Happy New Year!

Sociabilities May Be Alarming

However, it was a jolly Christmas and I hope everyone else had a good Christmas or at least an OK one.

This year I emailed several Christmas cards. 

For local friends I got some bright cards with a tree very cheap from the Indian Everything Shop in Surrey Hills. I was on the lookout for things to add to the collections of angels, gods, goddesses, heros and feng shui animals. (My place isn't as crowded as the collections suggest because it's a large place with ledges and picture rails.)

A good statue of a well known hero caught my eye. It was out of my budget, but having read about such flights of humanic vision in many ways since childhood, I decided to peek inside the neat little card that was titled Greek Hero ($89). Somehow someone must have got a little mixed up. It was a small and excellently crafted statue of Moses, MichaelAngelo's Moses.

My lost sister would have loved it. She collected statues.

These cards (10 for $2.85) only said Merry Christmas inside them so when I got ready to give them out, I copied one of my poems for the text. It is a poem I wrote ages ago when I lived in the box over the road, and things got mixed up in storage and I ripped the poem out of the notebook to read to someone, (one doesn't have much forethought in moving times, in illness times) and the rest of it is still hopefully the box it was in when I borrowed those pages back then whichever box that was:

And let my own words now sing song,

make music roll forth all day long.

May my words embrace the soul,

do this to make an old world whole.

May singing bless, may good words ring,

may poetry cause our hearts to sing,

be in our bones and in our blood,

make goodness come in righteous flood.

The poem came from a dream.

Slowly I thread through the phases of those older times when my possessions became debris. I need filing folders. There may be some somewhere but I can't find them. Easier to work with folders on the computer, easier to find things here, even though I can get my titles mixed up if I'm not careful. 

Recently I've noticed that when I emerge from the screen or page or move around the weeds, that there have been several days of such divine warm sparkle after a bracing Southerly Buster that I can't imagine being unable to dip my body in water or feast my eyes on the loveliness of the sea. 

(Mind you the storms frequently leap in response to a stinking weary fuming hot day when all you want to do is go to the pub).

There have also been many lovely balmy days, not so many returns to iciness as there was a few weeks ago. On a warm fresh day I recall the days of childhood and young adultry when we were always tuned to the beach.

When himself and myself lived at Bondi, we were just up the cliff from the ocean which was then a part of our every moment. I began a series of poems because there was inspiration afoot.

Poetry is amends for the future. On a crystalline day following a stormy night, I found myself yearning for a taste of the ocean on a perfect ocean day, so I hunted for the Bondi poem which illustrated the storms which stomp regularly around Sydney's summer and Christmas Season suburb by suburb and sometimes in one place out of the blue.

Although I found many poems from the Bondi Seasons Suite had been transcribed onto the computer from a variety of note books and an edit of some of the collection last year when I was going for competitions, the precise long ago Summer Storm which was ringing its words at me wasn't there.

To breathe the breath of the ocean after a storm is a good thing.

Change.

A veil of rain

thrown over the sea

from this morning’s storms

is lifted by the sun

as the surface of the ocean

gleams in light.

The Ocean From Mark’s Park.

The green waves flow,

the horizon a moist mist blue.

The flats are struggling down the cliff, climbing over

to catch the view, the glimpse of blue.

Torn by the weather,

The sea opens its heart

And mist rises

Above the surface of the water.

Those Stranger Times

The recent poem about the experience of Domestic Violence is now in print.

It's a declamation of woe and protest and astonishment. Maybe it’s a part of a larger script.

How does one write poetry about such painful events?

It's not pity that I'm chasing here, nor is it despair because I always was curious about experiences and learning to choose survival.

I am writing about these matters because I require and desire Justice in this once much more FAIR land of Australia!!!

I write here and in my poetry of things which should have been private and the subject of therapy, counselling and maybe support, but the story was picked over with an inordinate amount of clumsy stupidity and a barrel load of that sort of rubbish began an avalanche which later would involve a concerted bullying by many Government Departments, even when I was homeless and especially after I finally found paid work which was taken away from me...

I'm not a hater, but I hate such processes.

The Editor of the Magazine who published my poem said most people didn't write or talk about the subject of violence in the home or in offices such as those of Bureaucrats because there were and are still petrified with fear.

Oh yes, I had my time of terror also and I didn't think I scared that easy.

I hesitate to call Himself The Perpetrator, Him who I frequently loved so much before his greed and selfishness over money matters drove us apart.

I still have compassion for Himself because he saw violence happening next to him when he was but a Baby and I know now that that toxic sort of thing can twist perceptions. Forever.

At least I was an adult when it happened to me. I'd moved a long way away from him the first time he confiscated the first money I earned since I lost that last job and even more so after he first ridiculed me in public.

We shared the same dwelling because we started out so fond of each other and initially and for a long time afterwards we were interested in each other's work.

I thought if I stayed as far away as possible, if we mostly slept apart, we left a clear path and made clear plans, then all would be well in the end.

I know now that he told sob stories with a bent brain to that wretched Medical Clinic we'd both attended and also I know now that he's had a pattern of turning against those folks he gets close to who end up loving him.

How could he not when someone close did whatever it is lies hidden behind the warpings that are eventually intrinsic to violent attitudes.

Well, DH Lawrence did just that thing of writing a poem about Domestic Violence and that poem told me for the first time in my teens that those kinds of things could happen. The Ash Tree, his Mother thrown outside, locked outside one cold night and finding pollen from a lily on her face.

DH Lawrence was an adult by the time he wrote that poem and the events were long past by then although apparently dinner parties at the Lawrence's could be difficult much later once the plates began to fly.

I was an adult when Domestic Violence happened to me, and even so, although I continued to keep a journal when things were at their worst, I hadn’t known how to talk about it all, or even yet comprehend it. Sometimes there was a blunt description, at other times I repeated and tried to focus on my belief that things would heal.

When I got thrown out, it was in the heat of Christmas when Himself at the time of year when the family had been called to account, felt like a failure and blamed me.... on my face and on my reputation there was nothing but his self hatred which was thrown at me to deadly effect. It made me consider certain mysteries of misunderstanding within my own family because I was diagnosed as Autistic when young and a lot of things went way above my head.

Most frustrating with Himself was that the whole business then was something I couldn’t wrap my mind around. No such thing had ever happened to me in any how excepting maybe for literature or the very occasional intimation.

There was this Doctor. She was angry with me because I refused antidepressants and hormones and she was also angry because I denied that I was depressed.

(To be sad, worried or even despairing isn't the same thing as depression and when things were getting dangerous I thought it best to keep my wits about me.)

I told this former Doctor that in the past, I'd experienced pretty bad dentistry (which still affects my health and probably my immune system). I told her that sometimes when I get very stressed, I lose my appetite and sometimes also my temper when under duress. I told her Acupuncture had helped me with my appetite problems for many years and that those treatments probably stopped me from being depressed. Soon afterwards, admittedly with her initial help, I began to regularly see an Acupuncturist in that Clinic and it helped me keep going although it also hid the symptoms of the Worst Abscess.

(Oh I have that X-Ray still. That thumb print sized hollow in the bone of my face. Everyone should know that I was not only probably an angry part of that first serious incident but that I was then not well enough for the ordeals to come less than a year after the bone was scraped!)

In those years, the only expectation for treatments from the ex Doctor was certificates when I couldn't meet obligations because of colds or flu.

And...oh yes, she did once treat me for earwax which is when when the arguments about depression began, excepting for that one serious incident further down the track.

At first I'd said to her, OK, I am depressed.

Then I said No, my dear sister is dying, I can't find work, my relationship is bad, I hate being broke. I am not depressed, I am miserable and I have bloody good reason, OK?

Looking back, above all, when an event approaching real violence occurs, I believe that confidentiality must be assumed. If a person in shortened circumstances finds it hard to escape such a situation then they should NOT be endangered.

The incident of the bruising push concerned the time, the one time back then when his tantrums got physical. Thankfully, he'd spent much of the year touring, and that one time, he came home in a filthy mood and pushed me against a bookcase after smashing up my study.

Those smashups I had hated but they weren't too frequent thankfully.

My Acupuncturist would say if I appeared in the surgery trembling and stressed,

'Oh he's being Artistic Again, is he?'

You see my Acupuncturist had become a dear friend, she GAVE me books about the subject to study and I never once mentioned to her, my closest friend back then, what was going on at home!

Better to laugh I thought at first, until that one time when it hit my person.

It was in case it got worse I went to that dire Doctor.

And I showed her those bruises in case the whole thing got worse.

What got worse of course that she told a hostile Lawyer about it as the only comment on my health matters, thinking no doubt as many people do that if a person cops violence it's a slur on their character and their own stupid fault.

(Hardly one's fault if one has no comprehension of the same!!!)

So there I am, as I wrote a few posts ago, just as I thought I'd be off Benefits, with a part time job and the worst of the Dentistry done and I get dragged through that Tribunal crap and the 'victim of violence' crap was my only allowable defense!

It's a Solicitor by then, a Solicitor who was even dumber than myself about violence and they wouldn't talk about these Acupuncture treatments which I'd been receiving ever since I'd read about ex-President Nixon's Doctor being CURED of peritonitus, (techniques studied for millennia and applicaple to Martial arts and much much more!)

