drive because the results can be disastrous) and I went to Hawaii to hang out with Randy Dandurand whom I first met toward the start of 1969 in Laguna California and knew from too many trips (I will not elaborate on what that exactly means) and who at the end of 1969 I ran in to in Honolulu and who got me into the cult order I ended up in for a decade. Again in Hawaii, again with Randy Dandurand and again stuck – this time in June 1980 when I got a phone call that started with ‘guess what?’ and not to repeat the whole story again, that was 33 years ago and that was Sacha on his way. I have my Moon descendant line or is it the MH line? going through Hawaii so that could explain my two interactions in Hawaii; joining a cult order and getting married, neither of which worked out. Fortunately I no longer believe in astrology so that of course is all nonsense.

I was just saying to Narda yesterday the thing about learning is not the learning but what is being learned. I studied astrology for 40 years and I know all the interpretations and calculation systems and heaps of crap all of which I wish I had never learned because it is all nonsense. I am not sure why I think it is nonsense but I know for 40 years I used to make decisions based on where the planets were and almost all those decisions were stupid, ill founded, mistaken, crap. I have not followed astrology since 13 August 2003 and life outside of the event that caused me to stop believing in it or looking at it anymore has been OK. I think I make a lot of decisions based on common sense and they tend to be good whereas I use to make plans and decisions based on astrology and they did not work out.

Nada says I assemble together too many words to say something. So in fewer words or simple thought I wish I had learned a language instead of learning astrology. Which simply put as a life learned lesson do not learn stuff that you will never use in the future but of course how could we know that at the time on embarking upon the learning? Then again learning, anything anytime anywhere no doubt is good for the brain muscles. Some things we should have learned along the way but did not because we did not see the importance. For example in boy scouts I did not go for the orienteering badge and yesterday we got helplessly lost coming home from downtown where we are now. After that – the next time out – Narda drew a map of every street and turn and building along the way so we would not get lost again. Of course that was not needed as we got a ride home the next time we walked to the downtown area of where we are now by the owner of where we are living but more of that later. The price we paid was that after walking for more than four hours in the sun along a country road Narda, having one of those Northern European types of skin, got burnt and I became darker.

After the first half hour and we were out of Krabi the Thailand countryside was well worth the trip. It was about two hours to Trang and most everyone was asleep except the driver and me when we got close – which was good. I listened to my 1960s music: Dylan, Joplin and the likes so I would keep perspective on my life. Thailand has really beautiful countryside. The last hour we were along the coast passing through small fishing villages and large palm tree plantations on our narrow country road.

At the Port of Trang we waited for the ferry that was to arrive at 12:30. It arrived at two pm. I sat on the pier with the kids from our mini-van; three South Africans and the girls from England and Germany. Narda found an old couple; well probably our age, from Holland and stayed with them. What do young people see when they look at me? I feel at about the same level as them feeling youthful and liberal and free and though I have invisible tats and non-piercing piercing I have them psychologically and I am sure I could win at beer pong except for the fact I don’t drink beer but psychologically I feel intoxicated. The Brits said I was really kool whatever that means in their language. Probably like my “my granddad is your age and he is really kool”. “I mean he has a pace-maker and sits in his wheel chair all day in front of the telly and he drools and wets himself but for the few moments he is conscious every day after a bit of gin and a smoke he says some funny shit…” so that is about the level they see me. “Hey girls I was quite the stud in my day… I could tell you stories.. wait here comes my wife…maybe later I will tell you about living in a commune in San Francisco in 1968 – 1969 or the time I lived on a nude beach on the island of Maui in 1971 (Makena Beach) or… damn old age where is the toilet around here?”  Actually we had a chilled time waiting for the luxury ferry and then there it was.Bloody ferry should be condemned. The whole Tigerline Ferry should be closed down. We got into the main cabin – well actually there was only one cabin, and it was packed. Luckily we managed to find two seats left but the 40 or so passengers that also got on at Trang had to go up on top. The ferry had come from Phuket and was full.

 Our baggage was tossed amongst the rest – see photo below…Toward the end of the day we got close to Koh Lipe. Those of us headed for Malaysia were herded to one side of the boat and the majority on board going to Lipe got on the other side. We were put onto a Longtail Boat – much like we rode in Ao Nang and in Krabi. No one, or none of us, knew what was happening. Someone joked we were going to Malaysia in it but of course that seemed impossible. There were 14 of us with the hundreds of others getting on another ferry and headed to the nearby beautiful shore of Koh Lipe, a young person’s paradise so of course it was only fit to send us away.

Then they took our passports and the teenager that took them made jokes like ‘bye bye’ after collecting most of them. All except Narda and mine which she was not going to turn over until we realized we were not going any further until we did. Apparently this is immigration, Thailand style.

Koh Lipe with our boat heading toward us (really). As the sun began to set we got off at the floating immigration and our passports were taken to some other boat that said Thailand on the side.

My biggest concern was that there was no toilet at immigration and another person said wait until sun sets in a few minutes and go over the side. With more than a dozen  people standing around I thought I needed to get over myself and my being old and wait until we got to Malaysia which we were told was only an hour and half away by fast boat when the actual boat arrived.

When the boat arrived and we got in and took off everything changed. I sat in the back taking a zillion photos as I do and as the sun set our boat with its two 250 hp motors took us onto a journey like I had never been on before.

Once it became dark and my camera was away I just watched the darkness with only the waves from the back of the boat visible. Here we were riding very fast in an open sea; the Andaman Sea. Riding between two countries we could have been smugglers, James Bond types, anything; even ourselves. I wondered what would happen if we saw a boat coming at us and stopping us a gun point and taking us hostage. There are kidnappings and extremists wandering around Southern Thailand and Malaysia. I thought maybe I would throw my US Passport overboard but Narda thought maybe the Yanks would be the ones who would rescue us and me being the only Yank on board, I use my Australia Passport all the time and only use the US one when I enter the States, could get us all saved. The rest on the boat were from Australia, Holland, Poland and some non-definable, though Western, countries. The driver and his mate looked like adolescents and surely were not over 20 so what they would do to protect us I am not sure. Narda said she was thinking how it could turn out if the motors stopped and we drifted to one of the islands along the way and no one found us and we became like the people in the series, ‘Lost’. After half an hour I just stopped thinking and plugged my iPhone into my ears and listened to Dylan, Creedence,  ‘Layla’ by Derek and the Dominos (often voted on radio stations as the greatest rock song of all time) and just chilled like I have never in my life. This became the greatest ride of all time for me.All because we could get across Ut Tharakit Road back in Krabi Town and ended up at the government travel bureau that directed us to some small tourist centre where the chick there could not figure out the train ticket to KL from Trang or did not want to and hooked us up with Tigerline Ferry. She told Narda that at one time the brother or cousin of the owner of Tigerline Ferry wanted to marry her. Not sure how the dialogue got to that point but Narda and her had quite the tongue waggle and Narda said “you are quite the character aren’t you?” Whether the Muslim chick had a clue what Narda said or not I have no idea but even though her English was limited (not Narda, the other chick) they seemed to hit it off.

Narda is a social creature whereas I just look around for a place to get onto the internet – ‘hey what is the password?’

For example, we were riding our scooters around the back roads of Ao Nang and Narda wanted to check out real-estate of all things, something about coming here for six months when we retire soon; good grief. So we came across streets with nice little houses with for rent or sale signs in front and if there was a European hanging about Narda would end up in conversation. I would sit a few meters behind looking for the way out. We spent one afternoon doing this. Of course we have now found another place Narda wants to retire to; Ko Langkawai. I imagine Ko means island as it is front of every island name.

We did get to Langkawai; proof is that I am writing this from there, and everything where we docked was dark except for one light in a building which we once again turned over our passports. Narda went off to find an ATM to get some Malaysian ringgits and I stayed behind guarding our crap and waiting for our passports. We started off with bag each so how we ended up in Malaysia with seven bags I am not exactly sure but I think we have more crap to put into storage when we get back to Australia after we leave China in six months. Of course the amount of stuff we have in China to send to Australia will fill a container vessel by itself. Now I know what the difference between the twenty-year old backpackers we see everywhere and us. It is not their youthful tattooed-pierced bodies barely covered and their sole thoughts of beer and sex that differs us but that they travel with a backpack and that is probably all they own in the world and we lug around cargo ships of merchandise.

Once we had our passports and ringgits and seven bags lined up we saw all the rest of the folks get into the three taxis that were there. A man said he would take us for 40 ringgits (about $12 US) to where we were going but he was not an official taxi driver. Another couple was left behind and they were going to the same area as us so we negotiated at 30 ringgits per couple and piled in. OK what not to do in a foreign country in the dark with no one around; get into a car with someone who speaks a few words of English and head out into the night. But we have found ourselves in sticky places in Guatemala, Mexico City, Cambodia and heaps of other places and we lived in Jersey City for three years being the only white people in our area so we go through life taking chances and living in the moment. Narda had the phone number for where we were going so that helped and the driver actually found our way out of the way place and at 10.30 pm we arrived at this beautiful house.

Home now is much different than our rat infested shack back in Ao Nang but we are paying four times more and there is a bit of downside. We really are in the country. The next morning, yesterday, we looked out and saw the paddocks and the little bike width road to town. ‘Only about 20 minutes” people staying in the next cottage said. So we walked it and half an hour later arrived onto the main street of town and across to Pantai Cenang Beach. We had been there the night before at 10:30 PM. When we arrived in Langkawi we were very hungry having had only a couple of sandwiches that we had brought with us for the day. The owner of the place we are now at sent us by taxi to her café which is on the beach, an incredible and beautiful place; white sand tables on the beach and really good food. We ate there the next night, last night too.

Coming back home yesterday we got lost and walked for three hours along a country road and burnt Narda and me we were not impressed. We got this place the day before we left Ao Nang as we thought we were taking a train and never having heard of Langkawi.

We had a good stay howbeit the long walk to any place to buy food was off putting and the beach was a half hour walk but the swimming was great.

All in all our three-week winter holiday was relaxing and now at two AM we are waiting for a plane in KL to get us to Shanghai though not fun being so tired and all I must say it has been good. This could be our last trip during a school holiday as we may not work after this school year and where we will be next year to start 2015 will be as much of a surprise that we will not know about until we are in the moment once again just like we had no idea we would be out to sea on a fast boat between Thailand and Malaysia until we got on to the boat. We never even had heard of the fantastic island of Langkawi until a week before we went there. So life goes forward taking a turn here and a twist there and if we just can perfect the letting go and enjoying where we are being taken all will be fine.

Of course some things never change. When we got back to Dalian low and behold they lost two pieces of our luggage. Once again. Just like the times before. Thanks China Eastern you make life so predictable.

http://youtu.be/8Osc_Ckmz3E (Phuket)
http://youtu.be/8YGAf2A7NtM (Ao Nang)
(Railay) http://youtu.be/0O4WK_fCm2A
(Krabi) http://youtu.be/08hPnWF7PWw
(Koh Klang Island, Krabi) http://youtu.be/92Vx8hSsXzs
What Narda saw from her hammock http://youtu.be/l02Wi9lYdbc

Next

video at http://youtu.be/8Osc_Ckmz3E (Phuket)
http://youtu.be/8YGAf2A7NtM (Ao Nang)
(Railay) http://youtu.be/0O4WK_fCm2A
(Krabi) http://youtu.be/08hPnWF7PWw
(Koh Klang Island, Krabi) http://youtu.be/92Vx8hSsXzs
What Narda saw from her hammock http://youtu.be/l02Wi9lYdbc

Photos

2013 http://neuage.us/2013/ I could do over. Perhaps in a parallel universe or at least in a better written narrative I would have changed a few things. But what I would have changed could have been simple infractions such as not getting as many haircuts; I think there were four maybe five even six that happened, none by my suggestion, all by Narda’s perceptions of what a dude at my age should look like or what her dude should look like at any age. But to change anything else… nah. I spent a lot less time on Facebook than in the previous years; finding it a bit too much time-consuming. How many baby pictures can one see in a week – do they change that much? How many meals people post about, photos of last night’s pizza??? or comments about what I have no idea what they are talking about. So I check once a month or so and it is great seeing what folks are doing and having a peep into others lives; like everyone else my Facebook friends span a lifetime which in my case is lots of decades and lots of interactions and I am grateful for the people in and out of my life the past years and I will always be interested in what they are doing so I suppose at the end of the day Facebook is really great and as long as it exists or perhaps as long as I do; whichever comes/goes first…

2013 was a good year. They all are; with their different presentations/illusions/fulfillment/obstacles, choices to make or crafted by others and we are swept up in those choices leaving us to make our choices within the realm of someone else choices who no doubt is making choices within someone else parameters or perhaps if there are other life times we are reacting to how we acted before or setting the stage for the next life or the return to the One or we are preparing to be dinner for a great white shark or the revenge for someone’s belief system or simply the end of the localized life system we call our life.

Simply put, as everything in my life, it was good. Four years ago after my school in New York City ‘dismissed’ everyone over 55 – there were about eight of us. I signed up for employment assistance in NYC and signed up with the New Jersey unemployment bureau as we own property in Jersey City and I was getting unemployment from that great state. I have worked the past three years at Dalian American International School and I have been happy with that but I forget to stop my New Jersey employment alerts. This is all they had to offer me this week….

Your job matches from Jobs4Jersey Job Alert

Your resume generated the following matches

Not sure how my resume gives me this sort of job ability. Perhaps this is all one gets offered after a PhD in Communication and New Media at the University of South Australia. Gosh Darn!  Spent seven years on the bloody thing with a 575 page book at the end of it and the whole thing online at http://neuage.org/ODAM (Online Discourse Analysis Method) which I had once dreamt of becoming ODAT (Online Discourse Analysis Theory) but of course becoming a theory takes a long time and many folks on-board and perhaps a Nobel Prize; nothing of which my way ventured.

ADVENTURE EDUCATOR

UNKNOWN, NEW YORK, NY

Match level:

Adventure Educator NEW YORK NY TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR GUIDING EXPLORATIONS OF THE EVERETT CHILDREN’S ADVENTURE GARDEN FOR SCHOOL PROGRAMS AND DROP-IN FAMILIES. IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE COORDINATOR OF ADVENTURE GARDEN PROGRAMS, PROVIDE FEEDBACK AND IDEA FOR DEVELOPING AND IMPROVING CURRICULUM.

SUMMER CAMP COUNSELOR

The Educational Alliance, NEW YORK, NY

Match level:

Summer Camp Counselor DESIRE TO SPEND THE SUMMER OUTDOORS ALL STAFF IS REQUIRED TO: TAKE A CAMP BUS TO CAMP SWIM ATTEND ALL ORIENTATIONS BEFORE SUMMER ATTEND ALL STAFF MEETINGS DURING THE SUMMER SAFETY IS COUNSELOR’S #1 PRIORITY. COUNSELORS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HEALTH, SAFETY, AND GE

I could have stayed in the States and had jobs like this to prospect for. Wow what a mistake. That is all they have to offer me for this week and I think for the month. Unemployment was/is brutal but I did get another degree to amend my PhD; one in teaching, which got me lined up for life in China. It was a good year in China. Not that I am keen on China and being now in Thailand I could easily turn my nose up to it. Of course I would do that in Viet Nam, Cambodia, Guatemala, India and a number of other countries that we have loved. China has done us well but it is a difficult environment.

The people in Thailand, India, Viet Nam and Cambodia to name a few places, are much gentler and dare I say cleaner and well-mannered? For example we have had motor scooters in India (watching out for cows everywhere of course), Viet Nam and here in Thailand and I would not be so sure of doing the same in China. They all move so aggressively and without indication of what comes next, like for example, a vehicle next to them.

But China has done us well. The people are warm and friendly it is just when they group together in the millions such as on the trains and buses and sidewalks and shopping centres and food places that they get pushy and did I mention spit a lot? We started 2013 – January 1 and of course ended 2012 – in Hanoi. This has been pretty much an all Asia year with our usual visit to Australia (just once this year), the States; saw my sister and her family in upstate New York. I have only seen her like four times in my life as I was adopted and she wasn’t – my adopted father said it was because I talk all the time but I never really believed that. I first found her in the 1980s and saw her with my two sons first in 1991, again in 2003 or so and a couple of times since. My blood-brother who lives in Hawaii I have only seen once.

