upstate New York

Reason to believe

July 12-13 2013: Friday/Saturday

Home – I think – after decades where home is becomes questionable I think we are home. If we go by where the majority of our crap is that would be China but if we go by where we own our home then that is either one of two houses in upstate New York but nether of them feels like home anymore and our house in New Jersey we saw our furniture in there last week but that no longer feels like home. So perhaps Adelaide is home but this is not quite what I remember. I lived in various places in South Australia from 1981 – 2002 so this I suppose is home. My children and I lived in ten houses in ten years during 1984 – 1995, a bit of an unstable time.

Australia as visiting-home; from 2002 until February 2013 we would visit for four or five weeks a year as we lived in New York then China. We even built a house in Adelaide, in Lochiel Park, that we have never lived in and our tenant has now had it for three years and we wish he would buy it. When we would visit here for the past eleven years we stayed in an apartment upstairs from Narda’s parents but they moved a couple of months ago and for the first time in Adelaide we are homeless. Narda lived here ever since getting off of a boat from Holland when she was four up until teaming up with me. Now we are both homeless where we feel at home.

Not to worry we loved Malaysia and even managed to see a lot considering we lost one day after Malaysian Airlines canceled our flight and put us up for an extra day and night in Beijing.

It was the easiest airport we have gone through anywhere in the world. Just a stamp in the passport. No stupid questions both when we arrived and when we left. Malaysia is courting old folks so perhaps that is what they think we are. They want Westerners to retire there as long as they have three-thousand dollars a month to live on. I think that is per couple. The people are very friendly though I do admit I am at a loss to understand their belief system. I have always wondered why people believe what they do and why they are so adamant that their beliefs are the way it is. I have tried many belief systems even spent years toward becoming a priest and decades being an astrologer and basically I think they all have something to offer but none of them are really the complete system. I have taken bits and pieces from different belief systems and believe-in what makes sense to me which I suppose is what the majority of people do. Every religion is based on a leader who at the end of the day if you take away what the reality at the start of their trip was and then morph it over the centuries it is never like what everyone claims that person did or was or even still is. Perhaps humans believe in and follow someone because they are afraid to live their life without the crutch of an outside force/person/being/etc. It is easier to believe in someone who no longer or never did exist and describe it in terms of faith than to take on the responsibility for one’s own life. I blunder through life I know but I surely am not going to ask an outside non-existing being or ‘invisible’ deity for guidance. I am going to make a rational stab at going in a direction that makes sense and do what I think is best, and depend on mistakes/short comings/walking-into-walls and random experiences that may or may not have been beneficial/correct/moral (as per someone else belief system). I mean do we want to believe David Icke’s trip about how reptilian people are waiting to take over the planet? I must admit I have looked at his stuff for the past couple of decades for entertainment purposes and he is a hoot, one of the world’s great comedians and even funnier are those who believe him or take him seriously. Many people are just ‘trying-it-on’ and I am sure they are just as amused that anyone takes them as true blue as I am.

I have always loved monorails – every since seeing one in the movie Fahrenheit 451 in the mid-1960’s and riding one at the Montreal World’s Fair in 1967 and of course the one in Sydney I have thought a city should have lots of them and not just as a tourist attraction. Kuala Lumpur has a functioning good monorail and we rode it end to end. They do not have subways but elevated trains and the train to the Islamic Arts Museum stops at Pasar Seni which is one of the main places to go to. The other really different experience in KL is raised pedestrian walkways. Instead of footpaths (they have them too) along the road they have footpaths in the air (I have video clips but not photographs though if I were not so lazy I would use Adobe Premier and take a photo out of the video. I love the Adobe Creative Cloud and have a year’s subscription and have downloaded all their programs. Want to just stay at home and use the Creative Cloud but I hear there are other things one needs to do when coming to visit family, like visit family)

Below is me hanging out with Narda’s daughter-in-law. The last time we were here, six-months ago in February, Maggie would start crying every time she saw me, which I thought was just a normal female reaction to me, but this time we got along and collaborated over some technology. She was showing me stuff on my iPhone and I was going to show her how to make her own webpage using Creative Cloud Dreamweaver but she was not that interested which I understand a bit as she is only about 18 months old. She was even less interested in my new computer which has 16 gig-memory and all the latest bells and whistles and did I mention the whole new Adobe Suite – why would I leave the house?