(The Martial Arts aspect would save my life much later when Himself tried to kill me after taking Valium and Vodka after reading That Fatally Lying Tribunal Finding. Sure I got that eye blackened and my nose was poring blood, but I knocked him off balance and since he'd already smashed the place up, he fell on the smashed things and got bruised and later told folks I'd attacked HIM!)

(Next day my friend says, 'My God, what happened to You?' I says, 'You should see the other guy!' Was meant as a joke, but I trembled for months and had to drop a lot of work things which is another story, how much that all cost me.)

They shouldn't call Acupuncture a 'New Age Thing' should they? From my studies, it looks like something like seven millennia has gone into that field f research.

'Modern' Medicine after all is only a few hundred years old.

So this doctor said that despite the fact that I'd told her of the scary dentals and the appetite and the stress problems, that I had no health problems, but that the Lawyer should know that I'd once been to see her and I was bruised and in some distress.

(Isn't there somewhere in the Doctor's Code about Confidentiality?)

(Isn't there something in a Lawyer's code about Confidentiality and Endangerment?)


As to 'violence', me and my sisters had been frequently belted as kids of the Fifties, and smacked very hard on the back of the legs or the buttocks.

(Later, when my gal friends danced to Madonna’s old spanking song and swatted their own posteriors, I found it horrifying.)

I’d hated the smacks, the beltings and so on and I‘d a tendency to go rigid and glare at my mother when it was happening. That didn’t help because it infuriated her. The last time some idiot swatted my posterior in so called fun, I belted him round the head with the newspaper I was carrying which is maybe the second most violent thing I ever did in my life.

I knew that a folded Newspaper wasn’t going to hurt but I had to show my utter outrage. How people can enjoy that sort of thing is beyond my comprehension!

I didn't want to go through with those stupid cases at all and the Welfare Rights people said I had to.

They didn't even tell me it would different Tribunal the second time. They didn't say I'd be in an actual Court Room all day facing a Rigid Army Type Bitch who'd apparently concluded ahead of time that I was a liar. She even slandered my Mother!!!!

For the record, my Muma had a tough time in her life, was a teacher famous for her work and she tried alcohol a few times and didn't like it. That that finding called my Ex a bruiser, myself a liar and my mother an Alcoholic...well you know how stupid people get caught in cliches.. I am not going to forgive this crap you know, and I think I can guess who began the crap and I'll need a Lawyer by then...

And it has to be said here that it was our wonderful Federal Education Department under those face pulling sneering Liberals who wasted $30,000 of tax payer's money to put me through that 'Case' simply so I now understand, to prevent me from becoming the Tax Payer I had been before I went to the horror Dentist in the first place.

Rather than being the hard eyed level headed Defender of Injustice we see on the television sets, my so-called Solicitor fluttered apoplectically and apologetically all over the place.

She'd been to all those Preliminary Hearings without briefing me and without even knowing anything about me, except that she seemingly agreed that I should be punished for liking Acupuncture.

It must be said here that ambition and especially achievement CAN be considered as a crime in Australia. We can be slavish about our trivialised Cultural 'heros', but if an ordinary person, Heaven Help us, if a 'Dole Bludger', shows Ambition, even the ambition to get beyond Benefits, why then they are 'Up Themselves!!!!

In point of fact I hadn't wanted to be 'On The Dole' at all and only coped by doing immense amounts of Voluntary Work, some of which includes a much larger number of Essays than I ever presented at Conferences. I believed that at least while I worked, having been involved with Media, I was still 'out there'.

I could have meetings and coffee with former colleagues, talk about my projects, keep my CV updated etc etc.

The Dental Situation which had caused an instant health fall out before I had to attend a cheaper dentist as I was minus income, wasn't the only thing that had prevented me finding paid work in the Nineties. It was also a Tragic Truth that all my old Work Places had been absorbed and reorganised and positions were lost and people my age were being made redundant everywhere.

It was depressing applying for jobs but I kept doing so until the abscess hit the bone of my face and incurred a whalloping health crisis. OK, I hate the Dental Hospital & had been going to a cheap Dentist who didn't X-Ray. There wasn't much money after the part time voice work dried up.

During that particular crisis, the level of general physical pain was acute. I couldn't then (and can't now), walk very far. Maybe thats partly because I overdid it during the months when I tried to stay off the Dole. Walking from Bondi to Kings Cross and back for the job interview certainly roused those old sports injuries and the bad operation on the foot had me grounded for a week following.

I knew that any blessed part time job would be fine, but it was apparent even back then that I'd be better off working from home and maybe doing some part time things outside home.

The old time Employment Agency, the CES agreed. I attended every meeting with them and they only ever sent me after one job.

Eventually, I had to drop my Private Medical Benefits and I bought a Fax Machine, and after cashing in my Superannuation, I bought a Computer, my first Macintosh, now with most of the leads lost in the eventual process of homelessness.

With the Fax, the Phone and the Computer however, I organised quite a few Shows for Himself and spent a lot of time with Arts Lawyers hammering out the rights for all the people who gave us their time. Seventeen people contributed to our Music Project about The Last Of The Irish Bards.

As well as the Music work, there were several publications and one Seminar to the Graduate Literature Class at Sydney University.

There were a couple of Recording Deals too. I enjoyed negotiations although when stresses of Himself's awful work built up, I was hampered by the awfulness and tensions of the home situations. (And by the fact that some people became greedy about the project and began to harass me by telephone!)

The important thing I discovered was that like Writers, Musicians have to do a lot of Voluntary Work, and Work is the important thing. Maybe a person may find themselves without a job, but they should never stop working, whether it's study, Caring for other people or Voluntary Projects such as Bush Regeneration, even House Work such as can be managed despite various official and unofficial SmashUps, Work Is The Important Thing.

My study of Cultures continued and I was fascinated to discover Feng Shui, the Ancient Study of Time and Space which involves rituals in regard to the damaged areas of One's life. It's no Good Luck Charm. Luck is like the Life Force, it's called Chi and it can help even in the worst times because when one becomes helpless, there are still rituals and ways of making sense. I'd already investigated Taoism back in the Seventies not long before I discovered Acupuncture and I was fascinated to discover the similarities in the essential rules.

Well, Himself after the disaster which followed that second Tribunal case was apt to say that he'd 'supported' me all along.

Well, I've still got the bags and bags of receipts from all I paid from those times and I would dispute that claim from an exhausted and overly defensive mind. In fact his work expected him to go on the Dole for half the year when not working, which he hated so much that my Dole became our sole income when he was at home composing because I thought that by those means I was saving that much grief.

In all that time his former Boss ridiculed him for laziness. He certainly wasn't lazy. During the off periods when there was no paid work he rehearsed and composed at least ten hours a day. Those phases were good. I could get on with my writing and study.

I admired his work very much, but the Laziness accusations bit deep and eventually to my amazement, he accused ME of 'Laziness' and would say so even when I'd worked myself to the point of exhaustion.

At the AAT Hearing, during which none of these realities were ever raised, when I mentioned that it would be more productive to be at home improving my essay on Australian Rivers for the first International Conference I'd been asked to participate in, the 'Lawyer' jumped up and explained the statement away by saying I have a 'Personality Disorder'.

In fact I have Asperger's Syndrome.

I was speaking of my Seventh Conference Paper, still not yet read and the deadline for submission had been absorbed over the days waiting for the promised calls from the Lawyer who claimed to be conducting the preliminary business of The Case.

So eventually they found me guilty of maliciously missing three Appointments one time back in 1997 when my paper work had been hurled about and after the CES had written to tell me that I'd have no obligations that month.

Well Himself had cracked up, hadn't he and it was very bad. Did I say I have a tendency to forget dates and times when stressed? I do.

If my paper work is chucked about, how would I know about appointments? They were very obviously out to get me, and if that very fact is a breach of Tribunal Law, noone noticed.

Acupuncture, Depression, I mean, what was going on there?

Yes I did crack up myself eventually. It's awful to be homeless. Awful and I hope I inocculate myself against repeating such a pattern by these means.

You see, the real violence occurred after himself read the exaggerated lying Findings from the Tribunal and concluded that I'd exaggerated. I hadn't.

What had gone on was that my only allowable Defence was the one instance the Doctor leaked and they used my Work History to ridicule me as if I was a liar.

O Boy. Thus the poem.

Someone should explain to the Tribunal that Domestic Violence isn't simply the Lot of those they see as Losers!

Funny about this economic downturn. The recent American and Australian Governments spent an awful lot of money persecuting individuals solely for the purpose of whipping up paranoias.

They say I'd have to get to the High Court for justice. Qe?

Getting There

Rain falling and I'm remembering.

Two people I seemed to be as a child.

First born for a couple of decades in Old Jindabyne before the dam, I postured and pranced expecting admiration and laughter.

Then Daddy left us behind.

It's in the memoir, all that.

Muma and me, there we were remembering the old times and no-one spoke of them.

The world grew silent, no-one ever saw me and I thought to myself, am I here, is this a pretence?

Thus was the first breakdown and the first horror dentist.

There's a lot already written, a few books.

One time I believed in music per se.

If a person believes in music, perhaps they shouldn't get to know musicians.

I don't know Bob Dylan although he advises me with regard to my writing in my dreams.

(Dream On!)

A poem published while worlds fall apart.

I have got the hang of the things gone wrong in my life.

I've been writing in my note book.

There is another horrid abscessed tooth. Awful.