We checked our beautiful Victorians in Round Lake New York http://neuage.org/house I caught up with friends, a first girl-from 1963 – Kathleen, my adopted http://neuage.indiko.com/robert_adsit.htm brother’s friend, Marta Waterman  http://martawaterman.com/ who is writing a book about him and we spent a week in Atlanta with Narda’s son and daughter-in-law. Actually we went to Australia twice; once in February and the other time in July for a couple of weeks. We shifted our belongings in our storage area. This is our life; stored past, boxed memories, what-the-hell-will-we-do-with-this-crap futures. The idea was to spend two maybe three days going through our belongings and tossing crap. We talked about this on endless occasions; well Narda talked and I agreed that we would be ruthless. Our happy result (Narda’s happy result) would be a couple of boxes (she would probably have put smiley faces on them) and everything else would morph into rubbish to be landfill for some future resort in a South Australian vineyard or wherever trash ends up in South Australia.

Meaning that one of my cherished memories protected in a box for a decade or even decades if it had been a box stored from before we met, or even before I had children or even before I left Clifton Park in the mid 1960s; OK so I hoard a bit, and now in landfill to rot away and become a nutrient mixed with a manure composition of too many wayward thoughts upon which a seed would be planted and a grapevine would grow and from that a bottle of fine wine would be produced and I would re-incarnate in 2047 a hundred years after the life I had lived had begun and my need to hoard, no doubt coming from being adopted and having Venus conjunct a Saturn & Pluto exact conjunction 10 degrees 40 minutes of Leo in the 10^th house square my Jupiter in Scorpio (it is those fixed signs that have been the bane of my existence) in the first house near my ascendant and I would, to make a long thought short, drink the wine a couple of decades later, 2067, and become intoxicated by memories, that being unidentifiable (after all this is a reincarnation of myself and I may not even believe in reincarnation at that time just as I am not sure whether I believe it this time though there have been times in this life when I did believe in it but not now I think) would just be some flashing images of something stored in my ROM (read-only-memory) because by then with our cyber-enhanced brain we would have embedded search engines and what is real and what is someone else animational thoughts would mesh together much like my thoughts do now. So really thinking about this as we of course all do; in the future we will re-incarnate sort of because our consciousness will be uploaded and we will download the consciousness or plural that if which to have multiple personalities or simply be a Gemini and we will be who we downloaded.

So here I am at the end of 2013 mid-day in a beautiful place in Thailand. Today we have done little or we have done much. Life is so interpretable. This morning I was up at 6.30 AM, crawling out of bed with a mosquito-net covering the bed though I did not fare too well with many bites on both knees. And that is with sleeping under a net as well as using bug spray. And that is one night’s worth of din din for a family of backpacking hungry mosquitoes.

I worked on a video of yesterday’s travel around here, Ao Nang, and when Narda got up an hour later we walked to the nearby shop half an hour down the road and dropped off our laundry. We bought a liter water each found a great stationery shop with all kinds of strange stationary stuff and we bought a bag of stuff. I got some signs in Thai such as one with a line through a handgun. I assume it says ‘do not bring your handgun into the kitchen at tea time’ though not being able to read Thai I do not know. I will put it on the door of our flat at Campus Village when we get back to work. Another one had a picture of a water tap and a light bulb and I assume it says ‘turn off’. It could have said something rude – I will put it on my office door at school. I got a notebook that had some strange translation of English sentences which I find funny and read aloud with Narda hitting me in the side saying I was being rude. This happens so often I will probably start wearing padding under my clothes as apparently I often say inappropriate stuff in public though to me it is funny. We even have a code word that Narda says if she thinks I should shut up – I can’t put it here because then it would no longer be our secret code word for my saying stuff I should not be saying. I hear it at school from her a lot so apparently my humour and her sense of normal decent social verbalization are at times not synchronized.

I took a few photos of ants on flowers and have been sitting writing this and now it is one pm and maybe I will take a nap so we can stay up and watch fireworks tonight. Such is the end of another great year. In our almost all Asia year we went to Shenzhen for an iPad workshop and to Shanghai for a technology conference. We spent a week in Xi’an for Chinese New Year’s hanging out in the Muslim Quarters, seeing the Terracotta Warriors and spending actual Chinese New Year’s at the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. We spent a week in Dandong on the North Korea border and did a few other sides. In early 1981 I started a tofu factory living in and raising my children, babies at the time, selling tofu and tofu products at the same time as dreaming of success in one of many businesses. I had a children’s furniture idea with rocket beds being my first piece I built. Actually it was the last. We dragged that thing around from home to home; I lived in ten houses in ten years, a difficult parenting period. In this photo with my one and only rocket bed; inside was a playhouse and the bed was on top with a bookshelf in the back; my children: Leigh is standing in the front and Sacha is sitting on the bookshelf in the back are all happy campers. The other children were often parked at my house in Mt. Compass for me to look after; I forgot where there hippie parents were off to but this was my lot in life then. I wrote children stories http://neuage.org/stories/ I had a few novels underway; these were handwritten as I did not have a typewriter and computers for the likes of me was not yet available. There was my tofu business http://neuage.us/tofu/ my picture poem business http://picture-poems.net/ and I had about 15 other ideas none of which I can remember at the moment. I was probably doing some astrological readings as I actually believed in it then and I did start a daycare centre in Mt. Compass which was taken over by some women after I had it up and running – one of the themes of my life; move over let women take over. The big business was the tofu business.

The big turning point in my life that never turned was Jurlique. http://www.jurlique.com.au/ I had a bean grinder loaned to me from Jurgen Klein who used our okara (the soy fibre left after making tofu) and some tofu for body creams he was just beginning to make. Years later he would become one of the top cosmic companies and Jurlique would have stores from Australia throughout Europe and Asia to New York City. For a while it looked as if I would be having production in the same factory as Jurlique but as dreams and circumstances changes those dreams never happened and Jurgen has moved onto great success and me, I am writing this. It is these paths we embark on and some continue and some do not. Now when I see a Jurlique store I take a deep breath and wonder how I got so far from my dream and how other people’s dreams are so wonderfully real. Are we assigned paths or do we create them and fall off of them and continue lost for a while or for a long time? If I had been able to put together a successful tofu business would I now have products worldwide or would I at least have been able to have a good stay in Australia? I was building a large tofu factory on Tooperang Road Mount Compass in the old Mount Compass Piggery. My children and I lived at bottom of the hill in a two-story chalet like house. To make a really long story short I had borrowed money from a person who was going to help me sell my products to Sanitarium run by the Seventh Day Adventist. My neighbor who had gotten me the bank loan was some high-to-do person in the organization but things went sour and the factory never got built and Jurgen Klein set up his factory in the old cheese factory in Mt. Barker and he grew his herbs for his product at his home there. We stayed in contact for a little while before my business went bankrupt then I never was in touch again. Just a side note as most of life is compared to the greater whole or lesser hole or larger community or sometimes even to ourselves I have a link to the Seventh-day Adventist mob that I have not consciously created and I have been a vegetarian for about four decades.

1. It started out with being born in Battle Creek Michigan in a military hospital;

This from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Creek_Sanitarium) The Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, United States, was a health resort based on the health principles advocated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, most notably associated with John Harvey Kellogg. The complex was purchased by the U.S. Army during World War II and converted into the Percy Jones Army Hospital.(a funny side note to my larger side note is that I was born in this hospital delivered by an Army Dude: The Physical Me 1. I was born 10th August 1947 Battle Creek Michigan in a military hospital and delivered by Hugh Robins, M.D. and left with the name Terry Miller which was changed upon adoption to Terrell Adsit which was changed when I joined a cult order to Arthur Adsit and upon marriage to Terrell Neuage (first marriage 1980). From Leaving Australia) Kellogg was an advocate of vegetarianism and is best known for the invention of the corn flakes breakfast cereal (which incidentally is the only cereal I eat if I buy commercial cereal other than granola due to its low sugar content)

1. My tofu business was going to make great strides forward with the assistance of some leader in the SDAs in Mt. Compass as I rambled on above about
2. I am sure there are other connections but the most recent synchronous event was ending up at the Seventh-day Adventist Hospital in Honk Kong to have four stents put in because I was a step from a heart attack according to others. This was a totally random choice and not my choice for a place to do it. We were originally going to go to Beijing but that is China and some things are not best done there, then we were going to go to Seoul but were counseled against it and the suggestion was the SDAs’ digs in HK. And of course it is a vegetarian hospital.

There has been a lot of studies on random events in life and that we just put meaning to randomness to make it sound kool and as if our sorry-ass-lives really do have meaning and purpose and there is a map or destiny we are fulfilling as the progressions to our astrological chart and transits; especially the slower moving outer planets, and of course our relationship to the galactic centre evolves over thousands of years as our soul tries to find a better way to get us laid or whatever it is we consider the ultimate zenith of our lives…. And I am so happy I do not believe any of this anymore but just worry about local concerns like this morning we did not have any water. It seems we used up the water in the water tank which was our two-week allotment in our first week. But in my defense I was watering the garden here in paradise which our neighbor said when he filled our tank this morning that we did not need to do every day. And to me this is really the whole thing.

Stuff the metaphysics and what random events seemingly coincide just let’s get on our motor scooters and spend another day exploring the beauty of An Nang Thailand. Here we just end the year and start the next the same as we ended it sitting writing, walking to the nearby shop to buy our water and stop in to get signs at the stationary sign such as my no-gun sign and whatever meaningful words go with it. We have so many notepads with mixed translations on them but the one I bought for this year says

‘Splendid tomorrow will certainly arrive’

and that will be my overriding thought of metaphysical intent for this year of 2014.

Last night we were going to stay on the beach until mid-night and watch fireworks but hey when one lives in China and there are fireworks almost every day they do not become such a highlight that staying up until midnight is fun. We did make a picnic and sit on the beach and look out at the boats and islands and folks setting lanterns into the sky and all that until 9.30 and I am sure we were asleep by 11. Our neighbours are Muslims and I do not think they make a lot of noise or carry on. We get such a fright about Muslims living as Westerns but Christian and Buddhist and any extremists are all just as dangerous. Right-to-life clinics get blown-up and doctors killed by people saying they want to save lives. Belief systems are so weird and dangerous. Anyway back to the Muslims here. We went to a travel agent chick last week in Krabi who was veiled and all. She was quite the character. We had planned to take a train up to KL but what we found on the Internet was that the trains in Malaysia are very cold with air-conditioning on full force the whole time and that part of the trip would be 20 hours plus and the trains through Southern Thailand are coming under attack by some group that is pissed off with something or the other – probably people like Narda and I though we do not know how anyone could be upset with us. Apparently they are targeting Western teachers; but as I am a student of life I should be good. Nevertheless it all was becoming difficult too as the train is several hours by mini-bus away and mini-buses are uncomfortable. We just did one last week for almost three hours to go see the stupid James Bond Island and Monkey Cave and that was not only uncomfortable but the driver took too many chances in trying to scare the poop out of us. Narda was OK talking to others – the other eight passengers were from India which seems to be the primary foreigners this time of year in Phuket. So our Muslim chick, Narda’s age (quite young – see I do say nice things about her – in geological time scales…) got us on an eight hour ferry to Langkawi Island, Malaysia where we will stay for two days then a flight from there to Kuala Lumpur which leaves at 1.30 in the morning for Shanghai and gets us home in time to get back to work where I will go back to making videos and writing storylines and working on our school’s broadcast show; not really a big change from what I am doing now; though with faster Internet I will be able to work more online.

So our Muslim chick turns out to be quite an OK person who laughs, I think she saw Narda as more interesting than me and she did not laugh at my jokes but she seemed to think Narda was a bit funny and of course I never get pangs of jealousy when she gets more attention than me; I am used to it because everyone loves her and in the States and in China everyone thinks she is so kool and she has such a great accent – hey I am Australian too; sort of, I am a dual citizen and at least I got there by plane and Narda is just a boat person arriving on a boat from The Netherlands when she was young…. But being overlooked when in her presence never bothers me; well sometimes, a bit. But all I really wanted to say was that for some stupid I am such a Western-programed human – I thought the Muslim chick was just a normal person. And now with our little interactions with our neighbours I am not sure of what my fears of them were. They don’t drink alcohol, I haven’t for seven years, they don’t do drugs, they wear colourful clothes, and they don’t eat pork – now if they would stop eating meat all together we would be on the same page. What I do find different the most about locals and we saw this in Phuket too, is that they do not seem to have furniture. Everyone sits on the floor on rugs. We looked in windows of  new houses and they would have their mammoth television and everyone would be sitting on the floor watching. They eat meals on the floor too. Otherwise we are all the same except they do not speak the same language as me they look different and they sit on the floor and take their shoes off when going inside whether it is home or a business. That is a good idea though. Oh and the Muslims overdress themselves – even at the beach.

Our local beach, this time of year is flooded with Europeans, Russians, Swedes, Germans and the like and they have no problem with showing their bodies and some of them should be covered but I suppose when they only get a few hours a day sun they want the sun to see as much of them as possible which explains why the sun quickly goes behind a cloud when a big fat Russian disrobes on the beach. I mean have you ever seen a big fat hairy Russian in underwear on a beach? Not a pretty site. I have made a deal with Narda that if I spend a block of time writing in the morning we will get to a real-estate  office this afternoon to look at buying or renting long-term. Of course this is part of the ever continuing saga of conversation about retirement which seems to be just around some mysterious; to me, corner. At the end of this contract I will be 67 and just starting my career; Narda who is much younger than me by 8 years or so wants to retire. Not sure what that means. The plan I think is that we arrive in Australia this coming July and then maybe do some part time work maybe I will apply to adjunct at university. Actually we have a business idea involving film making and Chroma-screen and storytelling and all my slowing acquired knowledge of Adobe Creative Cloud products but we will see though I really hope we can do something and that it turns out better than my tofu business I had in Adelaide for eight years. And mingled/mangled in with this is some retirement concept with us traveling heaps and spending time in third world countries like the United States of America and progressive countries like Cambodia, Viet Nam and places like that.

I grew up with stories of Cambodia and Viet Nam from my relatives who were missionaries back in the 1950s and 1960s. It was because of them sort of that I left home when I was about 16. I got so sick of their stories and hearing about the good missionaries in these heathen locations that I had to get out of Clifton Park, New York.

I was living in Hawaii in 1970 being a brother in a New Age cult order going through cosmic initiations such as Illumination and Self-Realization and feeling full of light and quite the chosen cosmic incarnate as most people in their early 20s feel when Mr. Doty, our missionary pain-in-the-ass of my youth stopped in Hawaii on his way home following one of his five-year save the Asians tours. For some stupid reason, probably because my father asked me to, I went to see him at his upscale Waikiki hotel which no doubt was financed by my parents and their fund-raising exercises with their church and money that went to the Doty’s instead of my brother and me so that those poor people bound by the evil thoughts of the Buddha could be saved.

So there is Mr. Doty sitting in the lobby with his bible in his hand speaking loudly at me that the first thing he saw when he got to Honolulu Airport was the same Buddhist dressed people, only in this case they were Westerners, at the airport chanting and asking for money and that was proof that America had gone to Satan. Here we have poor Mr. Doty who had spent his life in Viet Nam and Cambodia ‘saving’ people and getting them to turn from Buddhism to the Christian’s religion only to find that this evil scourge had spread worldwide. I had a hard time to control myself from laughing as what he saw at the airport were the Hara Krishna groups that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s and were populated with the youth looking for something different than what their parents had fed them. We all did this and it is happening still. People in their 20s and 30s get into a whoop whoop religious thingy whether it is Krishna, New Age, Christianity, Muslim and all the others then when they get older and wiser they have a bit of a laugh of what they use to believe in and go on with their life. What is next? 2014 here we come with really a different year in front of us because we are officially quitting work. I have to deal with some heart surgery and other stuff and who knows? Maybe I will join or start a new spiritual movement or start a new business or write some more crap or take some photos but whatever I do I will do one thing that I have always done. Live in the moment. 2014 looks great – how could it look any different? We are into day 2 of 2014. 2013 was good. A little consciousness bump a couple of days ago when we were in Krabi. We were wandering around this small wonderful Southern Thailand city when Narda said ‘don’t look to the left’. OK so I look to the left. Jurlique. Those bloody shops are everywhere we go. And my whole could have been different life momentarily passed by then I looked at Narda and my life and went down the street headed into 2014/

Warmth

Warmth

video at http://youtu.be/8Osc_Ckmz3E (Phuket)
http://youtu.be/8YGAf2A7NtM (Ao Nang)
(Railay) http://youtu.be/0O4WK_fCm2A
(Krabi) http://youtu.be/08hPnWF7PWw

Photos

Saturday 21 December

Warmth has many interpretations, perceptions, explanations: emotional, physical, spiritual, local, worldly, universal, chemical, mental and so forth and so here we are seeking warmth that encompasses it all. Simply put, because really who wants to hear one whinge and whine about their lot in life? I will just say ‘oh look we are going to southern Thailand for a three-week holiday to get warm’, who wants to know that when they can stay at home and watch the television and news shows showing the worst of humanity over and over.