This was our first visit to a Muslim (65 per cent they say) country. I do like the get-up folks wear and if it is not irreverent to say it is like being at a costume party with us being the ones who forgot to bring any kool looking gear. We went to the Islamic Arts Museum which was really interesting. Their art is great but after reading lots of stuff from their beliefs and looking at exhibits I really do not understand what they are on about or why they do what they do. I did come away with the feeling that they are really really pissed off at the Jews and Israel. Again, I am not a politician or know much stuff, probably really don’t know anything about anything but if their exhibits are true then Israel really did do the dirty on the Palestinians. I see there is a book to buy called ‘A brief history of Palestine for dummies‘ that I can download, perhaps that will clear up my confusion. I read one book in the museum – it was really thin – about how the Christian’s Paul was really a bad dude – I never realised how much someone disliked him. I read it because on the back cover it said that the author had studied religion and that this book described the differences between the early Christians, Paul (which the book said was pretty much a bad Jew) and the Muslim religion. After skimming through it I realised it was quite the pro-Muslim read and was not really a thesis on comparing religions.

Besides the rhetoric and propaganda we did like their art. I would love to have our home – if we actually knew where our home existed – with tiles like they do. Of course they embed their verses from that book they like to read into a lot of their art and I am not sure if I want some of those lines on the wall of my home.

It is 12 RM ($3.78 US) per person to get into the museum but they only charged us 10. I thought they were being kind to us until I looked at our tickets more closely after we left and saw the word ‘senior citizen’ 10 RM at the bottom of the ticket. What? Are we that obviously old?

Narda in front of the museum – I have lots from inside even though there were signs, which I saw after – that said no photos, oops!

Our hotel was really good. At the bottom was a large shopping centre and of course having Narda come through the door of any shopping centre is a cause of celebration and welcoming for the locals,

We were on the 26^th floor of the Premiera Hotel with a great view, below is watching the reflection of traffic on a building,

Of course the big thing to do is visit the Petronas Towers. I think I found a new thing for 911 conspirators to think about – you know how they come up with all these theories and why the New York City towers came down – well I saw tee-shirts that said ‘Petronas Towers – currently the tallest twin towers in the world’. Maybe it was not one of those many conspiracies that folks on the Internet want us to believe but in actual fact the sellers of these tee-shirts who had family members do the deed just so they could sell more tee-shirts that said they were the tallest twin towers in the world.

We did make one sort of a blunder. We got lost as we do wherever we go and Narda suggested we pop into a hotel we saw right where we were lost. The Majestic Hotel – OK so it looked a bit classic, later we learned that it was built in 1932 and I love the movie ‘The Majestic’ with Jim Carey so we went into the very fancy lobby sat down and asked for a cup of coffee.

Well we were surprised at how small the cup of coffee was. It was served in fancy ornate small tea cups with a pretty little bowl with sugar. We relaxed and stopped at the bar to pay – holy cow – 45 RM which is $14.17 (because we put it on our credit card the Visa charge on our account is $15.22 US for two small cups of coffee) or to put the two cups together which still would not equal a full cup; we paid twenty-eight dollars, US for a cuppa. Blimey. To put that in perspective we had a full breakfast of eggs, toast, two cups of coffee and two cups of orange juice each at a our favourite Indian restaurant (Lotus Restaurant in Chow Kit) earlier in the day for nine dollars for the two of us. Not to worry, we just are not the classy folks that we thought/think/wish/perceive ourselves as. I suppose we should have just booked in a couple of days and eaten our meals there and forgotten about affording the rest of our trip.