I ain't whinging about it all.

I never knew about the Asperger's or the effects of bad dentistry and so on until recently.

I got me facts together with the 'Education' shit I went thru in this country.

It's in the note books.

Tryin to get a couple of my essays published overseas.

Noone here in Oz seems to be interested in the process of accumulating and investigating the processes of belief and knowledge.

Especially those I once believed to be open minded and honourable people.

I guess the next post should deal with illusions as I look out from my imaginary Beach House over a quiet pale sea!

How To Make Friends And Not Influence People

So much would have been easier if I’d known about the Asperger’s Syndrome a long time ago, but all the same, it’s really good to have gathered so many insights into that particular explanation. It’s also easy to laugh at some of what went wrong these days.

Not that I can yet laugh at the bullying techniques of those who steam-rolled me into the ridiculous case I began to describe recently, nor can I laugh at the total contempt and insensitivity of some doctors, or the fact that I attracted bullies anyway. That sort of thing has been difficult to comprehend.

One thing I’m grateful for is that I’ve always had a few good friends, people who can put up with my obsessions and most of all, people who can laugh in non-malicious ways.

It was in the course of all these years of studying dreams that I began to like myself as a person. In the dream life eventually, I saw the part of me who willingly made good cups of tea for my friends, who cooked, who looked into various psychological mirrors without too many qualms.

That’s why, no matter how difficult things have become, I refute the diagnosis of Depression. Even if external circumstances and misunderstandings both by myself and by others can be depressing, this doesn’t turn to self-hatred.

I know this because I did have Depression in my teens, in my twenties and the dark self-loathing isolation of it all was horrifying.

A couple of things changed that. First of course, was the discovery of Acupuncture. Already bothered by some things which I felt hadn’t been handled well medically, I’d been consulting a Naturopath. I don’t follow Naturopathy these days because it seems to me that the precepts of Naturopathy are a bit vaguer and somewhat more untested than Acupuncture with its thousands of years of research.

Naturopathy did enable me to improve my diet however. The crushing tensions of my teen years and the frantic level of stress at home had meant that food wasn’t a thing to be enjoyed and like many families whose dinner table isn’t a centre of harmony, we ate a lot of processed food.

One day, shortly after Nixon Went To China, I noticed an article about Acupuncture pinned to the wall of the Naturopath’s Waiting Room. China overnight had transformed from a scary giant intent upon perfection, into a place with which we could now trade Goods and Ideas. Above all, I noticed that the techniques were helpful for ‘nervous tension’.

I asked if I could have a treatment. The Naturopath certainly didn’t know about Acupuncture in depth, but he applied two needles to the Shen Points in the ear and attached them to a vibrating machine.

I’d been in a state of exhaustion and despair. On my way to the appointment I’d noticed yet again how grey the world was, and how grimly awful the rest of humanity appeared to be.

I stepped out to a sparkling world where everyone appeared to be happy. It was astounding to find that I could laugh aloud.

Soon after that, I discovered the course in Religion and Culture Studies at Teacher’s College and I was on my way to work which resulted in Conference Papers and eventually, the beginnings of what I thought would be my career. (There but for bad Dentistry….)

The effects of the treatment lasted about a week. By the time glumness and greyness set in, I was back for another appointment. Who cared if it was $15 a pop? There was so much more to do and be when I felt fine about myself.

Eventually, the Naturopath, who perhaps had become bored now that he wasn’t giving advice about vitamins and potions rebelled.

He told me that I should ‘get a boyfriend’.

I left in high dudgeon to try other Acupuncturists and that was good, but it wasn’t until the Nineties that I discovered how powerful these treatments can be as administered by individuals who never stop learning about this ‘Web That Has No Weaver!’

I can do some points on myself and usually take the disposable Acupuncture needles with me to the Dentist. Early this week, I forgot to take the needles with me. It was a serious treatment and I came away feeling just ghastly. The weather had turned cold and I had a definite dose of the Greys during the interminable ride home.

Uncharacteristically, I began to feel mighty sorry for myself. I even remembered the times before the madnesses set in, when my former flatmate would make me a cup of tea, cook a fabulous omelet and just be as sweet as he could be. (If we wonder why we stay around when things get mad, it’s partly because they weren’t always mad.)

“Oh why can’t I attract a nice companion?’ I thought.

Well, the Universe may be as incomplete and as illogical as dreams themselves and it seemed that day as if Somewhere Out There, someone caught the thought.

It was by then late in the day, so instead of going straight home, I stopped at my Handy Local for a sweetly numbing drop of Cooper’s Ale.

All I wanted by then was to bury myself in the newspaper and maybe hang out with my comfortable and comforting friends a bit later.

I noticed the startlingly blue intense eyes watching me as I entered. I acknowledged the smile and the wave, got myself the beer and the paper and went to sit at a table somewhere distant from any feeling of intensity. The owner of the blue eyes came across and joined me. He offered me a limp and silken hand and we exchanged names. His breath was terrible.

As he prepared to sit, I said to him,

‘Please, I’ve had a truly awful day. It’s been the Dentist and Root Canal Therapy and all I want to do is have a drink and read the paper and calm down a bit.’

He tried to make conversation and I apologized for not being up to conversation and that I didn’t want to explain Root Canal Therapy but he had to believe me that it takes some getting over. He looked crestfallen so I added that if he left me alone, I’d join him at his table later.

There was gradual relaxation. Soon afterwards two of my comfortable friends arrived. Ross has Asperger’s too and like Mark, he plays a lot of silly jokes. On the other hand both have sensors which can determine if a friend requires quiet sympathy, and I went to join them taking the paper with me.

This is not rudeness according to the codes we’ve built up as friends. We like to do the puzzles together. If someone’s had a bad day, we may growl a bit until someone thinks of something funny to say and that’s it. Comfortable.

Ross drove me to my storage places when I was homeless and refused any payment apart from allowing me to buy him the odd beer. Mark came later and over time, I got to know Glen and Tom as well.

We tell each other what we have eaten and what we plan to eat and how sometimes we don’t feel like eating.

Blue Eyes jumped from his seat and took the spare seat at our table.

Since none of us go to The Local particularly to Meet People, this was startling and introductions accomplished, Ross and Mark took themselves off for a bit of Poker Machine Therapy.

I found I so much didn’t want to talk to this poor guy that it was horrid. There’d been no consent to his immediate company and I wasn’t through the grey mood yet. He lives in a neighbouring suburb, he said, he occasionally goes to Pubs there but they are very unfriendly and noone is interested in Religion either and he thought I might be.

I am. I told his about my work as a Broadcaster working in Religious Current Affairs. It turned out I’d once interviewed his Guru.

I found I couldn’t stop the hackles rising and I got shorter and shorter in my speech. I’d only read a few pages of the paper and I was yearning for the daily dose of trash. Abruptly he got up and left, no doubt concluding that here was another unfriendly Pub and strange to say, despite all appearances, that isn’t the truth.

I never was much of a drinker. It affected me too much before the brief era of The Good Dentist and later on I was just too busy. However when the Flat Mate became too difficult to deal with, I took to the Cooper’s Ale somewhat enthusiastically because I wanted to go somewhere I could laugh and where problems were simple.

The habit continues these days, partly from loneliness and also because of the many friends who will let me sit alone and write in my notebook if that’s what I need to do. We all know where we should sit and where we shouldn’t sit.

I first approached this Pub about seven years ago. I made no attempts to sit with others. There were Bushfires blazing at my old place and I wanted to watch what was happening on the Big Screen TV.

Eventually I was invited to join a table of blokes who are still friends and who I can sit with and flirt or be flirted with. They like to ask me about Poetry and Literature sometimes.

That’s how it works I think. You can go to a place and feel things out. Although I didn’t initially stare at people, I became aware of who everyone was and how they operated. I noticed which people had a nice laugh and which people had kind expressions on their faces.

As a young Aspergian, I can remember bluntly going up to people in social situations and being very insensitive myself so I wasn’t blaming Blue Eyes.

It was simply a day when my general social tolerance was very very low. Blue Eyes did find a nice Pub and nice people, but he was too hasty. I might have found a kind nice friend, I don’t know.

Sometimes I’ve looked at a person and we are friends from the word go. Maybe I’m more cautious since the dreadful experiences of a few years ago. I know that these days I like to carefully work my way around potential shadow realities. I don’t trust as much as I did.

I hope Blue Eyes finds himself a nice lady, I really hope so and maybe their eyes will meet and that will be that.

As it happened I went to the Service Station to buy some milk a bit later and bumped into gorgeous Shannon and we stopped and had a talk in the street. He’s caring for an elderly relative and he doesn’t come to the Pub and I like that.

He asked me about my book. That must be when I last saw him, when I had that expression of interest from the Publisher. I had to report that since I wrote it so long ago, it’s only on hard copy and for awhile I’d lost the manuscript and only recently had I found it again.

Friends are people it’s easy to laugh with.

It was a relief to write about the Trial and all the injustices of the past which still impact upon me. Maybe it’s because I’ve only just been able to digest some f that bizarre saga or maybe it’s because, I’ve found a reasonable Dentist. Maybe under a new Government, it’s also been easier to understand certain factors in a situation which was astoundingly illegal and illogical.

That story will continue.

And I don’t want to make it the sole topic of this blog.