Again, here we are at the International area at Shanghai Airport, we’ve done this stop heaps or at least some dozen or more times which is heaps to some and not many for others. Usually we are here on the way to Australia. Though this is one of those rare times when we are spending Christmas not in Australia. I think we have missed going to Adelaide two or three times in the past dozen years. Before these past three years in China it was the 30 hours of travel from New York, usually a couple of times a year, to Australia. At least these past three years we have been close to the same time-zone.

Shanghai Airport, the last few days of 2013, still struggling with English words – in their international departure area I know, seeing ‘coffee and cates’ means no one here is in a rush to become Western too fast… there are lots of indications throughout China that yes they will cater to our lot but we are and always will be outsiders and why don’t we just learn their bloody language and stop being so precious about the English language and of course we Westerners are just too precious.

Last night was good. Yesterday, Friday, being the last day of school before the holidays meant that many bailed at the end of the day or were packing to leave this morning. But there were at least thirty-five that showed up for a sing-a-long in the lobby of Campus Café. Narda played piano and Tyler guitar – our music teachers bringing everyone together. It wasn’t just singing Christmas songs; there were a whole slew of songs with the words on the wall and from children to us oldies and every decade in between happily singing along. From our sports teacher to the owner of the school, principals, head of school, elementary, upper school and our Chinese school, Huamei teachers we had quite the cross section. Narda thought maybe no one would show up because of it being the start of holidays but this is a school that is a community and with us all living here music brings everyone together. We often say it is really assisted living though of course those in their 20s, 30s, even 40s would not want to say that but us over 50, OK over 60… damn I am the oldest, see it as assisted living. I was there in my slippers, so was Narda, others had their blankets; Joe Fred and Cindy had their Dallas Cowboy blanket over them. We are not big Grid-Iron fans but we did live in New York for a decade and watched the Giants beat some team, I think from the mid-west, in the Superbowl at a pub in Brooklyn a few years ago so I suppose that makes us Giant fans. But saying anything to Joe Fred about how Dallas is doing this year, or the past few years, is not a happy topic. I think they lost by a point or two the last few games. But they beat the New York Giants, though of course everyone is beating them this year including their selves, so who am I say? But they had their blanket and they shared it with the head of school and on a minus six degrees centigrade night we all were warm. And here we are at Shanghai Airport headed for a warm climate full of warm thoughts.

Narda has just finished her last concerts; the elementary winter concert, helping Tyler with the high school one and last Sunday conducting with some folks for the first international concert of our province. She had practiced for months with a group from some local school. At the Sunday concert there were politicians and a mixture of our school and whomever we had joined with. The concert was supposed to be at 2 pm but due to a least moment comrade-meeting by The Party the concert was put off until 6 pm because some members wanted to go to the concert and we were told you don’t mess with them. Sort of like ‘don’t mess with Texas’. But now it is all over, Narda’s concerts are at a break until the next series start up, the spring concert and I think she is doing ‘Sound of Music’ later in the next year, next year being next week.

Narda has a long history of doing concerts. When she was ten years old she would get her sister, 8 years old, to join in and they would do concerts for their nieghbourhood. Narda and Helena would wear matching dresses, put flyers in letterboxes on their street and perform for ten – fifteen minutes, playing guitar and singing. They would charge like ten-cents and I am not sure what would happen to the children of the street if they did not come but the Narda-ten-year-old-mafia-style-concert always had an audience. The only song I remember her saying she did was ‘you have lost that loving feeling’ by the Righteous Brothers. I find it interesting how we follow our destinies that we map out in youth. I was going to be a writer when I was ten-years old. I use to write all the time, novels, stories, poems, movie scripts… but over the decades that dwindled down to a few blogs and all that I ever got published was a children’s story that Scholastic Magazine published in the mid-1980s. My brother and I use to play restaurant and make up a menu and cook for each other Sunday night but neither of us got to the restaurant stage of life though I did manufacture tofu and many tofu products and to combine my ten-year old wants I am working on my tofu e-book (subtitled ‘Astrology made me a bad tofu maker’) which is really a novel/story/autobiography/cookbook and that of course I will never finish. (And of course it would never come close to Joanne Harris’s “Five Quarters of the Orange” which I just finished reading and I like about the best of any book I have ever read. She uses parts of a journal the mother in the story wrote which tells the story mixed in with recipes. I was doing the same thing but after reading “Five Quarters of the Orange” I wonder why I would continue with my book. Harris wrote the book : “Chocolat” one of my favourite movies and in fact is the first movie I saw with Narda after we got married which of course has nothing to do with what I am writing about here which is our holiday here in Thailand and Narda being a concert giver.) All unlike Narda with her making sure the neighbourhood showed their presence at her concerts and she would rehearse and prepare and make her posters all of which she is doing now many, many – (oops now I would be in trouble if she read my blogs) years ago.

We get into Kuala Lumpur at 1.30 –  that is 1.30 AM – sometime after midnight, then grab a flight to Phuket at 4.30 AM and get there at 5.30 AM or so. It is easier to do the 30 plus hour flights from New York to Australia because the flights are long and sleep is just a pill away but these short hauls are a bugger and we will be more loopy than usual when we stagger into our hotel in Phuket. Last I saw it was 30 degrees centigrade which is warm, maybe hot, but not what it was in Adelaide this week which was 43.5 C or 110 F.

Sunday 22 December

On the short flight Dalian to Shanghai they hand out their boxes of food. For once they got it straight that I am a vegetarian and they even stopped at my seat to confirm it. What could they possible give me? Considering on these short trip we only ever get a roll and a sweet bun it was not like they were going to pull off some strange; possibly chicken or a derivative of a farm animal, and give me a piece of carrot which is usually the way. In my little box, which said veg on the outside I got a whole-meal roll instead of a white roll like my neighbour passengers got. And a small piece of possibly carrot cake whereas my surrounding guests got something looking chocolate like, it was brown. The longer flight Shanghai to KL was better with a curry veggie smothered in rice and not the other way around. Surely we can make analogies to life based on experience on Chinese airlines with China Eastern being at a class in need of enlightenment (the lowest caste, the Dalits in the Hindus trip) and Singapore Airlines being the Brahmins.

So when we got to KL in the early hours and then to Phuket at even a more unreasonable time – like five AM and to our hotel in Phuket Town at seven giving us a 24-hour trip with a reasonable three hours at the max sleep. We get more sleep going from New York to Beijing or to Melbourne not having interrupted… I am losing interest in my story here..

Monday 23 December

So Phuket is OK. We stayed in a guesthouse; Summer Breeze in Phuket Town) that was in sort of a small village off to the side of stuff and that is always more interesting than being tossed in with the tourist throngs. We did the one-day tourist journey to Monkey cave and to James Bond Island (Koh Tapu off of the Ko Khao Phing Kan island in the Phang Nga Bay, Strait of Malacca) – all too expensive and a waste of a day. We almost never go on tours but fend for ourselves getting lost on buses or just wandering and being our own tourist guides. If we don’t know what something is we make it up as we would remember our own historical narratives as much as if some tourist guide told us what something is and our interpretation is always good. We should start a tourist guide business and whatever we say something is then, dig it that is correct. ‘and on the right of your tuk tuk Buddha blessed that tree, which of course is thousands of years old… well the tree isn’t, obviously, it is just a few years old, but the great-ancestor to where that current tree now is stood a mighty tree that the Buddha looked up at and said “life sure is kool” before going on and starting a religion that people even today leave fruit on alters for in hopes that it will be eaten by the Buddha but surprise surprise it is still there the next day’.

Tuesday 24 December

We took the ferry over to Ao Nang Beach, Krabie for the two-hour run. I fell to sleep soon after we left port. One thing I have always been good at is going to sleep – staying asleep is another thing – I wake up at two in the morning ready to climb a mountain or at least go look for something to eat. My best sleeping time is when we are taking off in a plane. I almost always will be asleep by or soon after being in the air. My record that I remember is one time being awake as the plane started down the runway and I thought I would just close my eyes for a moment – and waking up half an hour later in the clouds. Waking in the clouds is quite different than my usual being already awake in the clouds such as when I am at work. I rarely am tired or plan on sleeping I just like to close my eyes when the plane is leaving but almost every single time I am asleep by air time.

When you get on to the ferry everyone is told to put their bags into one large area so a couple of hundred people with a couple bags each, a couple of hundred bags, all happily leave their bags. The majority of the passengers, at least on our boat, were Australians and being young and backpackers were happy to find all the open areas at the front to show off their tats and youthful bodies to one another whilst Narda and I found the padded comfortable seats inside.

Somewhere in this setup there was a potential pain-in-the-ass moment.

We found it.

So when we get to Ao Nang Beach and everyone grabs their bags and get on land Narda and I count our bags. Of course unlike backpackers who have one bag each we have seven in total. Just because we have traveled steadily for decades does not mean we have figured it out. Oh wait! We now have six bags and the next set of passengers are all rushing on. I go back to find the missing bag but there is already a pile of bags where ours once were and one still is. The boat is leaving in five minutes and no they will not unpack the ferry to find ours but they will ring us when the ferry is back in port if they find a bag at the next island before the next group gets on and the ferry stops again at Ao Nang Beach. We are concerned mainly because we cannot remember what is in the bag. We have both our computers, Ipad, Kindle, cameras and lenses and clothes but even after unpacking we cannot figure out what is in the bag. Until I go to take my heart-medication; something to do with having four stents put in a few weeks ago in Hong Kong.

Oops maybe we should worry.

Narda’s friend from Hamburg is on holiday in Northern Thailand and we were planning at trying to get up there but now there is a concern about my pills. We stopped at a travel centre and it will take us a whole day to get to  Koh Lipe (Koh Lipe is a small island in the Adang-Rawi Archipelago of the Andaman Sea, in the Satun Province of southwest Thailand, close to Malaysian border). Four hours by min-bus and several hours by ferry, one overnight and another whole day coming back. Narda writes Mau that it is all quite difficult plus there is the potential that my pills would be gone. We hadn’t seen Mau for years, we use to pop into Hamburg each year on the way to Australia from New York but lately we seem to be Asia based. She realizes how difficult it will be to visit and she is going back to Germany at the end of the week so we will wait until somewhere else in the world is easier to get to visit in. My tie to her is from eleven years ago when we stopped in to visit; Narda met her in Budapest Hungary in the 1980s at a Kodály study program and they have been friends since. We spent several days at her home and I started writing my never-to-be-read by anyone except maybe my son, “Leaving Australia” in July 2003. It ended up being 570 pages and about 170,000 words plus lots of pictures, experiences, philosophies come and gone, relationships… I printed and leather bound two copies one for Sacha and the other sits on my shelf in China. It was a book to my children, as I was the existing parent, or sole parent from babyhood to hoods, explaining my life and why our life was the way it was based on my life’s experience. I wrote heaps for three days as Narda and Mau caught up on stories of their life. Two weeks later my son, Leigh, would fly to Sydney from where Leigh was playing baseball in Florida for the Los Angeles Dodgers and went off his 15 story hotel because his girlfriend broke up with him. It took me another six years to finish my book then I decided I would finish it for both sons even though only one decided to stay on the planet. Somewhere in the universal mind – some place in the slippery slope of galactic evolution there may be a particle of Leigh that exists and is conscious of what I say to him, so often, sometimes daily, sometimes just in my dreams. So that is my connection with Mau and every time we would go visit I would add to my “Leaving Australia”.

The ferry is due to stop at five pm at Ao Nang and at 4.30 Narda is insistent that we meet the ferry and not wait for them to ring us. We have rented motor scooters for two-weeks and go swimming each day – the water is warm – and go exploring and get ourselves lost on lots of back roads. So we get to the ferry and wow wow they have my bag with my pills. Not knowing what else we could have in the bag we quickly look and see our four seasons of “Sons of Anarchy”; we watched the first two seasons back in China. I have not really taken to the series mainly because the acting is so bad and the storylines are just stupid but because the two series we have been watching: ‘Homeland’ and ‘the Good Wife’, are done for the season and we did not have anything else to watch, ‘Sons’ became something to watch in the evening as I worked on my webpages and Narda watched. Narda’s DVD player, which plugs into her computer, was in the bag too. So we were happy though we have yet to have a TV on since being in Thailand for a week.

Then a day later, today, Thursday evening, we are looking through the bag we had left on the ferry and found my US Passport in a side pocket. Oops again. I only use it for when I enter the States, using my Australian Passport for everywhere else. Really! Who wants to say they are an American when traveling? I also found my Chinese bankcard which would have been a mess to replace.

What we realize when we travel and do not put the telly on is how peaceful and wonderful the world is. When we watch the news all they have is stories about bombing here and there and shootings in the States. We have no idea what is happening in Syria, Iraq, Egypt or really anywhere, now. Here the weather is fine the neighbours are great – Muslims are unlike what the news tries to do to portray them as such badies and even Narda has started to cover up like the local women but she does it because it is so bloody hot and when we are riding our motor scooters she gets so sunburnt so a black scarf over her head under her helmet covering her shoulders gives a local look. When we are on holiday I wonder why we ever bother to watch the news to begin with. Maybe that is what one does in retirement let the world get all crazy about the stupid news reports. I often wonder why we sit there looking at what is happening someplace where we are far from, have no ties to, will no doubt never go to, and which has and never will have an effect on us. It is close to being as bad as celebrity watching, something I have never paid much attention to. It is a good feeling to see a face on magazine covers and have no idea who it is; makes me feel not sucked in. I could not name a celebrity, singer or actor under forty and I am proud of that. Life is good here far away yet in the middle.

Thursday 26 December 26, 2013

And I have found warmth. From the sun to the people of Thailand to the foot massage – an hour for 200 Thai Baht ($6.10 US/ $6.84 Australian) which included a head and shoulder massage – to the warmth of being with Narda and the warmth of not having anywhere to go or anything to do. And Narda just read me that where we are, Aonang – is the world’s second best beach as stated by many travel magazines. The article did not say what magazine or what was the world’s finest beach. Having just come back from a swim as the sun set we can say it is definitely quite good.

Maybe I will post this and edit my videos in the Premier Creative Cloud Suite. Now there is warmth and the only news I need that today’s Adobe Creative Cloud Suite updates are downloading even with a slow Internet. And of course that the Australian dollar is back to 88 cents from 95 cents last month and that is the extent of the news we need. And of course that our friends and family are well and had a good Christmas and we got to Skype OK. Yesterday was Christmas and our Christmas present was a swim in the ocean and an hour massage. I think today we will ride our scooters to Krabi which we are told is half an hour away though we being old and slow and stopping too many times along the way, not to mention how easily we get lost and change our mind it will no doubt take the whole afternoon.

Tomorrow we buy our train tickets to Kuala Lumpur from Trang Thailand – leaving in two weeks on the 30 hour train ride.

Above is in front of our house – road to town.

unchain my heart

Video for this Hong kong trip is at http://youtu.be/aUYG8gn72MQ

Macau two weeks later or last week http://youtu.be/AzaiYZU3zZk

I was having a quiet  Friday evening watching thoughts drift by of what to do on the upcoming weekend. Sort of a quiet day. We arrived home at noon from a week in Xi’am seeing Terracotta Warriors, a Great Wild Goose Pagoda (go figure), peddling a bike around on top of a wall going around the city and merging with so many Chinese on holiday during 国庆节 (Chinese National Day) in a very polluted city of less than a trillion people though it seemed as if there were more than a trillion people in Xi’am frantically searching for a clean air-molecule or two. I personally had not found any and for the most part had held my breath for five days to avoid clogging up my airways. See a previous blog at http://wp.me/scHIf-xian

Though I do not think that holding my breath for five days had anything to do with what would happen next.

We had finished dinner and being a bit hungry I was in the kitchen looking for more. As we had been away for a week there was not much but I had found something which at the moment I forget what but as I took a step I passed out and came to on the floor a few seconds later. Narda was standing next to me and thought I had slipped and fell. When I came to I was quite disorientated or more disoriented than usual may be more accurate. And confused to add. Having never had passed out, or at least not in a self-propelled way as I may have on occasion done when I was past my youth but not quite to maturity – some time in a seemingly very distant past, this was all new territory.

I had a sore knee from twisting my leg on the way done and not being conscious to stop myself I had not grabbed anything to slow my descent – OK so it is not like parachuting from a great distance in the stratosphere but it is still a long ways to the floor when the microwave is at eye level one second and the floor the next. I pulled the dishwasher out of its place so I did go down with a thud. It was not a near-death experience because there was no tunnel with angels and whats-his-name at the end shoving me quickly back into the physical so I could constantly work off whatever karmic dept to the universe I seem to be laboring at.