After that little expense we walked to Central Market and along the Historic Walk all about twenty minutes away from the propaganda wielding art centre. We got another bag of clothes with the illusion that we needed more and the hope that we could squeeze just a few more garments into our bag and once again ate our meals in Indian places as most eatery places were closed due to Ramadan fasting.

Below is a curve in the tracks in Kuala Lumpur.

So here we are, Adelaide, sort of home for me for more than 20 years plus a visit place for another 12 years, in the midst of winter which compared to where we live in Northern China is not cold at all.

After the start of our mishaps with Delta Airlines (who just wrote to say they would reimburse us for the $400 we spent on ‘necessities’ due to lost luggage, – see earlier reports – so we sort of like Delta a bit and almost apologize for what I said last week how they were a crap organisation) then having Malaysian Airlines cancel our flight to KL (and their putting us up at a good hotel and paying for three meals) we did get ourselves here and it is up to us to have an enjoyable time.

This will probably be my last blog until going back to China in three weeks because what would I write about? Everyone in Australia is so normal there is nothing to say about them. I will spend lots of time, if I have any free time, sorting out the previous couple of week’s video clips and putting them on YouTube and of course having a grand old time with Adobe Creative Cloud. I know there has been a lot of complaining about taking away purchasing programs and giving us subscriptions. I would rather have the subscription because every month Adobe updates various bits and pieces in the 26 programs I have – some I have never used before. Social and family life? Hey can I put that all on hold for a year just to get really good at making webpages, e-books, videos, apps, games, and enhance photos of myself so I will not look so old in a few weeks when I turn 66?

Home as a tourist destination

Home as a tourist destination

I was born this
This way
Everything else
I make up
As I go
(July 1995 Hackham, South Australia)

I do not really have a home. I have a tourist destination. I am a tourist at home. Places I refer to as home are not homes but stops on the way home. And like the people who visit the cities and towns I live in I too am just visiting where I am. Of course I am not really sure what home is. Even more removed from the equation is where home is. If home is where the heart is then I would be remiss to say my home is my heart because that would make me slutty. I would have to say that my heart was a tourist destination and at my age I don’t think that is going to happen. I purchase fridge magnets from where I live and my fridge side are covered with magnets from so many countries so many homes. My home is represented by fridge magnets. When I was going through my divorcee back in 1984 which left me with two children to raise my ex-witch of a thingy submitted a report to the Adelaide Family Court about me from her psychiatrist, a person who never interviewed or met me: “… I noticed in his writing that he talks about disintegration within his personality; and there is evidence of thought disorder such as loose associations and flights of ideas, which together with his general suspicious demeanor suggests psychotic thinking”. At the time I was writing children stories and continuing with poetry that I had been writing for decades and as a side note completing my PhD. Anyone who has done a PhD knows there is little sanity involved during or at the end of the thing which in my case took seven nasty years to do. The fact that my home is a tourist destination somehow syncs with my writing and back in 1984 with my ex-witch-thingy and her psychiatrist. The reason I have lived in your home or you may have lived in mine is because we are all tourists at the same destination. We were in Family Court more than sixty times between 1984 and 1998 – my lawyer said a record. Adelaide Family Court was a tourist destination and I had never planned to set up camp there – it was just a stop along the way.

The last time my home was the only place and not a place in between places was in 1964 or 1963. I was about 16 when I left my safe little place in the world, Clifton Park – Saratoga County in upstate New York. I was having some problems at Shenendehowa Central  School ; I think boredom was a deciding factor.  I told some people at a recent party that I still had my yearbooks from when I was in kindergarten and first they did not believe me then they all were just about on the floor from laughing so hard. Damn I thought everyone carried around their yearbooks. I only have them from 1954 (above) to 1964 when I left to find my fame and fortune.  In the picture above I am in the top row third from left when my name was Terrell Adsit. I have gone into how my name became Neuage in past blogs; something about getting an Australian pregnant and she not liking my name and me not hers and Randy Dandurand said ‘you two think you are such new age people…’ – Really! We had met at an astrological conference in Sydney, had a passing fling between Baltimore Maryland and California for a week and ending up in Hawaii the names got changed then we got divorced and I was a single parent in Australia for twenty years. But that is not the point of what I want to say this time.