The Weird Ways Of Music And Government

Most of my Computer learning has come about from the advice of friends and relations and so my progress as an older person who previously only used a computer for Word texts, has been rather slow. I signed an agreement to study an Internet Course with the CES back in 1998, but that plan was destroyed by the Powers That Be in Australian Education.

And here I am, late as usual and still trying to solve problems.

Only this week did I hear about News Groups and I checked them out for Traditional Chinese Medicine, a favourite Study Arena for more a decade and a half or more.

I’m in the strange position of having had my work opportunities removed from me by Government Departments in order to ‘make an example’ of me as ‘an Exponent of Alternative Medicine’.

I don't think Acupuncture could be called Alternative. Even if its precepts are not the same as the ones we derive from Scientific Study, it's been researched for many millennia and scientific study has proved its efficacy in terms of complementing many medical treatments.

My feeling in the light of the length of research time involved, Modern Medicine could be seen as belonging in the Alternative camp.

It’s true I don’t like many Doctors because I’ve had rather bad luck as far as those scenarios are concerned. That my previous Doctor refused to divulge anything apart from confidential (and endangering) information in the instance of an eventual 'trial', didn’t help my mistrust at all. This Doctor knew I attended an Acupuncturist in her Clinic but she became very hostile when I refused to try antidepressants.

After a session of bad dentistry and the dissolution of several of my previous work places, I’d found myself reluctantly on Benefits and in very bad health. In the mid Nineties, I thought I was in luck with the discovery of a decent Dentist and I also was able to resume the regular Acupuncture Treatments which were my primary health care back then. (I’d previously attended a cheap Dentist after attending a rather bad one a few years previously and I didn’t know that a large abscess had developed under an old crown. Worse than childbirth? I’d put bonescraping right up there).

However awful, the bonescraping was worth it. The strong Acupuncture, the herbs and the even stronger dentistry had me recovering so fast that I think maybe I was considered ‘above myself’.

Soon after Mr Howard ascended to the power which would be so misused by the Liberal Party back then, My Dole was cut off. I had a strange sense of relief. At last, I thought I will have to launch myself into paid work, come what may!

Then the phone calls started. These Welfare Lawyers kept on ringing me to persuade me to be involved in a ‘case’ which I guess for them, must have sounded a bit juicy. I refused repeatedly, but they caused my insecurities to grow. I also got a number of sneering unpleasant calls from Government Departments.

With my new improved energy, I was working amazingly hard, but doubts began to grow. We went for funding for a Symphony. The call which came just before that meeting was so hostile and nasty, that even though I’d got an article about our projects in the Sydney Telegraph that day, I was crying and trembling throughout the meeting and our application failed.

No thanks to Peter Groves!

As these calls, one lot pretending to be helpful, the other lot insinuating harm, increased, I began to worry. What if the larger funding I’d been working toward for so long didn’t occur?

I was already behind in rent and still fighting for part time work and for funding. Eventually thanks to some very good friends, I was able to borrow enough just to keep going. Yes guys, I haven't forgotten and I will pay you back eventually!

Finally I said, OK I guess I can stick to The Dole for a few months and agreed to meet with the Social Securities Appeals Tribunal who agreed that I’d been under enough stress to miss a few meetings, especially if I lived in the company of a friend who tended to hurl things about while upset. He’d recently resigned from an impossible job and had been very upset indeed.

The SSAT meeting was quick and I began to pick up my work again.

Himself insisted on busking and I helped. He wanted to play concerts and we organized them together. I still have copies of the posters and when my promised scanner comes in, well maybe I’ll show some of them.

Eventually it was to my great astonishment, that Australia’s Federal Government Education Department appealed against the Finding of the original Tribunal! I was pretty upset about all that, especially given a situation of post eviction, being involved firstly with house hunting and then eventually with the most difficult and horrifying house move I’d ever experienced.

(Imagine moving house with a Flat Mate, who in the midst of a breakdown and a serious loss of faith in himself, kept smashing things up before, during and after the move. If that wasn’t bad enough, the new place had 60 metres or so of steep steps to carry the intact remains of our possessions mostly by ourselves and with some occasional help from friends.)

(That saga was exacerbated by himself pretending sorry at my ‘lack of organisation’ while I sat trembling and shaken amongst fresh chaos whenever those friends turned up to help. I didn’t know that finding someone to blame was so much a part of Domestic Violence before all that happened and as it turned out, I knew a great deal less than the fools who decided to persecute me for uncharacteristically missing a couple of appointments when things were at their almost worstest!)

The fact that almost a decade later, I can hardly manage to walk a hundred metres, probably wasn’t helped by those ordeals.

As to how I got the news of the new trial:

We’d hired a van which I drove as the Flat Mate wasn’t a driver. Weary from the first of the three smashups which introduced us to our new home, I made a last drop in to our old place to pick up whatever mail there was, as well as the remnants of my garden.

So it was a hundred or so exhausting kilometers from the new place that I found the letter from ’Education’, which as I’d eventually discover, promised further bureaucratic persecutions. I managed to recover the last of the boxes, and remembering that I’d have to return the van the following day to Clovelly and then find my way back via Public Transport, I left the last of the garden behind.

(How many gardens have I lost since I first met that former Flat Mate? Four I think and the last one was the best with many rare herbs I’d been able to collect.)

At first I was relieved that friends were there to help with the final load, but the relief and dogged sense of purpose which was by then accompanying my exhausted crawl up those interminable steps was shattered when I opened the letter.

The letter said I’d have to appear at The Administrative Appeals Tribunal to answer why I missed those appointments. (Hell the Flat Mate was throwing even my mail around during that time and I’d been told I’d have No Obligations until the following month and I still have that letter intact even though I’ve lost a lot as various emotional floods swept most of my library, practically all of my furniture and my entire previous decade of work away!)

Flooding was at its beginning as firstly I was swallowed up with fury and then, although it was out of time, I began to haemhorrage!

The next day was exhausting as may be imagined, and when I finally got back to the new place by bus, by train and on foot, despite my prayers for peace, there were two more smashups with the Flat Mate wildly accusing me of laziness because I couldn’t rise from my bed.

I tried to close my ears to the noises. He’d been mad enough to book two gigs back in Sydney, the first of which would take place the following weekend and I had to hold onto what strength I had, for that. Such strength as I had then is now a long way away from me because the ordeal which was to come was worse than anything I’d ever imagined.

One factor lit my way in that awful time. Perhaps it was the beginning of remorse, but himself gave me Bob Dylan’s then latest album, Time Out of Mind about a month before the eventual Kafkaesque Trial and from that point I began to imagine that someone might one day sing such a tender song to me as Make You Feel My Love!

Oh I know I have my faults. I can easily forget dates and times when I become stressed and stretched and with Asperger’s Syndrome, I tend to overly obsess about my obsessions.

(Sometime I’ll have to include what our wonderful local Doctors had to say to me about my discovery of my Asperger’s Syndrome at a later date, and sometime soon, now that some horrors are somewhat sorted, I’ll continue the saga which now has me appealing to Australia’s Attorney General in relation to certain Policies which the last Government I believe, was very foolish to initiate. A newspaper recently estimated the cost of AAT trials at $30,000, which is a lot of money to waste trying to prove that a 'Welfare Person' should have no Medical choices and thus be prevented from becoming a tax payer!)


I can’t afford Acupuncture these days and I miss it very much but I still study my herbs.

I still look for paid work…. (NOT in music!). It’s difficult because the smaller dental problems I had previously are now major.

I hate the Dental Hospital. I always paid for my own dentistry. I never cost Medicare very much because I prefer Acupuncture. I refused Public Housing, which is probably lucky because there have been many allegations of corruption and I wouldn’t have had enough to pay anyway.

Yet there were people who made me out to be a ‘typical welfare case’!

Yes I will have to deal with the slanderous processes of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the ordeal of encountering the most stupid Solicitor in the world but I’ll save that for later.

Here’s a Newsletter I encountered last week through a News Group:
Acufinder.com Newsletter.


"The sages of antiquity did not treat those who were already sick; they instructed those who were not yet sick..."
- Huangdi Neijing

Body Images

It doesn't matter what our body shape is like, as long as we like ourselves.

The 'Elephant Man', saved from being a circus freak by scientists, was proud of the one arm which was free from his illness, and insisted that it be shown in all photographs.

And even if any of our physical characteristics seem to be inadequate to us, most of us do not suffer as much as the Elephant Man did.

Codger, a former friend, remembered as a one time Golden Youth, is very irritated by the world these days, particularly after a few drinks.

Last time I saw him he yelled at me about the Sixties, saying that I'd looked as good as Twiggy when I was young and why didn't I become successful in the way that Twiggy has done? An 'ugly duckling' as a child, the swan phase was unnerving when I was placed somewhere between Catherine Deneuve and Garbo!

OK, after several people suggested it, I tried. I saved up and went to modeling school. I was taught to apply false eyelashes and advised to try falsies. An older woman attended. It turned out that she was a Madame, hell bound for recruitment.

As to our modelling success rate, one very nice short gal with blunt heavy features and a stumping walk, gained the highest marks for the course. She came from one of Adelaide's wealthy families. Her old fashioned bouffant would appear in newspaper fashion shots for a few months.

I don't know, people in those days compared my looks to various people and so on, but I guess I tried too late and I was in the wrong place. Besides I just couldn't relate to the scenes around that modeling school.