Narda was concerned. I was confused. I assured her that obviously I just slipped on some butter that was on the floor but for whatever reason there was no apparent sign of butter when I went to show her. I said not to worry to her running for her phone to ring the Beijing SOS clinic so they could ring our doctor who actually lives here in Campus Village but we are not to go banging on the doctor’s door but have to go through protocol. Narda has in large print on our door the SOS clinic telephone number because, yes, we have used it before – see http://wp.me/pcHIf-eS when for some reason I seemed to have become unstuck after eating something and within fifteen minutes of her calling Beijing I was in the emergency room of our clinic (two floors below us) and with a drip into my arm. This seems to be my year for medical stuff I think.

To keep Narda happy, which as a useful husband type of tip I can offer, by saying it is always a good thing to keep one’s wife a bit on the happy side if at all possible. Of course that has to be balanced in a sensible and creative way though the sensible part I must admit I have yet to master but the creative part I have down really well. I just say ‘yes dear’. Nevertheless Saturday morning we took the elevator from our third floor apartment to the first floor and walked past the lobby to the clinic. We call life here ‘assisted living’ and any teacher living at Campus Village would agree. Doctors rotate every eight weeks and on this eight week rotation we had our really great doctor, Wilhelm. Steve our other rotating doctor, and the one who looked after me when I had my bit of food poisoning episode is fantastic too. Wilhelm did lots of tests on me from blood letting to EKG and the like and was so concerned he thought maybe I should stay in the clinic for the weekend or at the least to take it easy. I chose the latter and played softball with our school team against the local Taiwan mob as we do each Sunday. I did a bit lighter weights for the next couple of days and no free weights of rather heavy; heavy for me as I am 66, just 60 kilos (132 pounds) that I have been building up from, but taking Wilhelm’s, I thought overly-cautious, approach, I only did the attached weights. I did not swim either as he was concerned I would pass out in the pool and that could pose a problem. I went to work as usual because I love work, I love creating and teaching film and just having a great time with technology. I surely had no intentions of staying home and being old.

Wednesday I was sent into Dalian to the Vitup Hospital and had an ultrasound and a halter-cardiac monitor attached to wear for 24-hours. I felt light headed and a bit wobbly and a bit spacy but that is pretty much how I feel most of the time anyway and have since the 1960s so I am quite use to it except the degree for normal behavior that I have enjoyed or not enjoyed at times for the past 40 years was increased though not enhanced. So of course being the verbal person I am I told my doctor I was not quite the same in the head as I was and he seemed a bit more concerned and started talking about maybe going to Seoul or Hong Kong for a bit of a more thorough check-up. I thought I could do the same in Beijing but he was not so confident. Over the next few days the talk became more of you need to go to Seoul or Hong Kong with Hong Kong being the doctor’s choice. I was in favor of Seoul because it is one hour away and a cheaper flight whereas Hong Kong is 3.5 hours direct flight and twice the airfare. I was still doing my weights and Friday morning we rode bikes to our local shopping area before school and on the weekend I played softball and went to the dentist.

Another week went by and another and by the 23^rd of October, almost three weeks since kissing the floor of the kitchen we were on a flight to Hong Kong.

We were booked into the Adventist Hospital 40 Stubbs Rd, Hong Kong and staying at The Emperor Hotel in Happy Valley. On the way in from the airport the taxi dude said this was a very busy night to drive to our hotel as the races were on and it was Oktoberfest. Our hotel was like a five minute walk to the The Hong Kong Jockey Club. Yes this is an actual photo of our walk-in and somehow we managed to get up the stairs and into the stands.

The cost to get in was 10 Honk Kong dollars ($1.29 US). I was mixed up with feelings; I was getting tested 9 AM the next morning and possible surgery as a result of it, I just wanted to be back at work. Who wants to be at work? Here we were in Hong Kong at the races, except if things went a certain direction I could be cactus in a few days. I listened closely to my heart – not in a romantic way where I am all goo goo because I am spending a night with this kool chick from Australia – oh wait that is my wife, and of course that is romantic an all but what I was listening to was whether my heart was physically doing the correct thing and thumping away like a normal heart should – and it sort of was but not completely. I wanted to relax and enjoy the moment. I had only ever been to horse races twice in my life. Once Narda and I went to the races in Saratoga, New York. (you know that song by Carly Simon “You are so Vain”?

“Well I hear you went up to Saratoga and your horse naturally won…”

Of course we own houses in Round Lake just a fifteen minute drive from Saratoga Springs and I grew up a short distance from there too but I only ever went to the races the one time with Narda. Another time Narda and I went to a race in Adelaide, South Australia and that is it. We made a couple of bets when at the Saratoga track but I do not recall whether we won. This time Narda said “let’s place a bet‘.

First of all we had no idea what to do, secondly we could not get the folks at the betting counter to understand what we wanted. They did not speak English and we did not speak whatever they spoke. We watched for awhile and by race three we decided it was time to jump in. Narda picked by numbers – the number 23 because it was October 23, we were on the 23 floor of our hotel, we sat in row 23 on the plane and there was some other times the number came up so she picked a horse with a 23 to one odds. I looked out in the paddock or whatever they call the area they warm in and one horse was just not in sync. It would rear its head, go the opposite direction of the other horses and just was generally ready to take off. I thought that if I were a horse that is exactly how I would act, a bit of all over the shop type of animal, so I picked horse number five. Feeling not lucky, how could I? I was off for heart inspection in a day I was conservative and put 10 Hong Kong dollars on horse number five, the same amount Narda put on the horse with a 23 to one odds. Horse number five, King Derby, was behind all the other horses most of the race. Coming around, I think they call it the clubhouse turn – or at least where all the stands are, I could see horse number five go to the outside of all the horses and just pass them right to the crossing line when it drew level then passed the lead horse, to win. The odds were like four to one so we ended up with 44 Hong Kong dollars which paid for our two bets, the entrance fee for both of us and with a bit of a top up there was enough left for me to purchase a small carton of soy milk. I did not want to bet on another horse because I did not want to leave as a loser which could have happened.

Being Oktoberfest the crowds were probably larger and more rowdy than usual but never having been there before I am not sure. There was a time when we were trying to get out, with me holding on tight to my winnings, and Narda holding tight on to me that we did not move in any direction. I was of course thinking about my heart when I should have been thinking about my luck. Narda had said “just think if we had put down our houses and any cash we had anywhere in the world and then maybe even had borrowed some. We could retire.” Retire? I was wondering if I was going to get out of the racecourse. What if my heart played silly buggers and took me out right here? I was so pinned in if I died I would have died upright (“he was an upright citizen”) and no one would know. There would be no sound of my winnings hitting the ground, no last words heard amongst the blasting music from someone announcing a winner in a drawing, not even Narda would know for a few moments as she was pinned in too. We were all frozen together on a warm Hong Kong night.

Yes of course eventually we got back to our hotel, I am writing this a couple of weeks later and I think I am still alive. As a matter of fact next week today we will be back in Hong Kong and I will be getting a bunch of tests to continue on with what I will say befell me whilst in Hong Kong back at the end of September. So yes, I believe I am alive. Still! Still as in quiet compared to my pre-Hong Kong self.

The next morning, Thursday, I was off to Adventist Hospital to get tests. I met Dr. King the cardiologist who was going to sort me out and I was sent off for eight tests. In Australia when I go to the heart centre and see my cardiologist each year the visit lasts about ten minutes, this has been going on for about a decade. He takes my pulse, does a couple of readings and sends me on my way with a sentence or two of advice. I thought this would be the same, just pop in – OK spending a couple of thousand of dollars to go and get that advice wasn’t what I wanted but Dr. Wilhelm thought it was important. I liked Dr. King. He had a sense of humour, was good at explaining and said he would arrange for a few tests. Then and there. All day Thursday. Seven or eight tests. A stress test on a treadmill with lots of monitors and beeping machines as the endurance speed and difficulty were increased to a point where the machines made more frequent noises and I felt worse. Then on to blood tests, a PET thingy (Positron Emission Tomography). In this test, I had a radioactive dye injected so that my heart showed on the scan. Laying down I was shoved into a doughnut-shaped machine to have images taken of my heart. When the dye went through there was a hot sensation going through my body which was not good. Being claustrophobic from an incident in my adolescence I spent about an hour in semi-panic. But the worse was yest to come; the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Laying down on a table inside a long tube-like machine that produced a magnetic field and again feeling quite claustrophobic with large banging sounds each time the magnets did whatever they did. I had a heavy plastic mask put over my face either because I was too ugly for the nurses to look at or to protect me from I know not what. It was like a helmet players of American Gridiron games wear. When I lived in the States we called it football but in Australia they say gridiron as footy is what Australians play and football is soccer some places but no matter what the sport having one on and being inside a tube fastened down was not fun. What was worse than the banging noses was some weird background music. Someone playing the same piano piece over and over. This went on for an hour. There is a button to push if one gets too stress and at some point I did and they took me out of the tunnel. I sat up said it was all a bit too much and being sympathetic nurses they smiled, took my helmet face mask off for about ten minutes put it back and and shoved me back for more noise and said this time it would be only for another fifteen minutes which somehow I endured. There was another test which I do not remember the name of where I was hooked up to several monitors and laying down they wanted to shove me into yet another machine. There was some problem with it because I have a very irregular heart beat and on their monitor it showed my pulse in such a low range – low in the teens – that the technician in charge got a bit worried. I told her it was her machine that was malfunctioning and not me. She said she had never had a problem with the machine and that maybe something was drastically wrong with me. She called in several other people and they all looked at me then the machine and they all looked a bit worried. I said it was their machine that sucked. Fortunately one technician had enough sense to physically take my pulse and she was relieved and I commented that it was their machine. They hooked me up to another machine and that seemed to work better. Actually this test was before the PET thingy because they had already put the dye into me and they had to have their monitors working before shoving me into the PET thingy. They said the new PET thingy could work with people with irregular hear beats like mine but there was only one of the newest machines and that was at Sanatorium Hospital, which incidentally was across the street from where we were staying and had a view of the horse racecourse. I of course volunteered to be tested there as being surrounded by 5 or 6 concerned, worried, semi-confused technicians, nurses and doctors was giving me the heebie jeebies. Someone rang Dr. King and someone said OK, probably the same person and it was all back on with me being put into the Pet thingy. There was the CT scan and the Ultrasound and a 24-hour wearing a halter-cardiac device all to find out what was in (too much calcium?) and what was out with what could be wrong with me if indeed anything was wrong.

We had spent about eight hours in hospital with me poked and prodded and early evening we finally got to go back to our hotel. Being told to take it easy and with my 24 hour halter-cardiac device with plugs stuck to various parts of my body firmly in place we took double decker buses around town. Being situated in Happy Valley which is a hub or the start of several double decker buses gave us a lot to choose from.

We just rode, got off; everything looked too Chinese for us – it was like being in China – oh wait maybe we still were – and got back on another one. The evening was so warm. We sat on the top deck and took lots of video which at some point will show up on my youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/neuage09 or my previous one http://www.youtube.com/tneuage

Friday we were back to the hospital in the morning to hear the good news; that I was fine, the tests showed that I had had a bit of indigestion and we could go back home Sunday on our booked flight and be back to work on Monday with a bit of an expensive three day break from school. We figured since we were in Hong Kong we would make the best of it and spend the rest of the day Friday and Saturday wandering around Hong Kong. Maybe try to squeeze in a boat trip to one of the islands.

Well that didn’t work out did it?

Dr. King said that I had a few narrow arteries filled with calcium and that I would need surgery. He said until he put a catheter into my arteries he would not be sure but I would need at least three stents. He went over what the procedure was about and that Sunday would be good to do it. Being a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital they were not in full swing on a Saturday. I think Saturday is their Sunday. Go figure. Nevertheless with this not so groovy news we set up for Sunday to be a day of no-fun. I was to check in Saturday night – OK so they let people check-in Saturday but operations get put off until Sunday. I was listening to Janis Joplin sing ‘Another piece of my heart’ in my head and wondering whether I should make this my phone’s ring-tone.

“Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!
Oh, oh, break it!
Break another little bit of my heart now…”

Of course like everyone I have my brush with fame story; Janis Joplin. Back in 1969 I was almost run over by her in her Porsche. I knew it was her. We all knew that car as she sped around San Francisco. I use to go and listen to her at the Fillmore and in Golden Gate Park and I still listen to her when I am lifting weights at Campus Village at Dalian American International School 44 years later. Strange how things stick in one’s mind but I always remember that moment and how close I almost came to my end then but didn’t and she did not long after and here I am writing about her instead of her writing about me. Not that she would but perhaps if she had lived and I had been knocked over I could have featured in one of her songs and she could be tweeting about how even now 44 years later she remembers that moment. But of course that is all silly to think of now when I am writing about something totally different. My heart.

Picture from http://dedeporsche.com/2011/04/03/porsche-project-recreation-of-janis-joplins-psychedelic-painted-1965-porsche-356c-cabriolet/

We went off to the billing department and they said we would need to get in touch with our insurance company to get pre-approval and that of course there should not be a problem with that. Having had problems with our insurance company for the past three-years we were not that confident. Someday I will put into writing the name of our insurance company but as we need them now and in the near future we will just say ‘our insurance company’. We rang the insurance company from the hospital and they said to send them a bill for the pre-approval. We took a peek at the future bill (the tests were only in the $3000 plus range) and sort of gasped. Seventy-thousand plus (not Hong Kong dollars but USA dollars) for a night in the hospital plus a few stents tossed in. I was thinking the insurance company would be better off paying off my fifty-thousand dollar death coverage than to pay this but over and over we have been told that we have a really good insurance company. Yeah right! So we went back to our hotel and wrote Dalian American International School to say we will not be back until Wednesday as I am having a bit of surgery on Sunday and I need to rest for two days so we will fly back Tuesday night and I would be back at work on Wednesday. Narda and I wrote and sent lesson plans for the extra two days.

Friday night we made multiple phone calls to both the China and the USA departments of our insurance company. This spilled into Saturday when we were told over and over that it would all be cleared up in a couple of hours and we would get the go ahead. By late Saturday afternoon we had to cancel the Sunday surgery as we had still not gotten the OK. All day Saturday we rang speaking to one person after another each saying it would be a matter of a couple of hours because anything over fifty-thousand dollars had to go to an underwriter. We went to Stanley Market and did a bit of shopping and then we discovered we had to move out of our hotel because Sunday night was booked out. We had planned to fly back to Dalian Sunday. Happy Valley was getting to feel like home and of course just a couple of days earlier we had our big win at the local track so moving was not going to be fun especially when our insurance company was being mean to us. One person, she was a supervisor, suggested we go to Florida because I could have the same operation done for about 45-thousand. We could not believe someone, especially a supervisor, suggesting we fly from Hong Kong to Florida to save the insurance company money. We did find a hotel; L’Hotel Island South http://www.lhotelislandsouth.com/eng/front/ and it was really a good four-star place. We got a room with the mountain view on the 32^nd floor and thought OK if this is where we have to bunker down for a long time this will be it. We moved in Sunday afternoon still getting phone calls saying it would just be another couple of hours.

Narda was emailing everyone she could find in the insurance company and still at mid-night Saturday she was ringing and emailing. Finally someone said that the underwriters don’t work on weekends and that we should know within a couple of days when they got back to work on Monday. It was looking more and more like we were going to be stuck in Hong Kong for awhile. Sunday we went to Aberdeen and found a great little restaurant on Old Main Street, Myanmar Thai Palace We are going to Myanmar for Chinese New Year in January to see our ex-workmates; Frank and Kay and we are going over with Jean and Sean so it will be quite the crazy week. There in Myanmar. Going back to L’Hotel Island South we took a nap in the afternoon and at 5 pm we got a phone call that the insurance company had approved it. One of the many people Narda had phoned had pushed the whole thing through. Actually it was the head of customer service, a man in India that Narda has contacted many times to sort out situations from the past. Nothing major just some basic tests we get done every year to be sure we are functioning well, stuff like that. The amount of work the insurance company goes through to get out of paying anything is always remarkable. But this one dude on a Sunday morning had gotten through where no one else was able to and got us moving forward.

Arrangements were made for me to check into the hospital on Monday morning and have surgery late in the afternoon. We went back to the Myanmar Thai Palace for dinner, sat along the river and wondered what would happen next. I was a tad bit nervous about the whole thing. Having been an astrologer for forty-years and having stopped looking at planetary positions a decade ago I thought I would have a peek for old times sake. Nothing looked too good and if I were to believe in astrology again I could easily have made some linkage. Uranus was in 9 degrees and 34 minutes Aries which is fine as it was trine my Venus at 10 degrees Leo meaning quick and successful surgery. But the real indicator of all the fuss was and still is Saturn at 13 degrees and eight minutes Scorpio so exactly square my Saturn conjunct Pluto at 13 degrees Leo an eight minutes. And yes you saw it too; square my Venus.

