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.