Besides, Adelaide had apparently, even in the early seventies, not then noticed than slender framed gals with straight hair had been doing pretty well over seas for some time.

Twiggy? Well I can tell you quite a lot about her since I obtained her autobiograhy lately.

It was her fifty ninth birthday on September 19th and a local rag which features a 'birthdays column', stated that she was.. 'a well known model from the sixties who never succeeded as an actor because of her cockney accent'.

This is factually wrong and I note this because of the very different lives both Twiggy and I had even if we were born in the same year.

Twiggy came from a stable family and she learned to read music at school. She was a good dressmaker and wanted to work in fashion design. She was sewing fast enough to supply many local fashion shops with her designs in her mid teens. The suggestion that she try modelling came as a complete surprise. (Even in those days, five foot six and a half inches, (You work out the metrics), was considered to be too short.

She didn't want to cut her hair, but Vidal Sasson was a good choice. She'd barely made the papers when she was declared The Face Of The Year.

The clown-like caterpillar bottom lashes were her invention and, apart from the surreal make up for David Bowie's Aladdin Sane album, she always did her own make up.

She wasn't a cockney at all, she was brought up well away from the sounds of the Bow Bells in Neasdon. Her accent was London, although as her father became deaf, she increased her volume until she was once described as sounding like a 'demented parrot'.

Ken Russell spotted her early in the piece and decided that she had enough presence for him to feature her in a movie. The Boyfriend showed that she could not only act, she could also dance. Eventually she performed tap dance on Broadway for three years, attracting in her audience such awesome luminaries as Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright.

She acted in Pantomine and also appeared in several plays. The Boyfriend wasn't her only film. She could be cockney if required and she adapted to accents because of her musicality. She's released several albums, (one which features Carly Simon as back up). Apart from that, she's also worked as a film producer and... so it goes.

Presently, she's appearing on our television screens in America's Top Model and is surviving very well in that particular shark pit.

Her face is softer and her figure is fuller, but she's still sane sweet gifted Twiggy.

Comparisons? I could sew, but not fast enough to sell clothes to shops. Noone we knew did that sort of thing back then.

My family was a disaster zone. True, I was sixteen when an older woman asked my mother if she could take me to Adelaide and coach me for modelling but my mother said no because she believed I should be a teacher.

I didn't want to be a teacher after I wasn't allowed to do Art at school (too useless) but I did eventually study drama, which I loved.

By the time I was twenty, I had liabilities such as Asperger's Syndrome and a fast encroaching Nervous Breakdown.

Above all, I hate other people messing with my hair and my face and my looks and if I don't get time to study and work at my writing, then I am uneasy and even clumsier than usual. I'm now casually designing garments and collecting fabrics and maybe I'll sell some to friends if I'm lucky. I've modelled for artists and for various friends who design and sew, but I never hit the serious prfessional scene.

I don't tap dance. Indeed, even my walking is difficult on certain days and in recent times.

I love clothes, but don't dress up very often. (This is admittedly boring, but Oh Well).

I love acting and anyone who wants to try me in a part may do so.

I've never been in a situation where I'd be likely to meet Noel Coward, Fred Astaire, Paul McCartney or even Fran Drescher.

On the other hand, people still put Twiggy down even if she's still recognised all over the world. They put me down because not only am I not recognised all over the world, but I wouldn't care to be!

I prefer Bob Dylan to Carly Simon.

Apart from all those differences and one or two vaguely similar inclinations, I'm no Twiggy at all and neither could I ever have been.

Bless her all the same, and I must say that if a girl or woman is naturally slender, then they should be inspired by Twiggy.

Bits

As it happened, my daughter came by & helped me clean my kitchen. (Kitchen, kitchen!)

It was boring to be ill.

It's good to feel somewhat more like meself, but I haven't quite got it together yet.

I'm plotting my next blog.

It's about body images. I mean if a gal is skinny these days it's seen as a crime!

And what about beautiful full figured gals,

Self hatred sells these days, I say.

I been busy too much for details here.

Farewell Paul Newman!

?

Wishful Thinking was about a dream I sort of liked.

(Yet another possibly good book some may be interested in.) (Don't blame me for that!)

Yeh, well I talked about Rock'n Roll in the last blog.

I study mythologies and culture heroes and so on,

All right I rent but I have an adequate kitchen for now.

So google put the kitchen improvement ads on my blog re Lou Reed and punk & Bob Dylan and

well, the internet is interesting.

I'm still struggling with typo's & inexperience & I still say friends, check the ads....

Cheers

Wishful Thinking

So, I’m still doing some unravelling here and there.


There was one time I spent most of my work time learning about Music because one time I was working in music areas meant to create paid work.


It didn’t, apart from a shortish stint in Radio. Things went bad. Very bad, and for a long time, I couldn’t listen to Music and I couldn’t be bothered until a friend began to play Mandolin and Guitar and sing locally, and gradually I got interested again.


Music isn’t just sounds, It’s stories and sagas and egos and mind games and sheer bloody minded madnesses as The Worlds grow longer.


I don’t get to hear much live music these days, it’s not a part of my work scene any more.


Instead I’ve got my CD’s (what’s left of them) and some DVD’s (ditto) and a gecko blaster and the computer and so on.


Additionally, if I spot a book about some musical icon or other, I buy it or borrow it if I can and all that has become fascinating again since I picked up the novel I began to write in 1994. Friend Mike brings me books too and with Booksellers newly moved in next door, some pieces of my old interests have revivified.


Who is gonna survive the long term? In what ways is a Muso part of one time or all time? It’s always a surprise to look back and see. I remember when all the rumours said that Bob Dylan had broken his neck in a full on Motor Bike Crash and we said Goodbye Bob and many caught up with all those amazing albums they’d never never listened to before and we cried as we said Goodbye Bob.


And just as Bob re-appeared to dwell there among the Culture Heroes of Forever, along comes John Wesley Harding and The Band and all the rest of it.


Just lately I read that The Big Motor Bike Accident wasn’t exactly a smasheroo, but that somehow the bike just slipped on the wet grass in someone’s back yard…


Before Bob took that rest way back in Those Days after it had been said that it wasn’t that he was burning the candle at both ends so much as applying a blowtorch to the middle. Was that Shelton? I can’t remember.


Bob did pretty well out of the rest he deserved back then and not only is he still about, I’m still catching up on things I missed out on one way or another. A lot of work, a lot of new equilibrations.


Yesterday I noticed that the DVD Shop around the corner from my Counseller’s Office had a pretty large selection of DVD's and after my session yesterday which was exhilarating and exhausting, I stopped in at the Shop and asked if they had Masked And Anonymous which I’d heard of after John M loaned me the CD.


The CD is stunning and on the DVD (with every single actor relishing their part in a sort of comic book saga), Bob Dylan, playing Jack Fate, is sprung from jail as the only star who’ll front The Benefit, and he genuinely looks like he’s been stuck in jail for decades as he comes up from out of The Grimy Under World.


And there is an Under World where all the Stars disappear to until they are rediscovered or whatever.


The two Stars of way Back When who were held the Least Likely To Survive were Lou Reed and Keith Richards.


I read a lot about The Stones in Mariane Faithfull’s Book. (She might have been on the Least Likely List herself, except that I think that People thought that as a Girlfriend, she was but a flash in the pan.)


(She said she loved Keith best all along but things were complex and that Bob was ready to love her twice but she was otherwise preoccupied.)


Then as it was with Lou Reed ‘punk’s godfather’ the Punk Tide was just right for Marianne. Wasn’t Broken English a great album and then all the rest of it?


I’ve almost finished Lou’s Biography.


He performed Berlin at the Sydney Festival earlier this year and that’s one thing I wanted to see and hear very much.


So, concerning the Bio, as I’m drawing toward the bit where Lou ends up with Laurie Anderson, I check Lou’s website and the speakers are up from having watched Masked and Anonymous last night and there’s this crash of electric guitar and all these New York scenes and maybe some from Freeport, Long Island and it’s just the best site and I heard bits of Berlin and I heard and saw some of the old stuff from when Endersbee took me to see Lou at Festival Theatre Adelaide and Wow.

Thanx Enders!


Apparently, Lou didn’t like Dylan much at first but then Bob turned up at one of Lou's concerts and sat up front next to Sonia, Lou’s wife at the time and there was one moment when Bob said, ‘Man, I wish I’d written that song’ and after that Lou loved Bob Dylan lots.


Which leads me to a small quibble with Victor Bokris' book, which is that the index isn’t all that comprehensive.


It’s fascinating to be thinking of Music and compiling Music Stories again.


I woke from one dream recently wherein I'd finally got paid for work I'd done and got a few rights I'd missed out on and the strange thing was that there was another dream I remembered from sleep during the past week.

I think that if there are two or three dreams within reach of memory when I awake, then because I don't write them out straight away, I don't always remember all of them.....


The dream I remembered from a few days previous was that I flew to New York City and it was a great journey. It went really really well and there were several ther places I visited and time to do some sight seeing as well as catching up with some concerts.


In the dream, this all happened because my book worked out and I had to do the book signing and interview thing.


I'm glad my sub conscious reminded me of that dream, because even if it's a Wishful Thinking Dream, it's a good one.

at 4:56 PM 0 comments

Saving Graces

Huge house, smaller life, but hey, I'm still recovering from quite a few Times of Trauma.