Hello! Wow is this so possible?

Saturn takes 28 years to get to this position and to have Uranus in trine to my Leo planets (Venus, Saturn Pluto, Sun, Mid Haven, Part of Fortune) is statistically almost impossible – maybe the planets get in this position every few thousand years. Lucky me. Jupiter was still in trine with my Jupiter – separating two degrees so that was helpful. Pluto (is that still being used as a planet now that it has been kicked out as a planet?) was inconjunct or quincunx to my Venus and of course square by nature of the qunicunx to Uranus at the time. If I were to believe in this stuff I would have been alarmed that transit Saturn was conjunct Mercury (was there some bad advice being given?) meaning that both planets were squaring exactly my Saturn Pluto conjunction (I used to give presentations and wrote some articles on the Saturn Pluto conjunction in Leo being the symbol of the baby boomers. All that free-love (Leo – heart) with Pluto overthrowing Saturn. I had really lengthy examples and proofs sort of back in the day. Now I just ramble on and no one has a clue what I am talking about. Narda just popped in, she watches all these medical shows; 13 years without fail she watched ‘ER’ and now she is going through season after season of Grey’s Anatomy. She loves all this medical and I don’t. I have never watched any of them.

So Narda asks what I am writing about and I am sitting here with the astrology chart for 28 October on her iPad and I am saying I don’t believe any of this anymore and she says if you did what would that chart say?

See this is what I mean. I tell her and basically all I can say is that it means what actually happened. I did not need the symbolism of astrology to know something was going wrong. OK one more thing; the Moon was in Leo. Holy Cow! There is the moon sitting on top of my Sun dragging all those influences into being. Saturn as Saturn does, delayed and made us go crazy and of course having calcium in my arteries is well explained by Saturn squaring my Saturn in Leo – ruler of the heart. For a couple of decades I was really into medical astrology even to the point of making magic potions and elixirs for people based on their rising sign and the position and aspects to their ruling planet. I was sort of known for this in New Orleans when I was a street artists. I use to drink a lot of lemon grass tea as that was suppose to be a Venus ruled herb and Venus rules my astrology chart (Libra rising with Venus being strongest by being in the 10th house and having so many aspects). Another interesting point is that at the time of surgery for Hong Kong at 4 pm there was Aries rising with Uranus in the first house and the fifth house – the house of the heart – being ruled by the heart sign, Leo, so all my Leo points and planets were in the fifth house during the surgery. I use to love astrology but it got in my way and there was a time I could not just live my life but had to do astrology charts on everything. It was when Leigh killed himself (http://neuage.org/leigh.htm) that I just could no longer use astrology. I was not seeing reality but was off following symbols that were based on interpretation and I got caught interpreting life through my eyes and wants and I missed what was really going on.

The Adventist Hospital being a vegetarian hospital seemed so natural. It went along with what was roughly my life-long life: hippie communes in the 1960s, eating vegetarian foods for the past 45 years, being in a new age cult group for a decade, various religious and philosophical beliefs embraced then discarded over the decades each pushing the vegetarian life style, being a tofu manufacture for eight years in South Australia – see my slowly evolving e-book http://neuage.us/tofu/ There was even a time when I was going to build a big tofu factory – compared to the small tofu factory I had for eight years – and sell to the Seventh Day Adventists in Australia. It is all quite remarkable and now here I was lying in a bed with needles in my arm and an oxygen thing in my nose and eating wonderful vegetarian food. The food was so good I kept ordering more off of the menu. The staff there must have thought that I had not eaten for days.

Every few minutes nurses would come in and take my blood pressure, give me some medication, take pulses and I would ask to see the menu again. At four pm I got rolled down the hall all neatly snug in my bed with my lame looking gown on and things hanging out of me and over me. Not that I see many hospital movies but times that I have passed through the lounge and Narda has one on there is always some poor joker on a bed being wheeled into surgery. Now I was one of them. I looked around for the camera crew and the make up artist but I was put into the operation theatre with little fan fare. Narda could not even come in. To make matters worse I was not given some really nice powerful mind altering drug. All they did was put some local numbing agent on my arm where they were shoving a needle up my vain and into arteries around my heart. I could see what was going on with three big screens in front of me and none of it looked to comfortable. Actually I was very uncomfortable and kept hearing ‘you have to lay still’. I never sit still and never lay still but I was trying. All the time my chest was feeling like a heart of elephants were doing a ballad on top of it. It was all so uncomfortable and there were so many people with jobs. I counted 9 at one time. But this is China. There are always a mingling mob for each job. I think it is called full employment. Everyone looked quite concerned and busy with their tasks at hand. Of course they all spoke in some language that I was not familiar with. If only I had taken those Chinese language courses offered at our school. Narda and I did one and we sort of never got back and here we are three years later not knowing anything.

I tried to take my mind off of what was going on by thinking about useful stuff. Like my lesson unit – that put me to sleep and they said I had to stay away so I thought of places I had lived, things I had done. Most of all I wondered if these people had a clue of what they were doing. I thought about various stuff I had believed in during my time on this planet and wondered if everyone changes their beliefs as often as I do. I suppose it is a times like this when someone is shoving rods into the heart that the question and importance of life become forthcoming. Unfortunately I did not get any insights. I no longer do. I think it has to do with our school taking on Standards. It makes people stupid; both teachers and students alike. We are losing the creative aspect and teaching sameness and in-fusing it into bland world of massive robotic proportions. I use to believe in reincarnation, astrology, evolution and all that kind of stuff.

Now I believe we are just the fodder, unripe food for the next wave of people/machines which of course will be combined and already has its start with Google Glass and other wearable tech things. My son Sacha said if I could wait a few years they would just send in an army of nanobots to clean stuff up and stitch the veins. I could have main vain veins with a search engine embedded that would scour the world’s medical knowledge and new procedures and not only find but implement the procedure and create the fixings by combining DNA strands various cellular molecules and have nanobots fly out of my ears and go off to factories in distant places maybe on another planet or asteroid get what was needed and arrive back to my body and go to the factory somewhere in my body and fly off to the part of my body that needed fixing and life would be beaut. I could have a whole nano-factory built somewhere in my body and a constant movement of things fixing and improving throughout my body as I lifted weights at the gym and listened to Janis Joplin.

These are the kind of things I think about when laying on a bed in a operating room with masked people speaking in a language I did not understand and hopefully they shared as they at times spoke in hurried phrases then a few of them would come running over and my wrist where they had the injection point would sting and then my chest would feel like a herd of elephants were doing the Watusi on my chest.

“There’s a dance called the Watusi it’s out of sight,
First you slide to the left then to the right.
The Watusi is out of sight,
You slide to the left, then to the right.
Take two steps up and keep it tight.
And do the Watusi, it sure is a sight.”

There were three large monitors that I could watch what was going on on. I looked up once or twice and it sort of freaked me out so I went back to thinking. This all went on for more than two hours and I just could not find a good range of thoughts to centre on. Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s I use to believe in all the mind control of your body stuff. For years I carried around “The Science of Mind”, by Ernest Shurtleff Holmes [1926] believing all that crap. He was on about how our thinking creates diseases in our body. For example negative thoughts created negativity which manifested as dis-ease, not at ease, in our body. I furthered this thinking for a decade in the Holy Order of Mans when I was a brother in their centres in Hawaii, San Francisco, Cheyenne Wyoming, Wichita Kansas, Detroit, Syracuse New York and finally Baltimore Maryland. They had all this material about the higher Self and how our body was just a vehicle we traveled about in and if things went wrong it was karmic from some other lifetime or the miss use of energy now. I managed to go through their initiations of Self-illumination and Self-Realization before leaving for good and learning to re-live my life without the muddled illusions of superstitious belief systems. I must admit though whilst having stuff shoved into my arteries next to my heart and a herd of elephants doing the Watusi on my chest I tried to rise above my body or at least try to do something more metaphysical than just lay there hurting but I did not have any luck. My mind has ground down into the physical so strongly that I wonder how did I ever get into believing all the hocus-pocus stuff I once believed in.

At some point I got wheeled out of the operating room and there was Narda on the other side of the door. I know this happens all the times in her medical shows she watches but I had never been in an operating room before. Even when my two sons were born, I helped deliver both, it was just a simple room. Especially the one in Kahuku Hawaii where Sacha was born on the North-shore of Oahu. There was just Dr. Branch, the alleged mother and me. Leigh was born in Ashford Hospital Adelaide and I was there and at that birth so was Sacha, age two and a half.

Narda is always there making the continuity of life good. All I felt was hunger and of course a sore chest and sore arm and sore wrist. Dr. King (who has a Chinese name in brackets between the Peter and the King) said it went better than he had thought. Good grief what had he thought? He did put in a fourth stent after he was deep into my chest and found another artery that looked suspect. He kept saying to lay still which for me is very difficulty. I struggle to sit still for ten minutes and to sit still for two hours is gruesome. First I was cold so they put some horse blankets on me then I was hot so they took them off. I think I am a bad patient. Even my dentist is constantly telling me to relax when she has her head half way down my throat. I just am not the ideal ER patient.

The menu is great. I ordered half the stuff on the menu then ordered some more. Narda stayed in the hospital overnight. Lucky for you my photos are on my phone which is over in my classroom at school or I would show a photo of the room, probably one with me all hooked up to oxygen and drips and monitors but smiling because the food was good. It was like staying in a hotel with lots of room service. I had to stay in bed until the next day which was making me go funny in the head but we made it through the night and by the next evening, Tuesday we checked out and went back to L’Hotel South.

It is strange to go back only a day later to someplace when so much has changed. Now for the rest of my life or at least until they crank up the nanobots I have to wear material inside my body up near my heart.

Wednesday, two days after surgery – that is me in front of the sign the day following stents shoved in, not feeling great but at least a bit mobile. I liked this sign because I thought it said Old Man Street. I even made it my Facebook profile photo. A week later I realised it said Old Main Street. I felt like a real goose but I have kept the photo for now. No wonder I get so confused I misinterpret everything I see. That was always my problem with astrology. I am sure it is all there but I misinterpret it all.

We took a boat over to Lamma Island for the afternoon. Lamma Island does not have cars on it. Like Prince Islands in the Bosphorus Sea outside of Istanbul. We like quiet islands with no cars. Wish they would take them off of that island we call home, Australia. I wasn’t feeling to flash, a bit dizzy, light headed and weak. I guess when they poke around a heart it leaves one not feeling their best. We did not make it very far but found a nice quiet beach to sit at and later in the day took the ferry back to Aberdeen and went home.

Thursday afternoon we went home getting back to Dalian at 11 PM. Friday we were back at work. The people at Dalian American International School are the best. Lots of welcome backs and hugs (even though I am a product of the 60’s and lived in communes in California and did all that new age crap – hey my name is Neuage – I am not a touchy touchy person and don’t like hugging but I put up with it this time). The middle school choir, under Tyler, put together a song, Monty Python’s Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life and sent it to me. Of course they left out a line or two which would not be appropriate for middle school children to sing – even to an old goat like me. In my middle school class a sixth grader ran across the room and threw her arms around me and said she was so happy I was now OK.

My students were so good whilst I was away. I had written up my lesson plans and one day even partially taught my high school film class via Skype. The students all did their assignments and emailed their work to me and my high school students put their work in their Google Sites pages for me to review.

I had on my table the DVDs of my heart operation. I had not looked at them and just figured in between classes I would have a look-see. Of course my middle school kids wanted to know what was on those disks and I said nothing that you would want to see – it is my heart operation and of course they then wanted to see it. I was quite unsure, Narda, whose music room is next door, was looking through my door shaking her head no. Can you imagine having a film studio next to the music room? I produce two shows for school a week called DAISlive with stories and events and the like about what is going on around school. In most interviews, stories and what not there is a first grade flute class or fifth grade singing rehearsal for the upcoming Christmas musical or worse, third grade drum class in the background.

I said to the children that it would probably gross them out which of course makes an adolescent want to see it all the more so we watched. Actually there was nothing gruesome to view. On the one DVD we looked at there were 36 video clips – in black and white – showing like a string with a lasso on the end going through the vein to position the stents. One 8th grader who wants to be a doctor after watching for a minute said that I had an irregular heart beat. Well I hadn’t even noticed that.

So here I am three weeks after surgery and we are going back next weekend, hopefully just for three days this time, to be sure everything is in place. I was told not to lift weights for the first two weeks and that this week it was OK to go lightly so I have done that. I said to a nurse “what about my six-pack I am trying to develop” (at 66 years old) and she said “why?” because I was married. I said that matrimonial status had nothing to do with vanity but she did not get that. We have gone for walks which is OK though I feel pretty crappy after about 20 minutes. Of course I am wondering whether ever having anything done was the correct thing to do.

To freak myself out even more I read a story in the New York Times Health blog section this morning,

“Heart Stents Still Overused, Experts Say” By ANAHAD O’CONNOR August 15, 2013 http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/heart-stents-continue-to-be-overused/?_r=0
which says one out of ten don’t need them and that doctors and hospitals make good money doing these procedures. Damn!

Xi’an

Life is good.

1. youtube clips at http://youtu.be/8CFyFFGaNio (first day – flight and Warriors Apartments): second day (Muslim Quarters) http://youtu.be/8Qbn9fvAusU, http://youtu.be/GT2uYOwkS0s Terracotta Warriors, Drum Tower – City Wall = http://goo.gl/bSY4io and Giant Wild Goose Pagoda @ http://youtu.be/iu342lr_KFY
2. photos for this trip at http://goo.gl/0JquHn

When the television is off for a week and there is nothing to do but nothing to do the world is really an OK place. It was not really our own choice but the choice was good. A few things this past week have not been our choice but then again we have been making do with ‘outside’ and ‘others’ choices for a lot this year. The first few days we stayed at the Warriors Apartment in Xi’an. In the Bajiaxian Xihuanmen hood to be specific. There were no television stations in any of the many languages that we speak/understand: Australian English, American English (Narda questions whether that is really English – ‘just a dialectic of the Queen’s English badly butchered’), New Zealand English, Canadian and of course Narda speaks the language of her birthplace up there in Utrecht (The Netherlands) but anything else we have to turn the telly off for and anything else was all there was on the television in the Warriors Apartment in Xi’an. The rest of the week in the apartment we were in we were not ever able to sort out how to turn the television on. We tried every button and every combination of every button and just saw characters on the screen that seemed to be laughing at us in our ignorance of how to put meaning to them. I have a Ph.D in communication (constructed all in Australian English – 155,000 words, 550 pages with diagrams and images – http://neuage.org/ODAM) which is all about the construction of meaning – see image below – but in that whole seven years of research and of course the masters and other degrees leading to that, I never learned how to put meaning to the images we were seeing on the telly so we could figure how to get the bloody thing to go to an actual television station. Of course we no doubt would not have found a station in any language that we understood if we did so we would not have known what was going on in the world after all, especially the first few days of our stay at the Warriors Apartment in Xi’an where we did not get Internet either.

I will attempt to stay on task of our trip to Xi’an; though, as I have not written since returning from summer break and our little journey to the States, Australia and Malaysia and we have had a very busy month since returning to work and the weekend before going to Xi’an we were on the North Korea border staying in Dandong I probably will have moments of drifting to other thoughts/insights/visions/illuminations/realizations/memories and the like.

Speaking of drifting – I write for myself – if no one reads anything I write ever that is fine. I have had comments that my spelling infuriates some (I switch from Australian to whatever it is the Yanks speak – being a duel citizen and all) so my excuse is color is colour and sometimes a ‘z’ is an ‘a’ and some words are slang and some no doubt I have made up and that is my writing that I do for myself because I enjoy writing and I do it for myself and I do a lot of writing to remember what we have done. I wrote a 170,000 word book called ‘Leaving Australia’ and made two bound copies of it; one for my son and one sits on my shelf and I like to read it sometimes as it helps me remember stuff. I don’t even have portions of it on-line. Anymore. I did for awhile but some characters that I have met along the way who were in my narrative were really upset to find their portrayals on-line; true that it was but of course we all have those sections of life we pretend never happened and hope that no one will ever divulge either. But my story is also the story of interactions with people in specific situations at a certain time and space that we shared and to change or even delete those moments makes the continuum of my story choppy and invested with deep holes – so that is why I only printed two books.