So I got out of Clifton Park:  and yes that is my mother reading probably not her email and me siting in the trailer being silly like I was eating raw corn back in the late 1950s. This next  photo is of when I first tried to leave Clifton Park, New York. I was about six and I was headed out of town but got as far as the front of the house before getting stuck in a snow drift. The fact being that I was just a tourist in Clifton Park but at the time no one would believe me.

None of this is here now, they put in freeways, and a shopping centre and a Home Depot megastore where I attempted to grow up.

On with what I want to say, home as a tourist destination probably means that of going somewhere and living as a visitor, most likely because it is a passing through moment. I went in 1963 to Florida, to New Orleans, New York City, did the San Francisco stop at the end of the 1960s and lived in a commune across the bay, on to Oregon, to Hawaii – joining a religious cult for a decade – and living during that time in Kansas, Wyoming, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans and a few other places too. Then I ended up in Australia as a single parent with two boys and we moved ten times in ten years and settled down to live in two places for almost three years each. Then I got married successfully again, another Australian, and we tromped off to northern  New York and lived in three places in five years; two of them beautiful Victorians, which we still own in Round Lake NY. We then moved to New York City for five years and lived in only two places there, one of which we still own and even managed to live in South Australia sometimes and yes we own a house there too but we do not live anywhere that is our home still. When we moved to China we thought we were settled but now we have moved twice in two years; in the same building but in different apartments.

Maybe it is because I have Aquarius on my fourth house cusp with the ruler, Uranus conjunct Mars in Gemini in the 8^th house – and of course I am married to a Gemini.  And Mars rules my 7^th house, the house of marriage, so if I believed in astrology that would explain why I have not felt settled in a home since 1963 – not that I felt settled there either because I was adopted and brought to that location kicking and screaming when I was three years old. So it is fortunate that I do not believe in astrology or I would be quite confused.

I like living here in Campus Village in Northern China. It feels like home but most homes I have had have been tourists destinations (I am thinking of Maui, Honolulu, San Francisco, New York City, LA, New Orleans – my favorite, Victor Harbor South Australia – Victor really is a tourist destination because it is the end of the road – to go further one drives into the sea, unlike most towns and cities that one can drive through on the way to someplace else, Victor Harbor – where I raised my two sons for many years in several homes, is the end of the road. We, my good wife – the one I have now, and I have lived in Paris, Utrecht, The Netherlands, her place of birth, Ferrara Italy, Goa, India, San Pedro La Laguna on the Western shore of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala with my friend Dell, and Eugene Oregon and just so many places. I do not mean overnight places but places I, we, called home, though perhaps for only a week in some places. Mexico City we got settled in as well as in some places in Ecuador, though after only four days in Quito I had to get out of town because I had such a bad case of altitude sickness I just was not going to last in our home there so we got down to the shore and life was good. I thought we were settled in Istanbul but suddenly it was time to leave.

New York City was a fair effort of five years. That is a good example of home that others tromp through all the time. We did too. Every day I felt like I was a tourist except for paying mortgage and electricity bills and all those other home equations but still I was just passing through.

We are all just passing through until we get to where we are now. Home is where we are now. I am a tourist in my own home. I take the guided tour quite often. There are paintings my brother did back in the 1960s. He died of AIDS and I am so excited because his best mates are writing a book about him. There are belongings of my sons.  My son, I spent such a life time raising him, he was signed by the LA Dodgers, then committed suicide soon after turning 20; http://neuage.org/leigh.html. My fantastic still alive son, who even came to visit me here in Northern China is doing so well after all our moving around. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, one of the world’s greatest tourist destinations. I tour my life – it is on the walls, all those places I have lived in; posters, gadgets, my 600 page book “Leaving Australia” that I made two copies of – one for my son in Australia and the other I read when I want to be a tourist in my own life.

And that is all that was on my mind at this time.