I have so much to sort after times of cognitive dissonances when my own true story was stolen. I thought I did pretty well to put together a memoir dealing with What Really Happened (from an Autistic point of view, somewhat) and now the old computer isn't working.

I never was a very patient person. At least if I'm learning patience now, I have more space with which to work some new solutions.

The Sixties was a time of many changes. Me, by the time I'd got to University I'd missed out on my classical schooling because my family situation had already seriously broken down.

In the old home life, there were saving graces indeed. There was an abundance of books and magazines in our home for example. (Mind you such a phenomenon may offer a slightly skewed perspective in a family who doesn't communicate.)

My own book world was built out of ideals. With a Father who'd gambled away my Private School Fees and a Mother stressed beyond measure, I took to Religion and Bible Studies. Crazy, crazy stuff really.

We still say we're a Christian country in Australia. What does that mean?

Well, for myself, while trying to maintain Spiritual ideals and ideologies, I worked at as many jobs as I could, and my Muma, a well paid teacher also took on jobs and then eventually I was the one to do the cooking and housework and so on, and none of it got us ANYWHERE!!!!

I considered the Lilies Of The Field and envied them. I would willingly have been Mary as a relief from being Martha, but hey.

'The Rich Man and The Kingdom Of Heaven', did that have something to do with the money disappearing faster than it was earned? O Dear.

Now it seems to me, we live in a time when Money is Everything and Nothing Again!

With Asperger's Syndrome, with my own peculiarities of interpretation, I truly believed it to be better to be honourable in one's doings and to serve creativity and understanding than to principally pour oneself after wealth. I believed that if the creativity was attuned, then wealth would be automatic.

Admittedly it was a mistake to marry a Liar in the midst of the Breakdown in my early twenties and it was also a mistake in terms of the dissonances which had caught up with me and manifested themselves by the time the Seventies arrived.

That particular breakdown which caused me to drop out of University was at least diagnosed.

Trouble was that Old Time Asperger's Trap:

'DO YOU HEAR VOICES?'

That's what the shrink said, and I said , 'Well, yes, (I hear your question, for example.)'

Oh yes, there had been a little bit of Acid, not much, (I was underweight & fashion only allowed a small amount of some things). Not much is probably still too much in the light of some downtime dreamtimes.

Marianne Faithfull describes the amazing insights into archetypes which can be gained by such experiences, but the problem with Archetypes is that if they've already been disrupted in one's world, the visions of the same can easily fool one.

If all that wasn't enough, there was also the Sexual, soon to become the Sexist Revolution, not to mention the Vietnam War which I'd originally believed in until I read the History of that business!

For a child who decided to be conservative in order to cope, all that stuff was indeed a breeding ground for serious Cognitive Dissonance (as if the original family crap hadn't been bad enough!)

So it's interesting to read Memoirs of Those Times. Marianne Faithfull, Wow!

Today, I'm pretty much through the latest fluey illness, still overdoing it sometimes. I'm preparing for the Dentist tomorrow etc, and today I've been pretty much absorbed in Lou Reed's Biography.

I heed the fact that Victor Bokris' bio of Andy Warhol was in some ways negated by Andy's Diaries, but the Lou Reed Book is interesting indeed.

I couldn't have guessed that Lou had had serious Electric Shock Therapy as a youngster.

(One friend of mine, John M had that treatment lately. He said he stopped when he realised that he'd become addicted to the preparatory drugs.)

My Dad had ECT too, way back in the mid sixties, soon after Lou Reed went through it, and it was strong and heavy back then.

I think my Dad had Asperger's. Did they ask HIM about Voices perchance?

Well, when they put my Dad in The Bin, he later said to me that he dreamed they cut his brain into four pieces and put them all back the wrong way round. I understand that possibly questions, drugs and treatments are a lot more gentle these days. I understand that if, for example, a person is gay, they wouldn't be likely to have to endure a lobotomy as Alan Ginsberg did way back when in the forties!

All the same, I got very scared of psychiatry after what happened to my Dad and after my own enormous and stupefying dose of Largactyl.

Believing that some things may be saner in these times, a couple of years ago, I decided to see a Shrink because I'd been through Domestic Violence and a particularly nasty violating legal disaster which mucked up all my prospects at the time... (I agree I may have colluded with some problems, but if you are losing your temper on account of Bad Dentistry, that's something else, even, possibly, mitigating circumstances!)

Anyway, I went to The Shrink and I said, "I have Asperger's Syndrome."

She said, "There's No Such Thing"

Please remind me, which Century are we in?

Beyond Cliches

Some dreams are ominous.

It's good to keep track of the puzzling dreams because eventually they make symbolic sense, or at least maybe we eventually perceive a mythic sense of timeless reality within the time of dreaming.

In one dream of the late Seventies I was at one of our frequent gatherings and I looked around at all of us. Some I'd met at University or Art School, some were simply amazing people. We had our children with us, we had our feasting, and for those of us who were born in Australia, there was all this new and fabulous food we'd never encountered before. There was music, there were astounding new books and ideas. In those years, there'd also been new insights into politics and history and somehow a world of possibility seemed possible.

Fiction wasn't simply trivial surface stuff.

Yet in my dream, something stopped me cold in this relishing of the wild, the beautiful and the creative and I uttered these words:

"Something terrible is going to happen to our generation!"

Well, even if prophetic utterances occur out of the blue and even if it's a dream aspect of oneself who has uttered, we have to carry on, continue work and study, continue to do the best for our children and the environment while the dreams stay hidden in a book for future examinations.

A younger friend, recently said to me,

'Oh, you people were just the Baby Boomers!'

This, I thought, this is the terrible thing that has happened. We have been dismissed by a despicable cliche which is as if we're less than normal because someone imagined that an entire generation had blissful lives.

As if!

I know several people who were able to accumulate or continue wealth and priviledge from those times but I think they were a minority in everyday life. Certainly there was a sort of faith that things might get better despite the shadow of The Bomb, the terror of Communism, the fixations about Immaculate Moralities and the everyday Brutalities of the School System then, but I don't remember the Fifties as Paradise.

If you were 'bad' (and who was good?), you could be threatened with one of those awful 'Homes' for the Wayward. And in the days before Birth Control, many families simply became so impossible that half the kids could be sent off to Orphanages.

Our parents by and large had suffered World War 11 and The Great Depression. Many of them were traumatised by what had happened within their own families and even if they desired the best for their children, the sheer ludicrous idealism of romantic media psychology, romantic filmic art didn't exactly encourage communication between the generations.

Neither did the assumption that adults should be treated as if they were gods.

I think that the empty materialism projected onto 'Baby Booming' is more intrinsic to these times that it was to those times.

We forget that these twentieth and twenty first century generations aren't the only ones who ever existed:

I have been in many shapes

Before I attained my harmonic form

I have been a drop in the air

I have been a shining star

I was in the Ark with Noah and Alpha

I am a wave of the sea

I am a tear of the sun

I am fair among flowers

I am a salmon in a pool

I am a hill of poetry

I am a god who forms fire for a head



And those words are from Robert Graves, quoted as I discovered yesterday in an autobiography by one our most glamourous and troubled 'boomers' of the times, Marianne Faithfull.

Marianne reminds me of the best parts of the Sixties even while her explorations of the worst were pretty thorough.

In my opinion, the best part of those times was the books. Spiritual insights and magical moments weren't spelled out for anyone in terms of mass culture Special Effects. Participation in terms of fashions and perceptions was possible.

Archetypes assumed great power in terms of the music and the momentous events of those times, but really anyone who had a curious mind could enter a world of possibility, because well, this was our priviledge, ANYONE could afford to buy books and music. We went to ordinary cinemas and we could just about see any cultural event we wanted to see.

Cliches corrupt, cliches are the basis of propaganda. That's what I reckon.

So

There has been this Flu and there has been an urge to keep working.

I got dreams. I got puzzles, I got situations, I got books.

(And Boy, did I find two great books today!!)

Thanx to all dear friends who emailed me & did a quick check.

I know lots of you never knew about my studious side of things.

You are most welcome to comment or if there's a prob, email me & say so!

I was out and about today, I went to the dentist.

Dammit, I was too crook for a treatment.

I reckon I figured out what the Adelaide Uni dream meant.

Anyone out there interested in dream interpretation?

I'm about to shift some material from a simpler blog and I've got a new review Blog in mind.

Blogging is fun.

I like to click onto Next Blog once I've posted.

See you there maybe.

Recent Dream

I’m back at Adelaide University, and I’m walking down through the main campus which is bigger and older than I knew when I attended Teacher’s College in the days of Comparative Religion, then Education Studies. In this dream I am living on the Campus and have done so for a very long time, not in one of the older residential areas, but in a shed halfway down toward the river.

I’ve had a tiring day and really need to get home and rest.

I’m puzzled because I’m down at the lower end of Campus and I walked right past my shed without seeing it. I walk back uphill. I still can’t see that familiar shed.

I notice that there’s some new building going on and it’s only when I take a long circuitous walk to check my bearings that I realise the truth. The new building activities that have commenced are all around what was once my shed dwelling.

It’s my place, my bed, my things are in there.

I wander around until I find a way to get back inside. I’m worried.

What will I do now?

Inside though, the place is still really looking quite nice. My daughter arrives. Is it she who brings the news? Apparently while renovation is going on all around, we can profit by sometimes subletting the space for Japanese Ceremonies.