On the way to Xi’an the funnest of funnies… because of the upcoming national holiday the stewardess gave everyone China flags to wave – which they did. Following that people went up to the front and sang stuff. A stewardess came and asked me to sing. I said Narda was not only a professional singer but also a music teacher of course Narda did not hear all of this and the next thing she knew I was pushing her up the aisle. And even though I could not get a video of her singing because of all the people standing in front of me I did listen as everyone on the plane did. She of course could not sing a Chinese patriotic song but she did make up a song using happy birthday. Some words about ‘I wish you well China and on and on…’ we all cheered and my only disappointment is that I did not get it recorded.

Warriors Apartment in Xi’an. I will start with that. Because the place had a top listing for places to stay in Xi’an (Ranked #1 of 86 Xi’an B&B and Inns by Trip Advisory) and it looked as funky as could be we booked it some six weeks ago, August 24^th to be precise, it was the place for us. We spent a lot of time trying to find the owner of the place. All the web searches for it lead to Expedia, Agoda, travelpod, booking.com and all the rest are just to rent the place. We did find the actual telephone number eventually and rang the owner who had his wife meet us at the airport bus stop. It was fortunate that we did as the place is almost impossible to find. It is located down an alley after a few other side streets. It is not a building dedicated to the Warriors Apartment but in actual fact three apartments, one located on the 7^th floor where there is no Internet and two on the second floor. The building is about 25 stories high and is amongst many other tall buildings all several decades old. We booked a one-bedroom apartment for a week and were happy to be given a two-bedroom apartment. Inside is so much our style. Who would not want to have a home with warriors all over the place? In every room including the kitchen and about 40 holding up the bed (no comments please)

as well as four holding up the sink in the bathroom.

Warriors-Apartment

warriors apartment behind the bed

 We were only about five minutes walk to Beiyuanmen Muslim Street which is the in place to hang out. Because we went during the Chinese National Day holiday week (celebrating the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949) the place was so packed that there were times we could not move in any direction. 

See http://goo.gl/S2dh8L or click on the QR code. 

We got out to see the Terracotta Warriors in the morning. Bus lines were enormous with a couple of hours wait for the tourist bus that is mentioned in Lonely Planet. We gave up and found a more of a local bus on the other side of the car park – bus 615, which got us there in an hour and we waited only about 20 minutes. We came back on bus 614 which took two hours but that was because of traffic. The pits were will worth seeing once in a life time. (lines were much longer than appears here – they wrap around and go out past the train station and through a large car park out to the main bus station across the road.)

 In pit one, the largest of the diggings, they have gotten the furthest since starting back in 1974.

I could never have been one of the people digging these things up. It is all quite painstaking and required endless amounts of time using small brushes and files to scrape off thousands of years of muck. In pit two and one which are smaller – there is still digging and crap going on to expose all this. We have a book written by the owner of the Warriors Apartments which is quite good and of course there is heaps on the Internet.

I wanted to go to the top of the mountains across the road but we did not have the time. We were an hour from Xi’an and still the pollution was so thick that even at noon the mountains looked too hazy to get a good glimpse of.

To divert a bit. We got home yesterday afternoon and as always had a Jack-driver meet us at the airport and we did our shopping for the month on the way home. In the afternoon we were just chilling and after dinner I was in the kitchen and without warning I blacked out and ended on the floor. I only say this now as I will probably forget somewhere in the future – like next week – and I want to record what happened. As a person who has never fainted or passed out before it was a unique experience. One minute I was putting something in the microwave and the next I was gaining consciousness on the floor. I did not feel light headed or any signs of anything even a second before. I did not even recall going down. Narda said I looked in shock when I came to. The whole event lasted seconds but I did get some aches and pains such as a twisted knee from crashing to the floor. What is slightly interesting in all of this is that things just happen maybe even for no reason. I felt fine after and we went and used the large massage chair on the second floor, coming home feeling great. So today I went to the S.O.S clinic on the first floor and Dr. Wilhelm looked after me. He took some blood, did an EKG which he sent to Hong Kong for a specialist to look at (oh boy maybe we get to fly to Hong Kong next week) and spent more than an hour doing all kinds of tests and at this point we do not know why I kissed the floor. Being a holiday week and the staff mostly out of town I pretty much had the clinic to myself. I only mention all this because nothing like this has ever happened before. In Xi’an the traffic was brutal. Cars, buses, scooters, trucks and people all going in all directions often in total disregard of any laws that would be in place if anyone was around to enforce them. (Travel operators in China have a huge new set of rules to follow now that the country’s first tourism law is in place. The 112-article law came into effect October 1 But I do not think it applies to people trying to get through an intersection) All manner of vehicles go through red lights so they are not a deterrent from disaster. Narda and I surely mingled with the masses and crossed in-between buses and carts and all the rest. Our tactic is usually to use others as a human shield and cross in the midst hoping others will protect us. Luckily for any reason I did not have a black out – my one and only of my life – in one of those crossing the street situations. And luckily we were not riding bikes in our dangerous fashion alongside main roads and darting across roads in front of traffic that would not be aware of a red light or anything else that could possibly slow down their forward motion.

We did ride bikes in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi province on the wall that surrounds the city. It is one of the oldest cities in China and the largest city in the world in 582 according to people in the know. There is all kind of historical crap to look at. We rode up on the wall that surround the city. It is some 14 kilometers and we rode three-fourths of it. Because we rented bikes for only 100 minutes and we are old and slow and take way too many photos and videos and there are four bike rental areas at the four main turns of the wall: yes, the North and the South and the West and the East gates we only got to the third gate by the time we peeled our sorry asses off of the bike seat.

After the first days in the Warriors Apartment we had a bit of a shock. At the door was standing three people and the owner’s wife. She said they too were booked into our apartment. It did not register at first and when I saw it was three teachers from our school – that we live on the same floor as – I welcomed them in thinking they were in the second floor apartment. We knew they were staying at the same place so this was not a totally unreasonable thought to have. It was not like waking up on the kitchen floor wondering how I suddenly passed out. Low and behold they had their bags with them and were told they could stay in our second bedroom. Now we realise that there is a difference in customs and how people interact. Perhaps in the local Chinese world having three people in a bedroom and another couple in the other is not uncommon. But these three women had already paid for the apartment we were in and not only that but more than Narda and I had. So of course everyone, except the owner, was upset. I just sort of drifted out of the picture knowing that four pissed off middle age women would figure stuff out a lot more efficiently than a 66 year old ex-hippie. The owners blamed Agoda saying they stuffed up the booking. The women called Agoda and Agoda rang the owner who said everything was fine and that he was taking care of it. What a balls-up – never seen such a situation. Right up there with fainting for the first time in my life. I suppose that is why life is mildly interesting to me it is so incredibly unpredictable.

We were told to wait until six pm, but it was about 7.30 when Clarence showed up to sort out the dilemma. In the meantime everyone was a bit agro. His initial ‘idea’ was for us all to stay together and he would refund some money. Well that was a stupid idea so he said he would go off and look for something to move someone into. As we had booked a single room apartment it was obvious that we were going to get the boot and we did. Clarence, his wife and son all showed up and with Narda and I were taken out of the old quarter that we were really getting to like and into some crappy new city area quite the distance. The apartment we were given was terrible. Clarence said that it would be very difficult to find a place because of the holiday. The apartment was dirty, there was left over food in the small kitchen and the bathroom was just dirty. We were quite upset but that is where we were left. Whose fault it was, whether it was Agoda not passing on the booking or Clarence’s it was handled very badly. He had no problem with taking the money – which incidentally was on the same day – we independently rented the same apartment in the same city on the same day – 24^th of August. Clarence saw them as the same booking but of course anyone would see that there were two lots of money. We were exhausted by the time we got to the apartment and did not put up enough of a fight.

As always is the case we made the best of our new surroundings. We found our way to the subway and took Line 1 which began operation on September 15, 2013, like a couple of weeks ago. I love subways and always ride one in a city comparing them to New York City and Paris which not as old as London are great subway lines. I have never been on a subway line that is less than a month old. OK there was nothing special and it was so crowded because of the holiday that we barely could get on. But it did get us back into the old quarters. We were also near the Big Wild Goose Pagoda (Dayan Pagoda) which was begun in 652 and though another pagoda is not so exciting we did go to the fountain light show in the evening. I have some good footage in youtube but my still photos of the fountain light show are a bit average as you can see but I did get this fairly OK shot of the pagoda thingy.

Again there were so many people it was difficult getting around. Outside of spending a couple of more days tromping around Xi’an, riding the metro and looking at huge shopping malls that were fancy from the outside but just like every other shopping mall inside were the same old we just looked around at another polluted over crowded city.

However in one mall was this huge screen on the ceiling,

This ceiling LED display of more than 3000 square meters (168 meters long and 17.92 meters wide) located in Qin Han Tang Emporium which is next to the Goose Pagoda was impressive. I will have a clip on my youtube site at http://youtube.com/neuage09 any moment now. At the same time as writing this I am editing clips in Adobe Premier Pro Creative Cloud – my new favourite subscription software in a suite of lots of groovy creative projects. I am loving After Effects and Photoshop along with some 20 plus other programs but Premier definitely does for me at the moment. Having hundreds of video clips and a thousand photos I will have enough to do, along with an actual job, and being a caring/listening/nurturing husband (will there be time for that?) to keep me off the streets for awhile or hopefully off of the kitchen floor.

Thankfully I was not hanging onto the side of a tuk tuk as it found its way through traffic. These things are off-putting to me but as Narda likes them we do ride them in various countries.

I started a new series here at Dalian American International School – the DAIS Cooking Show. Well, I have had one show which was with meat eating Patrick. He showed how to make meat burgers – good grief, and in front of me too; I showed my tofu burger making skills refining one of my recipes from http://neuage.us/tofu/ where I showcase experiences/recipes/stories garnished from seven years as a tofu manufacturer in Adelaide, South Australia. We filmed it all with two cameras; a Nike and our new school semi-professional JVC. I now have several hours of banter, silliness, cooking, eating and live audience (Narda, Sean, Jean, JoeFred – not a big audience) to edit. I have several other shows getting lined up and soon the next in the series will be up and hopefully by the end of the school year some mega China television broadcasting networking system will offer me a huge contract to show what to do with tofu on live television… oh wait! This is China – home of tofu. Well I am giving it a shot that is for sure.

I did like the street we were on, it had art all along it much like we saw in Mexico City.

Here are just a couple of the pieces – there were probably a hundred:

At the end of it all after walking 8 – 10 hours a day for five days in a very polluted Chinese city I think we would have been better off on one of the other holidays teachers took this week such as to Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, inner Mongolia and lots of better holidays than we took. Not to worry we are off to Thailand for three weeks at Christmas and lots of other great destinations for the next holidays.

The weekend before we left on our Warrior-less Apartment we went the three hour drive up to Dandong with about 55 people from our school. Dandong is across a narrow river divide of North Korea.

Walking out on Friendship bridge we could see the fake amusement park on the North Korea side. The Ferris wheel is just a cut-out thingy. We did hear children playing and actually saw them playing along the river. Online stories say this part of North Korea has been tarted up for tourist to look across and see that everything is quite normal. 

The boat trip is well worth it and I even got up close to some North Korean soldiers,

Maybe I could get them interested in my tofu cooking class.

At the Museum Commemorating the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea there is lots of anti-Western stuff to look at. I photographed several of their write-ups but not having been in this part of the world and only having an American view I can not comment on what the beef was all about.

But Dandong is not just about North Koreans and their possibly tainted view of us – I mean Kim Jong Un is friends with Dennis Rodman, they are BFFs, how could they be anything but sympathetic toward others?

The best thing to do is go along the wall where it starts. Of course this was before I blacked out in my kitchen and twisted my knee (there goes my softball career – every Sunday we play against a team from Taiwan here at school and this was going to be the game that I actually hit the ball far enough to get on base – saying all that, everyone is much younger than me) so I was able to climb and climb and climb. We were a bit worse for wear when we got to the top but the view was fantastic. We could see straight into North Korea but I did not see Kim Jong Un though he may have seen me.

DragonBoat Festivals, DiscoveryLand, B’days

China surely is the champion of what is and what is not and perceptions mashed together to morph into possibly acceptable perceptions, but not really. Reality is a mistaken illusion – it always has been; look at religion, personal-relationships and politics and education…. Maybe it is best not to look to see but to look to enjoy – surely not to look to ponder or philosophize, that would be akin to giving accreditation to what is really all just for fun. Do not take what you perceive to be real as truth, just enjoy. This is China – I tell myself that often – just as I would tell myself that in those psychedelic moments of the 1960s, or in my Tarot Card readings and mystical belief system of the 1970s and astrological interpretations of events/thoughts/life for some 40 years before waking up one day and saying ‘this is bullshit’. Perception is just how we colour reality in front of us. To me China and the 1960s have similarity in their un-realness. The moment is just about fun, to enjoy, to build memories for future moments when life returns to boring, which from my experience it always does.

A week from today school is over and we are preparing to travel to New York, Atlanta, Malaysia, Australia but today is a holiday; Dragon Boat Festival. Duān wǔ jié happens on the 5^th day of the 5^th month of the lunar calendar and believe it or not I did not get a pop up message on my phone, ipad, computer; not from Google Calendar – which boldly proclaimed ‘you have no new events’ – surely it could have said ‘go back to bed it is a holiday’ but no – no reminders or messages to tell me of this glorious event. And to contribute to all those bloody fives I was wide awake at five AM demanding of my unwilling mind to go back to sleep because this is a holiday.

According to Chinese custom folks race boats, eat Zongzi, and drink wine – pretty much like an Aussie Barbie celebration for anything.

Then last night we were watching that most stupid of series (that everyone else is ranting and raving about how it is the best series of all time; what??!!!) ‘Game of Thrones’ and that idiotic Southern California blonde chick started season two or is it three – it is so mindless that I am always updating my web-pages during it and forget where in the story we are – she goes and gives birth to dragons. Good golly how could anyone like this? Narda says we should just watch it for a while because everyone is ranting and raving that it is the best series of all time and maybe at some point we may like it or at least understand what is going on. She said that about Dexter too. All that blood. We watched the whole bloody thing – to give realism to that Australian/Pommie saying – but of course I was updating my web-pages during all of that but at least it was easy to follow – just find a baddie and kill him.

From an email to staff at our school about today from our Mandarin teacher:

‘This Festival is to commemorate an upright minister called Qu Yuan. He was an excellent poet and literati as well in 300BC, the end of the Spring and Autumn Dynasty. To protect the country, Qu Yuan advised many suggestions to his emperor. While the emperor was irritated and Qu Yuan was put into a river and drowned. People were sad and took boats to save Qu Yuan, and meanwhile they wrapped zong zi and throwed into river, avoidding fishes eating Qu Yuan’s body.

Until today Chinese people retain the traditions. First zong zi was made by sticky rice only, and gradually zong zi has different types like meat inside, peanut inside. I like the very first type– with rice only–and dip some sugar on it.’

When we were asked to sign up for a celebration of all of this last Sunday we were informed that only 20 could go and a bus would take us to the Tong li Gong Palace in Kaifaqu.  Of course I was excited being the academic tourist that I am. I quickly sent an email to reserve seats for Narda and I. I could barely restrain myself from running down to her room to share this wonderful news that not only had I registered for us to go but we were accepted on the bus that would only take 20 of us most chosen to this glorious event. Well she was a bit less than thrilled and wanted to know why I would want to go and hear some children singing songs. Now perhaps I had a misconception as normally I do of the reality of the event. Dragon Boat Festival? Well it sounded really great to me. I had no idea it could be anything else. Narda said that the Tong li Gong Palace was not a palace but was the women and children’s centre of Jinzhouixinqu. Damn! She had taken a first grade class there to sing earlier in the year and it is where the owner of Dalian American International School has a language school which many of our teachers work at in their spare time – though being a teacher at this school I am not sure when there is spare time.

At another time in my life I would have been disappointed but at my age everything tends to be so unlike I thought it would be at the start that I have become immune to concepts of disappointment. I suppose I would be surprised if anything in my life turned out to be how I imagined it to be at the start of the process of adventure that I had hurdled myself at before crashing into a wall of reality.

The big day arrived – last Sunday, and dragging a complaining Narda to the lobby to mingle with the assumed 20 teachers who were quick enough to sign up before the bus was full we were greeted by the other three teachers who signed up to go. We ended up going in two cars instead of a bus load of chirping, happy, Dragon Festival celebrating mates. I like the entrance to Tong li Gong Palace which of course by now I had realized was not a palace but as all things in China are – just a misconstrued notion of what a palace would be if it was a four floor office building. And yes that is a huge construct of a mother and child on top of the building – giving away any illusion that it could be anything else. Not sure when angels arrived on the Chinese mindset but there they are, western looking cherubs up there with a not very Chinese looking mother. Welcome to China where we are not quite sure of our icons or what we should believe in.

And as luck would have it – there is a YouTube clip of this wonderful event at http://youtu.be/KO8GHLMuKFQ  – another one of those ‘gone- viral’ extremely-sought-after video clips; wait that is my illusion – now three days later – there has been one hit to it. I think that was me looking at it on another computer.  But to save my two or three readers who no doubt have had a gut-full and have stopped reading by now, the thrill or agony of watching yet another one of my five-hundred plus video clips I will simply say yes some children sang, a grop danced; but that is not all. We made zong zi – a sticky rice, bean paste, red date in banana wrap thingy. However, I was a total failure and after being tutored by a patient local gal with great wrapping skills who patiently showed me over and over how to fold the stupid things quit – or I quit – here is a photo of me trying this – of course the YouTube video at http://youtu.be/KO8GHLMuKFQ shows this even better.

The other highlight – other being second to me making zong zi, was this traditional paint dude who we were told is famous. OK I have thousands of web pages and more than five-hundred  videos on line – I bet he has not done that – anyway, all those pesky planets I have in Leo constantly get in my story-line; this painter dude made a great ink drawing. I think we are taking a course with him in the fall so that will be groovy. He did this calligraphy & Chinese zither in about ten minutes.  You can see this in the video at http://youtu.be/KO8GHLMuKFQ.

To quote some stuff from the program list of what we saw:

• Children poetry chanting: “the new san zi jing” – always a thrill to watch
• Children game: ”ding ji dan” (hitting eggs with others – in this game children bash each other’s boiled duck egg and the first egg to crack is the loser – good grief)
• Children folk dance: “Xiao a’ ge” (little brother)
• Children folk game: Shooting “five poisonous animals” (actually throwing darts at a dart board)
• Prize-awarding ceremonies – this is where the Zongzi making ladies were awarded for their making of Zongzi and unfortunately my instructor was in the third place category which could give credence to my belief that it was not really my fault for being such a dismal failure at making Zongzi but that I lacked proper instruction.

It is two days ago, Monday that I started off talking about but having woken at five AM – it is now after 8 and Narda is still happily sleeping the holiday away and I am fading I drifted off about what today’s holiday actually was for – a dragon boat festival but as we are on the sea and not on a proper lake or river there are no races.

Monday, we, well Narda did not go as elementary stayed at school and sang or rolled about or whatever elementary children do, took the middle school and high school children to Discoveryland (大连发现王国). Discoveryland is our province’s concept of what Disneyland would be if created by Chinese. Yes I have a YouTube video at http://youtu.be/lOoeM46fwl0, and yes I do a lot of work not only at school but at home for school – I just fit in my own personal crap early in the morning or while watching riveting TV shit-shows like Game of Thrones. This is my early morning holiday last posting probably before flying off to New York next week.

We were doing one of those amazing race races. I do not agree with children doing a learning project for hours before having time to play on their own. They pay their own fee in to the amusement park, 100 RMB (about $15 US) – which is cheap compared to the States and to have to do work for hours is nuts. This year we teachers each had a station with an exercise for the students to do – my event was to take a photo of a one-perspective and a two-perspective line up of the children. We all have an advise group and I have 10 middle school children in mine. So my advise group started off at my station which was an OK place as it was beneath a building providing some shade. After my event they draw a card to see where the next exercise is and go off to that. The important part is that they work together and stay together and do the exercise. Well after ten minutes two of my girls come back and want to rent a scooter to go around from event to event. Of course I said no as one of the rules is not to run to the next event or lost ten-points. We did not make a rule that children could not rent a scooter to go from event to event because who would allow such a thing? So the girls run off to the principal and ask and he says yes they can so they do. That was the end of my advise group’s cohesion and after a couple of hours the other children in my group came back and said they could not do the events because they could not find the girls roaring around on their scooter so I dismissed them and said go have fun.

Frank had it more difficult as his station was on a bridge with no shade and there he stood for hours in the hot sun.

Discoveryland

As it is Dragon Boat festival week holiday the place was crowded – not sure why we would go on a holiday and not a week earlier but such is life. Lines to rides were four hours long instead of the usual two. Only a few children went on a ride – for the most part they wandered around in the afternoon and the ones I saw did not seem that happy. I took lots of photos of our students as I do to put on the TV screen in the window of my computer lab and to have footage for my twice weekly in-house TV show that I do with my film class so I was entertained. My favourite part is their Discoveryland Parade. As tacky as any such thing would be this is especially strange as they have mostly non-Chinese in the parade. Most of the participants are youthful Russians. The Egyptian group consisted of very camp males in their twenties dressed in gold skirts and gold plastic to look like metal tops dancing as if they were the Village People doing WMCA. On top of the floats were youthful females with few clothes on wiggling about.

I got a lot of short clips that I can use as backgrounds as my film class has gone blue-screen crazy.

Last Saturday was Narda’s birthday – see the wonderful clip of this most timely of events at http://youtu.be/ik8Ms09Q-NY

Narda said she just wanted to gig for her birthday so here at Campus village cafe at Dalian American International School that is what she did

The best of living in Campus Village, assisted living, as we call it is that our little community tags along together. Last night we went out to the Discoveryland Hotel for beer and food – the people are great – the ones we work with – the beer was what it is in China but the food was crap. I struggled to find a vegetarian dish and that ended up being tofu with fish – so that concept got lost in the translation. For Narda’s birthday a dozen or so old people came to our flat for din din – we made up a good vegetarian lasagna and some other stuff. Everyone seemed happy – a few murmurs about ‘oh no no meat’ but that is the way it is in my kitchen. We went the three-floors down to Campus Café and Narda with the others were happy, sounding great and entertained us and the other twenty – thirty folks. It was by far her best birthday in the past 13 years since we left Australia. Being early June – the problem with Gemini – we have not been around her family in so long. But with our community and with a microphone and good musicianship her birthday came to life.

Skip to my loo

It is so fundamental but the loo can so govern the day, especially in China. (Loo being Australian/British and etc. for toilet: (From Wikipedia:  “When people flung their potty waste out of the window, they would shout “Gardez l’eau” [gar-day low]. That’s French for “watch out for the water”. We probably get the word “loo” from this expression, although some people think it comes from “Room 100” which is what European people used to call the bathroom.”  “The word appears to originate no earlier than James Joyce’s usage in Ulysses in 1922 — “O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. water closet.” — perhaps Joyce came up with it.”)

My favorite is at the Shangrali in Shanghai with a remote control for many functions; spray water, various forms of heat and many buttons that I did not try. The loo at the Vutup Dentist Clinic at the Shangrali Hotel Dalian is a treat. As soon as the door is open the seat pops up, it is warm and it too has buttons. I have yet to be game to push them but Narda tried one and it gave her a bit of a spray wash – she did not try the other buttons.  OK the picture does not give much of the pleasure of use but compared to the usual toilets in China, even at the ultra- modern new Dalian North Railroad station, it is a real find. I hate squat toilets and in my two years here have not used one except to pee. Anything else waits until I get home or find a western hotel. Last week a woman’s baby got flushed down one (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/chinese-baby-flushed-down-toilet-1923771) and survived. I always thought that someday I should have therapy about the fact I was put in an orphanage and taken out three times then finally adopted by some mad-cap Christians in 1950 but this person is going to really need therapy. Narda has the technique down – the squatting part and does not mind too much. She

has demonstrated to whomever is interested – not in real-action, but showing us a good squat position to make things move along. The worst toilets are in the Jinshitan Market where, if one can get past the smells, even the women just squat along a wall with an open trough. Narda, a user of said trough, could not understand the gestures of a woman squatting next to her one time. She kept point a finger in the air – not the finger but a finger – this is China where people are not as rude as us Westerners. Then Narda realised the woman was telling her to put her bag on a hook on the wall so it would not touch the foul floor.

Toilets in Holland I find difficult too, and though they are proper sit-down toilets the drain is placed in the front so everything sits not in water but on the base, stinking up the room until flushed.

I suppose if one watched heaps of ER shows, or Grey’s Anatomy and had an interest in what their deposits in the loo looked like they could easily observe it in a Dutch toilet.

Not sure how I got onto this topic when there was so much other I wanted to note to remember the past two weeks, but at one am I was so wide awake and it being
Saturday night well actually Sunday morning I thought I would write a bit then go back to bed. It is now three AM and my concern is that I will be sleepy for Sunday which I suppose is fine as all we will do is shop at the local Longshawn Village for veggies and tofu for the week. Couple with the fact that I have taken photos of loos for some odd reason – maybe just to appreciate what a proper one with heat, spray and the what-not incorporated within. I think adding music would be good – something classical – though hip-hop could be OK. Even country and western would be fine – they are always talking about loss. Then there are the blues, surely we could have some really good B King tunes play when we sat and shat. The one at the Vutup Clinic is adequate though. As soon as the door is open the seat cover pops up and when you leave it goes back down. It does not differentiate between male or female so the seat ring thing is still down and needs to be lifted for the male release thing.

It is three am so I will try once again to go to sleep. I had already lain awake for an hour before getting up at one am. My mind is so active. Not sure why. School is full-on, we leave for the summer in two and a half weeks for the States a couple of weeks then Australia for four weeks and a side trip to Malaysia so it is all pretty chilled and no reason not to sleep. I tried to contact the inner Self and find peace and solace using techniques I learned back in the 1970s when I was a brother in the Holy Order of Mans but they did not work and I question these past few years whether all what I once believed in whilst in my decade long metaphysical stupor was real or are we just caught up in evolution’s game being nothing more than the ones who prepare the next generation who will do the same and within all that the species evolves toward something or the other?

Yesterday we went into Dalian on the 轻轨, qing gui (light rail), thinking by leaving at 8:30 we would get a seat in but no luck it is always so crowded. Out of boredom I wrote down all the stations on line 3 – speaking of threes – most of the stations are broken into three words on the signs though in reality, my reality, they are really one word: Jin Shi Tan, Xiao Yao Wan (the stop for the future city, Wolong Bay, that is being built – see my youtube video from last year at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drgVo45WWs) DD Port, Bao Shu Qui,

Kai Fai Qu (5 colur city see my clip of Kaifaiqu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAz3eqFzfRg), Jim Ma Li, Da Lian Wan (in the Ganjingzi District of Dalian City), Hou Yan, Auan Shui (markets), Jin Jai Jie, Xiang Lu Jiao (Metro, Sams Club, Decathlon sports store – 迪卡侬(香炉礁店, Ikea) and finally stopping at the last stop –  Dalian Station. The school’s shopping bus stops at Metro where we fill boxes and suitcases of what we need for a month then put it on the bus and go off for the day. The bus driver unloads our crap back at Campus Village and we collect it whenever we drag our sorry asses back home.

, about a 45 minute ride, Narda managed to rush onto the train at the Dalian Station

and get a seat. I was fast but when a hundred Chinese are going for a couple of dozen seats it is the really quick who get a seat and I was left standing to analyze my poor strategy for getting a seat. Never the one to shy away from strangers I saw Narda and the girl next to her passing the girl’s cell phone back and forth. They did this all the way to the Kai Fai Qu station where suddenly Narda moved over giving me a space to sit. They were using the phone to carry on a conversation with both translating back and forth and the topic of discussion was that when the girl got off I would have a seat. At the start of their ‘conversation’ the girl wrote that Narda could help her with learning English. This is what is so enjoyable about living here; people will find a way to communicate whether they share a common language or not.

Last weekend Narda’s sister, Carolin and her husband Michael stopped in for a couple of days. They are celebrating being fifty and are on the way to Holland, England, France and places like that. On Saturday evening we went into Dalian on the light rail – kuai-gui to stay overnight at the Harbour View Hotel and we went to see the Beijing Beatles on the rooftop at the Lenbach German Restaurant ( Xinghai Square). They

were sponsored by the International Club of Dalian. I have a short video clip at http://youtu.be/WzsnK6uUQx8 without watching the clip let it suffice to say they were quite terrible sounding. Narda had just done a Beatles concert a few days earlier with her elementary children and they were much better. A couple of Narda’s fourth/fifth graders were at the gig and they went on stage and told the Beijing Beatles who by the way are from Australian and great Britain – that they sang the wrong words for Yellow Submarine. The children would know that one as they sand it for weeks before their concert. I heard them daily as my video-film studio at Dalian American International School is next door to Narda’s music room. A lot of my little video shows I do twice weekly with my students for the school to play has her children singing off in the background because of our thin walls. There were a lot of expats at the show – many from our school and it was enjoyable no matter the fact that they were not in harmony, missed lyrics, and were just generally horrible. They have a website which make them sound good http://thebeijingbeatles.com/ but in reality – think of a college piss-up where everyone knows the lyrics because it is the Beatles and there is a lot of drinking going on and no one really cares how bad the band sounds because it is so easy to sing along.

We have two weeks left of work then we are off to the States (NYC, upstate New York, and Atlanta), Malaysia, and Australia then back at the start of August. As usual life is hectic at school with so many things to deal with. In my little world things are great with my film class and our setting up a film program and studio. We have been going nuts with blue screens and having lots of interesting backgrounds. I am still looking for a proper professional camera for next school year with little luck. I will probably have to wait until Australia to get one. It has been an amazing year for me both as technology integration coordinator as we move toward a one-to-one device program. It is a challenge with so many devices and operating systems. Back at Albany Academy when I was the Director of Technology it was straight forward, we all used macs and that was it. In my video production class thanks to an Intel grant we are getting set up well and coming with good products, looking forward to next school year.

In my little self-centred world I have been creating web pages since the early 1990s when the World Wide Web was first invented. I have created thousands of pages and have many domains as any self-serving Leo would: neuage.org, http://neuage.me, neuage.mobi, neuage.us, neuage.info, to name just a few. Last week I put a tracker-cookie on 590 pages (about ten percent of my pages) so I could have a better idea of where people go so I could improve and change them to more mobile friendly and perhaps start creating neuage apps for my tofu pages or my picture poems, children stories, many blogs and etc. I thought it would give me a good idea of where the masses are flocking to. As a night-mare on Leo Street would have it after three days I had one hit to one page out of 590. I think I could be in a record book for having the fewest visits to the most created pages on the web. Narda does not understand why I would care if anyone visited any of my webpages but she is a Gemini so I understand her confusion. I have Mars conjunct Uranus in Gemini so I do have a little bit of non-Leo in my makeup and I know that part of me; Mars and Uranus confuse me often as well as those around me.

When Narda’s sister and brother-in-law were here last weekend we went to the

And in Dalian to the Korean Market

Just another weekend in China

Just another weekend in China though with a different set of events/thoughts/wanderings….

• Chinese Visa Office
• 11th Annual Dalian International Walking Festival
• Soggy day
• ‘Famous French and English Bands’ at the Chateau du Vin Bordeaux
• Beatles concerts
• And so much more

Actually this is more than a weekend memory of what-we-did as Thursday and Friday is just as much of this extended weekend at least in my memory as Saturday and Sunday is. Of course Thursday and Friday were work days. With my job as technology coordinator however I am always on the job as I read technology and educational blogs and updates whether I am at school or on the shopping bus, sitting on the loo or waiting in a dentist’s office. Saturday whilst Narda was in the dentist chair for more than an hour I took enough notes from what I had found to be potentially useful stuff for possible integration or to-try at school that I will be spending days engaging with it. There are so many blogging-filming apps now that I am looking forward to what I can do with my classes next year that are specializing in multimedia, and film specifically. This is an exciting time to be developing a film program in a school. Helping students to become always-journalist will be one of the most important lessons for them. Journalism has not changed but the delivery and sharing has. When I was doing my journalism degree at the start of the 1990s I concentrated on radio-broadcasting, helping to start the community radio station E-FM (Encounter FM) in Victor Harbor, South Australia. My part of the radio station needless to say was news and children’s radio (CAR = Children’s Australian Radio – my little contribution to Australian community radio) where my children managed to star on.

I am teaching broadcast journalism along with filming.  Merging these with social sites and story development and sharing more than ‘we had pizza last night’ will greatly assist students. I am having them blogging using their phones as well as filming and bringing it into the classroom for editing. Next year I will collaborate with the English department (write the story), music department for backing tracks as well as my classes for filming and editing.