My Mother has also heard this news and she’s excited. She’s sent me a big round chocolate cake with my name in white icing on top.

Well, our feasting can be multicultural, but we must clean up, pull out the black and the white screens, and get the matting ready and so on. Ikebana and Tea business must also be prepared and proper food ordered, but first of all we need to shower and we remind each other of this fact several times.

I go out the back to the shower cubicle and there is the other bedroom I’d forgotten and there is the tall man who I’d also forgot who also lives in one part of this shed. I tell him about the Japanese visitors and I offer him a coat.

He refuses as he walks off. His coat that he’s already got is good enough, thankyou very much!

Asperger's & Bullying.

Last night I dreamed that I was back among the bullies, that there was one man who was sneering and denigrating me and taking away my means of working. It was depressing and unbelievable, yet very familiar. Those kinds of things have actually happened to me and as much as I hate it, I'm still trying to work out a pattern of getting beyond other people's rubbish and rubbishings.

Bullying is the sort of thing which can occur in response to a condition like Asperger's Syndrome. For the Aspergian, ordinary communicative signals may be difficult to read. Then, when misinterpretations flourish, inappropriate honesty is no help at all. Neither is any form of curiosity which ranges beyond a group mind.

Flying into Melbourne one evening long ago, I was met by a few friends.

It had been a long flight and someone asked me how I'd passed the time.

'I read the Book Of Daniel from The Old Testament,' said I.

They looked at me with what I realised later, was some horror.

It took me more than a year to realise I'd got myself mixed up with people who, while they were nice enough to meet me at the airport, inexplicably, they had no interest in Biblical Studies.

I suppose if I'd mentioned The Book Of Daniel to Nick Cave or Bob Dylan (had I known them) or to any number of mystically inclined folks, it might have been the start of a most interesting conversation but I hadn't encountered such folk back then.

It was also three years before my first encounter with Dr Norm Habel whose Comparative Religions study course would bring such joy and it was also a good three decades before I learned about Asperger's Syndrome.

Thinking back to those ancient Melbourne days, I'd have been better off lying. If I'd said that I spent the flight absorbed in various trashy magazines , that would have been acceptable, but even if I'd had the wit to think of that, my automatic corrector would have jumped up and stopped me.

I wasn't much bullied at school. Initially I was in a sort of daze, didn't hear or notice anything except my own thoughts which were basically about how I thought children SHOULD be treated.

We were at least read to at home and I remembered those stories better than I remember my first few clouded years of school, where I only ever woke up to find myself in Serious Trouble with some Teacher or other.

I was well into Primary School and considered to be Hopelessly Retarded before I finally learned to read for myself and that only came about because we had a sporty relative who'd got into the newspapers. Thus I learned that the written page wasn't solely fancy and talking toys.

Reading brought momentous change and suddenly my lack of social skills didn't matter so much.

The Library became my refuge, although every so often I'd emerge with an idea for a new Playground Game, teach it to anyone who would listen, and play joyously for a few weeks until my mind would again wander off of it's own accord and then I would follow the said restless mind back to its place in the Library.

Fortunately my Mother was a Teacher and she made sure that other staff members let me read what I liked.

When I was in my early twenties, I visited my Mother who was still teaching at that same School and I was astounded to note that two of my games were still being played by a younger generation of kids.

I felt that even if I hadn't studied what I'd wanted to study, that even if sport and injury took a great deal of my time and created far too much attention, that there were still ways I might one day fit in once I got over my breakdown.

Even without the Doctor's diagnosis and the horrid drugs he gave me, and despite my mind's different kinds of pacings, things had gone seriously wrong in my adolescent years and whether it was called Neurosis or anything else, I knew that things wouldn't work for me until I escaped my family. It's obvious that so strong an impulse will mean a necessity to re-discover the family later and I more or less did and have developed compassion for the kinds of messes which can skew the lives of perfectly nice people. In my teens and early twenties, I was chiefly aware of confusions and broken pathways.

I'd had no particular desire to perform at Sports. It just happened, an inheritance from a very sporty Grandmother I suppose, but suddenly there was all this attention and turmoiled feelings of all kinds abounded. My siblings were furious. Jealousies and rivalries seemed to pour themselves in front of me. I think that the first serious bullying I experienced was from my younger siblings and the more I tried to escape, the more relentless it all became.

And all that time our Daddy was out drinking and gambling all our family money including the money that was supposed to have taken me to Private School to learn Classics and Art and so forth and, as I'd imagined it, to quietly compete only if I felt like it!! A small Country Area School offered no such opportunities. I was the only one in my Intermediate class to pass English after our Teacher taught us the wrong books. I was the only one who had (accidentally) come across the books and poems we were supposed to have studied.

We may all know and begin to understand the extent of our own problems without really comprehending the situations of those close to us. Thinking and writing of those times makes me realise how much our Mother suffered then. It wasn't simply that she'd lost the life of Culture that she craved and was working three jobs to keep food on the table. The worst part of it was that the person she loved was a bit of a Bounder.

It's strange how love may anaesthetise the obvious. It was us kids and especially me, the gawky grump who she blamed for her unhappiness. I've had my spell of work in schools. I came home glazed by Personality Onslaught, she came home with her armour still bitterly intact.

As the psychological tensions increased so my temper shortened and the only way I could make people leave me alone was to think of nasty things to say which, while they were things I didn't mean, were fairly striking on account of my rapidly increasing literary repertoire, so I was branded with the bully brush too and that was odd because any occasional experimental skirmish into bullying ways was always a failure for me. (My timing was always frightful, there'd be an older sister around the corner or my chosen victim would just laugh and jeer back.)

The one or two times I accidentally succeeded at being truly mean I regret utterly.

Yes I was bitterly jealous of some children, but after one or two bouts of name calling, even those feelings faded into my curiosities about behaviour and it was as if my Schoolmates and Teachers were all characters out of someone else's book.

As a small child our brattish next door neighbour beat me up regularly. She was smaller than me but she had me terrorised. I ran to my mother crying one day to say that Little Miss had threatened to bash me again and my Mother said,

'Well, bash her back!' I was astounded. Such an idea never occurred to me.


In the end I didn't bash her. I got myself a coat hanger to help me face her off and tremblingly told her that I would bash her back if she took one more step. Arming myself probably wasn't a good idea because she was aggressive and I wasn't. It could have been very bad but I was unexpectedly lucky.

Just as I got ready to throw down the coat hanger and run for my life she backed off. I was astounded.

A Counsellor I've been seeing recently explained to me that all bullies are in fact cowards, so maybe that's our explanation here. (I think it should be said here though that not all cowards are bullies. For some of us peace-loving souls, bullying is too risky. As an older person though, I do argue back in the face of attack these days.)

(Question, is the early cowardice and basic urge to flee one reason I found I could run at speed in later days?)

Anyway, my life's path was pretty much set then. Retreat back to the Ground of Knowledge at every opportunity. Emerge renewed. Try something else. Talk with people who understand. Try not to explain too much. When people look glazed, it doesn't mean they are interested. If you find a good game, then you might be able to talk others into playing it. In the meantime, keep learning.

I guess the point of going back to the family is important, because by now there have been several occasions when I've got to the point of loving another person very much and suddenly again I'm under attack. There also came particularly strange times during the Nineties and beyond when I was seriously endangered.

That has been a very strange set of experiences especially if I've brought my verbal talents to bear because then the bully will claim it's them that's being bullied and well they are more convincing these so-called 'normals'.

I've learned more than I ever expected to know about Psychology in the meantime because of course there are plenty of books about Domestic Violence and so on.

To consider how a person constructs meaning in their lives one must focus on notions of Good and Evil. I thought that sort of thing to be clear cut and decided for myself that such forces are a sort of continuum relative to circumstance.

But if someone bashes or begins a campaign of slander and if they assume that my only good is to acquiesce, then I must disagree and I must get beyond the situation that those kinds of precepts landed me in. I wish it was as easy as a coat hanger backed up by bluff, but it isn't, so I'm searching through my options.

I've had a phase of reading the Biographies and Memoirs of successful people. That is satisfying. Recently I pulled out some of the more mystical books from the Seventies. My Library is a bit of a shambles after the violent incidents and much of it is lost but I still have some books on the Kabbalah.

Now there are a few interesting pathways there!

Reminiscences

And so in the last few days, I read my blue dream book from those Seventies days so long ago and I was reminded that things ain't always what they seem.

One dear friend was pregnant at the time of writing and I dreamed her baby died.

I took no notice of all that because I thought that dreams were crap and of course my lovely friend delivered a healthy baby. Huh! I said to Jung! Huh I also said to anyone who may have though I had hidden hostility.

I lost that book for a time. I felt later, did the person who found the book suspect hidden hostility toward my friend?

If so, I thought I'd only found evidence against dream theory because I never then had any hostility toward that friend of mine and noone could ever persuade me otherwise.

Even if C was rich, beautiful charming and successful, I'd long ago learned that envy was a useless emotion. I somehow always knew she'd deliver a healthy child. Yeah, I was wrong on one count. I was sure she'd have a girl and it was a gorgeous little boy she bore, but I didn't care. I was prepared to respect instincts, not trust them utterly! And I blessed them all.

Ah, how much I'd have loved a tribe of kids and a happy family for myself. Too weak really, but all my friends who bore beautiful children are still in my heart.