The next big shift in schools is from integrating technology to integrating film in every department. Students are already doing this in their life outside of school putting clips onto whatever site is their favorite at the moment. Students are self-branding all the time and assisting as well as providing time and space to do this will improve their self-image i.e. self-brand. We have been putting a lot of emphasis on student portfolios lately but social sites are there real portfolios and I feel that is the area we need to develop. Employers are looking at social sites as part of their investigations of potential new hires and if the social site has wonderfully crafted video-blogs and short films this becomes a living-portfolio. This area has not been very well addressed and it is an area I will be working on next year so students will have their shared-online-lives crafted to look like mini-film-festival. ‘The Festival of Me’ – it sounds so Leo and having five planets in Leo I feel qualified for such a category of instruction or for at least me. In my middle school publication class I have students making a magazine in InDesign titled ‘About Me’ where they create a whole newsletter/e-zine about themselves. Their initial reaction is that writing more than fifty words about themselves is impossible becomes more engaging when they write about their favorite video game or movie and get to insert photos (Creative Commons only of course) and interview each other and write up a commercial and on and on.

We have been corresponding with a school in India to do a collaborative on-line real-time film project and we have the assistance of a film producer in Los Angeles who recently had her film accepted into the Sundance film festival in Utah. Our class has been Skypping her and we have been discussing their individual projects for this quarter as she ‘looks over our shoulders’. My neighbor, Frank, and his wife are moving to Yangon, Myanmar to teach at an international school next year. We have been putting together a plan to do a collaborative film project which in my little world is quite exciting. I am thinking of his and my students writing a script together – back and forth then having our individual classes create and edit the script and have them playing side by side as one film with two interpretations of the same story. His students are mostly Myanmar citizens and mine are a collection from around the planet which would make this a very global endeavor.

To emphasize my integration of film in the student’s life where most of their daily short clips are posted to social sites from their smartphones..

An Australian filmmaker has won first prize at the Sundance London Film and Music Festival with a short film shot entirely on a Nokia Lumia 920 smartphone. The film explores the influence of hip hop, which started in the Bronx, on the indigenous communities in regional Australia and how it helped youth reconnect with tribal elders and tell stories using this style of music.

http://www.techguide.com.au/menu-news-by-categories/mobiles/1817-aussie-wins-film-festival-with-movie-shot-on-nokia-lumia-920-smartphone

see it on youtube at http://youtu.be/W8Lewbdm8lg

Last Thursday it was Narda’s elementary student concert, ‘All you need is love’ that put us into a Beatles mood. She has been doing a lot of work on this for the past months and I have been filming little segments as commercials for our school’s video-news show, DAISlive. As Narda’s biggest fan the past twelve years I would say this was up there with her best work. Of course it is not the same as when she did a Beatles tribute at Albany Academy in upstate New York a decade ago but that was with high school and there was dance involved as Albany Academy for Girls has a strong dance program. Being in a Beatles mood we are off to see the Beijing Beatles next weekend who are playing in Dalian. Carolyn, Narda’s sister and her husband are visiting from Australia then so they can too see what China has to offer to the musical past. One of the Beijing Beatles is from Australia so they couldn’t be that bad. The name of the show is We do like to be beside the seaside – tour to Dalian.

Friday we needed to collect our passports so we could go to the U.S. Consulate in Shenyang this coming Tuesday. Narda has to sort out some stuff with the Yanks and I have to go along being the Yank of a sponsor. As always these things are so complicated; whether to keep a Green Card – problem is being out of the States for the past two years, surrendering it is an issue and becoming a citizen is another kettle of fish. We just hope to be able to sort it out in one trip. With less than four weeks before we leave for the States she is now in no-man’s land. They won’t give her a visitor’s visa without tossing the Green Card and she may not be unable to renew the Green Card and now with the recent Boston problems the Yanks are all the more tighter about stuff. When we first went to the States in 2002, shortly after 9-11, we had a terrible time. According to many phone calls we had everything in order. When we arrived in Sydney – with our flight booked for the next day to New York, not only were they very rude to us but they said in the photos of Narda her ear was not showing enough and we would have to re-do the photo and come back in a week. At the time we were homeless, having sold Narda’s home in Adelaide, and storing away all our belongings we were left to cancel our flight with no idea when we would be able to get Narda with a visia. We were not going for a usual visit, we were moving there. I had been out of the country for 20-years so they said something about not having domicile and as a sponsor of Narda who, like me, had jobs in the States; she was at Albany Academy for Girls and me at the State University of New York at Albany, and my father was 97 years old waiting to see me before he left the planet. After three days of abuse by the wankers at the US consulate in Sydney I contacted my cousin Fredrick Miller who knew Congressman Sweeney and Sweeney sent a congressional letter to the consulate in Sydney. All of a sudden they were nice to me, and said I could come in right away and we could fly out in the evening. There was a period we thought we would never get in to the States. Now after living there for more than a decade, owning three homes and Narda having a son living in the States married to a Yank (I started the trend in her family of marrying non-Dutch people). Before I came bopping along Narda and her three sisters and all their relatives had only ever married Dutch people, having migrated to Australia from the Netherlands in the 1950s. Since me one son has married a Yank and lives in Atlanta, Georgia and another son has married a POM – prisoner of Mother England, and her third son now in India, has a pommie girlfriend too so I changed their directions. They had all been staying in the Dutch genetic pool for five-hundred plus years; so they must be thankful to me. To make a too long story short about going to New York my father hung around for another five years and we were happy that Sweeney was able to get us in. Fortunately for us this was before Sweeney got into a bit of trouble: In September 2006, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released its ‘The 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress’ and Sweeney was one of the 20.

Our visit to the Chinese visa issuing place was much different than the one to Sydney. We had one of those Chinese moments where everything takes longer and goes slow compared to what us Westerns want but after a couple of hours, chatting about stuff like the price of wine in Australia and how many children we had and lots of smiles and interpretations we got our passports with our official work-visa to July 31^st 2014. Being past 65 this is a big deal for me as in most provinces the work-visa limit is 60. I believe from our conversation at the visa office that Chinese retirement is 60 then I think they get a pension which puts away the thought that china does not look after their people.

What we are finding is that a lot of stuff we have been told in the Western media is quite different than the China we see on a day-to-day basis. People; whether authorities or folks in the street are really quite friendly. They stop and stare like we are from another galaxy but with five planets in Leo it does not bother me. They are generally a very curious lot and want to know about Westerns.  We are curious too; and of course I am very curious about their fascination with all things French as I will show in a moment.

Saturday was the big 11th Annual Dalian International Walking Festival. We signed up before realizing we had a dentist appointment at 11 AM. We figured we would walk for an hour then catch a cab into town. As things would have it, in a town that does not see much rain fall, all day Saturday it rained. I put on my waterproof ‘Tommy Hilfiger’ trendy coat (even old people like to look stylish) and we took the school van in a dozen or so other ‘walkers’ from school.

There were a lot of people, like many thousands, all with their umbrellas up headed out on the 5 – 30 kilometer walk going along the Coastal Road, “Bin Hai Road”. We had intended to do just the first five. Actually we did the first few blocks then disappeared up a side street and caught a cab to the dentist.

At the start of the race is Dalian Castle Hotel, a 6-star hotel (300 rooms) due to open December 1, 2013.

It overlooks Xinghai Bay, 星海广场 and of course a million or so walkers in May, rain or shine.

Of course it is the statue in front that I find even more interesting than a walled castle being constructed in the midst of a city;

Definitely my kind of hotel if I could afford a six-star hotel, I did not even know they had such a ranking.

After the dentist we took the light rail (轻轨, qing gui) to Kaifaqu. Normally we take the shopping bus and get our groceries but we missed the bus. Harbor Deli is one of our stops as it is near the Kaifaqu qing gui station which is the Five Colour City stop and they have Western crap; cheese, cereal and that which we cannot otherwise find. Of course the rain was ever present as we took a bus (for one RMB = 15 cents US) instead of walking to the green-door – not the name of the place but we have no idea what the sign says – and loaded ourselves down for the week.

We figured we would take a cab home but after a couple of cabbies said no and another said two-hundred RMB (30 bucks) we realized the only way home for us was to call Jack – our regular driver who came and collected us and took us for 70 RMB – about 1/3 the cost of a taxi. Of course it was not Jack himself but one of his mates – we call them all Jack. If this was Australia we would just add an o to the end as Australian’s do and call him Jacko but we don’t and we won’t.

We were so exhausted by the time Jack came as will as wet we were ready to go to sleep on the sidewalk. This is one of the most difficult things with living at Campus Village; the transportation is almost too difficult.  This is the second time we spent an exhausting Saturday and got ourselves stuck. If there is a lesson we are not learning it except that we should stop shopping anywhere but our local Long Shan Village.

We received the invite; ‘Famous French and English Bands’ at the Chateau du Vin Bordeaux in our school email. Chateau du Vin Bordeaux, which was called, last year, Chateau De Bourdeux, across the street from us – I can see it from my balcony. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTioCA7Ct44&feature=share&list=UUzGrI_yggI56Gpp2ZyNQAXw, a year ago) has been another castle dreaming of France but this one you can live at as they are  The Dalian Haichang Group is building 400 luxury villas in this style. We toured the place last year and when we asked why they had not sold any we were told because they were too expensive, like a million dollars plus. The Haichang Group have been purchasing lots of chateauxs in France – see The Chinese Chateaux In Bordeaux for the down-and-dirty. Of course we are hoping this will mean cheap French wine locally.

Some of my images for this afternoon visit to almost France – China style.

The first one is a view of our apartment from the local million dollars plus flat.

 

SOS China

SOS China

Dinner seemed fine, just scrambled eggs with a bit of cheese and hash brown potatoes. But a few minutes later I was sicker than ever in my life. Narda was OK so we ruled out food poisoning but after getting rid of dinner and all else before and getting worse by the minute Narda insisted on calling for help. This is not calling a hospital in the States or Australia which would have had Narda driving me to a hospital then me sitting in a waiting room for a long period as the world continued to swim around me and I did not know if I would survive another moment. Living here is what some would call a third-world spot; though China would not agree. I know we always say we do not want to end up in a Chinese hospital. But we had no worry of that.

I managed to say a few times that I would be OK – surely one more vomit and one more laying on the bathroom floor as I held on from blacking out then I would be fine. After the nagging wife said for too many times she should be calling for help I mumbled just call to see what they would say. Of course telling a wife such a thing is a green-light, open-door, the horse-has-bolted, thing to agree to.

We have the number for the SOS International medical emergency on our door. Narda rang telling my symptoms and some other medical stuff about me and a few minutes later our doctor said to meet him at the clinic in ten-minutes. Our doctor lives in our building though I do not know which apartment and the emergency routing service is through Beijing – off in the distance.

Again this is not the States or Australia where we are from. This is in a foreign country where only people around us speak English.

What is so unique is that we live in a community that has everything. The Dalian American International School with a large fence, gates, and guards 24-hours a day has more than a school within the compound. It has Campus Village, where we live, students live, and families working for Intel, Goodyear and the likes live. It also has a restaurant and most importantly a medical clinic. Last year we went to the clinic a few times for flu shots, occasional blood tests for some ongoing stuff and general checkups. It was only a few months ago that we saw there was more than the waiting room and a couple other rooms where doctors talked about their life in other countries in between prescribing medication. There were several other rooms for overnight patients and a whole little emergency room.

What is unique about this job is how our lives are so communal. At most schools people work together, sometimes go for a drink; when Narda was chair of the performing arts at Albany Academy in New York she would have her staff meetings at a local pub but aside of that most schools do not have such a community environment. Here I see the doctor at the gym or bike riding; I see kids at school, then at the Campus Café or on the shopping bus that trolls the highway between our compound and the nearest shopping areas half an hour away and on Saturday all the way into Dalian – more than an hour – where we go to Ikea, Metro or Sams Club to load up on crap. Parents are at the school, and then at the gym or swimming pool, at the café, doctor’s, chasing after their children on the school oval. Our actual living is a bit separated but in the same compound. We have the teachers wing – three stories of us, each with a different story to tell; the Chinese boarding students are in the same building but in a different wing with the boys on the third floor and girls on second; and administration, families and ‘important people’ living in larger flats in the next building and over and beyond that, yet still within the walls of our school area, are the townhouses that the expat employees live in. They are of course on a different pay scale than us and their children go to our school and they have drivers on call whenever they want to go someplace. We have drivers too but we have to pay them. Of course we are mere teachers and not movers and shakers at international companies.

And what is most interesting is our doctor who lives in the same wing as us; I think on the second floor – I have never been to his place. Doctors are on 24-hour duty and I think it is six weeks on and six weeks off duty. Our current doctor is from Ohio (I think) our other usual doctor is from South Africa. They belong to Doctors without Borders. They work in all sorts of environments and seem to have to know about everything as they are all we have to look after anything that can go wrong.

It was about 8:30 when Narda rang SOS-International in Beijing and they in turn rang our doctor who rang us and said to be at the clinic in ten-minutes. Our clinic is open 8 – 6 Monday to Friday and a bit on Saturday but of course in an emergency it is always open. Our current doctor, Steve, did lots of tests on me including an EKG (electrocardiogram) in between my staggering to the loo to vomit whatever was left which at this point was not much. Before long I was lying in bed in a room next to the emergency/operating room with an IV line in my arm and as the world spun a bit out of control I drifted off due to a combination of some heavy sleep inducing stuff and whatever other medication was being pumped in. As the clinic was closed Doctor Steve rang one of the nurses to come in and watch me throughout the night. When I was still conscious I felt bad about someone having to come in for the night when she was the day time nurse that day. Narda told me the next day that Doctor Steve slept in the room next to me with the door open instead of going back to his flat. During the night I was aware of the nurse checking me, taking blood pressure and checking the IV drip.

Narda came in a six in the morning and left a bowl of cereal and my soy milk. When I awoke at 8 I gave Narda the instructions to where my lesson plans for my classes were on the school drive so they could be passed on to whoever was taking my class.

At 8:30 the nurse took off the IV as I was feeling better and I wanted to go home – which in this case is taking the elevator up three floors. A nurse wanted to go with me in case I got dizzy but I insisted I was OK. I slept most of the day and today, Friday, I was back at school, though tired and weak it was good to know that I probably had some of the best care I could have had anywhere in the world.

Sometimes I think life was easier back in the States or in Australia (well not always; as a single parent for 20 years in Australia that was difficult) but I have never been in a place where a medical emergency was so quickly attended to.

Last summer Narda and I got hit from behind by a large truck on a four-lane highway in Mississippi at 70 mph and if it was not for the concrete blocks separating us from the oncoming traffic we would have been in a bit of a pickle but we just totaled the car and had shock but otherwise not injured. We waited for more than an hour that time in a very hot sun on a major freeway before the police arrived. If we had been injured we surely would not have been in an emergency room within fifteen minutes like here.

Of course if I had listened to Narda I would have been downstairs a couple of hours earlier and perhaps not have gotten myself into such an emergency state to begin with. Then again if I had not listened to her and decided to tough it out which was my notion then most likely I would not be writing this now.

To make a short story a tad bit longer; another amazing aspect of our close living together is everyone knows everything. Everyone I saw at school the next day, today, wanted to know how I was doing. The teacher next door heard me gagging and exploding in the bathroom so of course she wanted to know how I was.

And what happened? The doctor reckons it was a case of severe food poisoning. I ate the same as Narda for tea but for lunch we did not have the same thing. We usually come home and make a sandwich then go back to school unless I have lunch duty which I have twice every eight-day cycle. Lunch duty means eating with the kids downstairs in the café. But yesterday Narda stayed at school as she is doing heaps of extra work for the elementary concert; “All you need is love” a tribute to the Beatles, for next week. I went home and decided to have some pasta and to make a white sauce for it and as there was an open pack of milk in the fridge I used that instead of my usual soy milk. What we have sort of determined was that the long life milk was the culprit. Last Friday we had no electricity for about fifteen hours as I wrote about in the previous blog and stuff thawed out then re-froze; our long life milk packs we keep in the freezer. Then it could have been transit Mars in Taurus opposite Saturn in Scorpio making a T-square to my four planet conjunction in Leo (Venus, Saturn, Pluto and Sun and my Part of Fortune too all in my 10^th house). Whatever it was life in China is good. We often say it is safer here than living in the States or Australia mostly because folks don’t walk around with guns.

Walking home from school Narda and I pass the clinic and there is our doctor leaning out the window asking how I am feeling. Where else does that happen?

I use to live in communes in the San Francisco area in the 1960s and this is not far removed from that where everyone works and lives and plays together. I would like to have a large communal garden but as we all go away for the summer it won’t work.

Quoting Jean, “We can’t lose you – you are our mascot”. Good golly what does one do with that piece of knowledge?

Those were the days….

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 was 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.
   

   street artist Terrell New Orleans1972

   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.

   

   1969 Oregon Coast with Terrell and Desiree

   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 – https://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
   

   Neuage selling picture poems in Adelaide, South Australia 1994

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)
   

   Saint Terrell as astrologer – article from The Adelaide Advertiser 1982  about an international astrological conference I presented at

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.

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,

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.

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

Below gypsy Terrell in the 1970s.

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!