Years later, in retrospect, I'd say that the stillborn factor I dreamed of with regard to my friend was perhaps the religion that eventually failed her.

There were a few Guru's in the Seventies times.

Thanks to Norm Habel and my studies, I simply stayed curious, I didn't go too far.

There was however, one Indian chap in the old days who knew a great deal about Philosophy and he seemed to have many insights into reality. I was glad my glamourous friend found a connection, but I hesitated for myself.

That Religion turned out to be run by greedy people and many devotees ended up in Shit Creek.

I think now that the dream was possibly prophetic in terms of stillborn philosophy and I wish it had worked out for the many people attracted to that particular spirituality.

Sometimes in the dream world, images can be pretty crass.

Somehow though, dreams provide strange forms of information.

Dreams aren't straightforward in any way whatsoever and when they are straightforward they may be terrifying.

I don't recommend that people study dreams unless they are desperate.

Essentials from Other Worlds

On the Fourth of July 1978, I bought a blue exercise book with the intention of recording my dreams.

The year before, I'd begun to study Comparative Religions at Adelaide Teacher's College in South Australia. The first year previously had been an astounding journey through the Religions of the World, Ancient, Modern, World, Tribal, Secular, Theistic, you name it.

If that seems to be an unlikely field to cover in one year, I must add that we had a stunning teacher, Dr Norm Habel. Norm's work was extensive even before he began to teach Comparative Religions. He'd started out as a Pastor in the Lutheran Church, and then as an Old Testament Scholar, he went on to publish many works, most notably a commentary on The Book Of Job.

My previous years had been a time of Breakdown, Turmoil and Bad Medicine, during which time my daughter was born in early 1973. It was also when I completely lost faith in Government Processes, The Media, My Christianity and You Name It.

Crawling gradually into a new reality and reading the works of various mystics, I was astonished to find the words of the Gospel coming into my mind constantly...'Judge not lest you be judged' etc etc. The words of Jesus had a new startling impact, but over time, I found I could not longer relate to the Church of England, my old well-beloved Religion.

(Much later I tried, but they'd changed the Service the week before and the Service was a shambles.)

In the years following my Religion Studies, I felt my daughter should have some experience of a Spiritual life. We were living by then in a small country town and I took her to the Methodist Church. They were without a Pastor for the first year and the services were gamely taken over by the members of the congregation. It was wonderful to hear these simple hearted people struggling to communicate aspects of their faith using examples drawn largely from television. The Folk Religion stopped when they got a stern Pastor and I left the services to attend to my studies.



The Religion Studies course, well, I heard about from a friend who passed on a pamphlet he'd picked up in the Theosophical Bookshop.

Out of curiosity, I turned up at the Teacher's College that first week of term, taking my small daughter along. She wanted to play, she needed my attention and eventually I went outside and listened through the door and I found myself to be hooked.

Norm Habel is a most extraordinary speaker, a rhetorician in the old sense, a story teller and one of the most charismatic and knowledgeable performers I've ever encountered.

In terms of learning, it was as if I'd come across a cache of precious jewels.

Fortunately the receipt of the pamphlet coincided with the introductory lecture.

As a result of that inspiration, I found baby sitters from my circle of friends and began to attend Adelaide Teacher's College twice a week. Even the notebooks I still have from those times sparkle with astounding phrases and poetic summaries of the various philosophies. It was almost too much to be virtually converted to a new Religion twice a week, but it was also too exciting to avoid. Norm was able to speak from within all these different aspects of human spirituality and communicate the world view, the rituals and living reality of culture after culture.

I knew that I'd got hold of something important, a way of understanding with a great potential to heal.

The following year offered another brilliant teacher, Dr Basil Moore. We began with Religion and Philosophy, and again the atmosphere of excitement and challenge was inspiring. The following term's Religion and Sociology seemed more mundane and I skipped a term, impatient for the third subject of the year, Religion and Psychology.

One of the most exciting books of that year had been Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. Like most of his class, Basil was fascinated by the experimental teaching techniques suggested by author Robert Pirsig. Basil therefore decided that the term's work should be driven by the class. Accordingly, he set a list of theoreticians on the subject and included himself in a programme whereby each of us would prepare two papers relating to an aspect of Psychology and Religion and we would then read our papers to the class.

(Basil would take this further in a later year by not simply grading our essays for us, but dividing our marks between his grading, the average suggested by classmates and the grade we'd decided for our own work. The final mark would be an average of all three. I recall that I was the only student whose classmate averages hovered between the barely passed and the high distinction.)

When it came to Religion and Psychology, I fell into disadvantage, or so I thought, almost from the outset.

When it came to the second date, I couldn't attend. I can't recall why. Either my daughter or myself had fallen ill. I only remember my frustration that the class was going ahead without me.

Whatever was wrong was righted by my attendance for the second week, but my pleasure in attendance received a severe blow. All of the proposed papers were taken except two.

The two papers left for me to puzzle through were both to be on the subject of Carl Gustav Jung and that was strange. The previous year I'd missed a class where topics were shared out also. My fellow students and even Norm had suggested I might be interested in Ancient Egyptian Religion and I'd said 'No way', (having previously encountered a few maniacs who were obsessed by the same).

Back then, I missed a class or I was late, and yes, I ended up doing my paper on Ancient Egyptian Religion and it was totally fascinating.

The same people I'd come to dislike with regard to strange ideas of Ancient Egypt were also mad about Jung.

I decided then and there with all the arrogance of youth, that I would do my utmost to disprove Jung.

Hence the Blue Notebook.

The first dream, as I predicted, was mish mash, the most important factors being that I was on a road, I got stuck in sand and was embarrassed and upset. At the end, perhaps the most important point, 'I'm looking for my family.'

I'd studied Freud for awhile during my University years. The University time had been disrupted by a breakdown and wrongly prescribed largactyl as well as several distressing confusions. I didn't think that Freud had all the answers even though the conception of the Unconscious was a fascinating idea. What more could Jung say?

I managed to write the more general paper which dealt basically with Jung's theories and his time and place, but when it came to the second topic, I was stuck. "What was Jung's influence on Modern Science." OK, I'd read overviews of Scientific Theories, I looked at Scientific Magazines in the library and I'd never given up on my interest in Biology, but as for the 'influence' on Science by someone I perceived as more mystical than Freud ever was, I was stuck.

I managed a kind of presentation for the class outlining the ideas of how Science was seen in the Nineteenth Century and quoted Jung's allegations that he too was a Scientist, but it wasn't much. I complained to Basil that Jung's work seemed to range too widely for me to summarise his influence on anything (if he had influence at all) and if he didn't have an influence, then why?

Ah, Education was a brilliant force in my life back then. My teachers decided that the third year of Religion Studies would include a 'Special Topic' subject where the student could put together a thesis on a topic of their choice.

Although Basil taught Educational Psychology, he felt that he wasn't expert in the area of Religion and Psychology and the following year, the Department hired an American expert on Jung who also knew a lot about Hinduism. That was very exciting until the moment I met the new chap. Yes I checked my notebook since I wrote all this. Stephen Gadsen was his name.

We were introduced and we found that we had not one word to say to each other. Other staff and most specifically, the expert on Indian Religions found themselves in the same boat. It turned out that he hated our College, he didn't like us and he loathed Australia. Where his dreams lay we had no idea because he was out of there in a few weeks. Some things don't work out. I never even dreamed of him. Should I google him?

In the end it was Basil, the hard headed Marxist who supervised my Thesis, which turned out to be no end of a Good Thing.

Unwillingly, I'd launched myself into a sea of Jungian information which I still felt to be profoundly irrational. I continued to write out my dreams and along the way I gave up any idea of disproving Jung.

When I brought my work to Basil, I was running it by a Logician with an enormous knowledge of Philosophy and philosophies. Basil helped me to phrase many notions I found irrational so that at least the intentions of the statements were clear. That year also, I noticed that there would be an Australian Association For The Study Of Religions Conference hosted by our College. Recklessly, I put my name down to read my glimmer of a Thesis toward the end of the year, plenty of time, as I thought.

That's another story.

I write of all this because I recently contacted the AASR again and am now again on their mailing list.

I write of all this too to explain the work with dreams. Last year, for the first time I stopped writing my dreams and the loss of that particular habit felt very strange to me indeed.

The last dream written in the mauve book was recorded on 28/9/08. It involved the former Principal of the Teacher's College, the person who eventually amalgamated all the Teacher's Colleges into The South Australian College Of Advanced Education.

Occasionally, from time to time, I've stopped writing the dreams, sometimes for six weeks or so, but never for this long. I should add that in December last year, I was seriously ill from Dental infections, a phenmenon which has become something of a national illness in Australia since the Howard Government removed the major proportion of funding for training in the Dental area.

I hadn't quite imagined that I would stop writing the dreams. I'd bought a new pink dream book long before I ran out of the mauve book and I kept opening the new book wondering if it would stay unfilled. The dreams in the mauve book had been sagas, many of them exhausting. Somehow it had all become too much.

Then, on the 9th of May this year, (the anniversary of my little sister's death in 1994), I dreamed that I was with my now adult daughter who was reciting Wordsworth.

Suddenly we were both surrounded by a group of very wonderful people who were concentrating their strength onto us and I decided that that dream was a pretty good one with which to begin anew.