Friday, November 1, 2013

The Horrors of 1969 and 1970

Trick or Treat! Oh. That was last night wasn't it. My wife and I watched "High Spirits" with Peter O'toole last night for about the 20th time. It has become a family tradition since we first met in 1994 and first dated around December 1st of that year.

High Spirits (1988) - IMDb

www.imdb.com/title/tt0095304/
Rating: 5.2/10 - ‎4,838 votes
Directed by Neil Jordan. With Peter O'Toole, Daryl Hannah, Steve Guttenberg, Donal McCann. When Peter Plunkett's Irish castle turned hotel is about to be ...

High Spirits (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Spirits_(film)
High Spirits is a 1988 fantasy comedy film directed by Neil Jordan and starring Steve Guttenberg, Daryl Hannah, Beverly D'Angelo, Liam Neeson and Peter ...
Plot - ‎Cast - ‎Reception - ‎References

I think it was one of the pumpkins I carved for my 17 year old daughter since she is the artist and I'm much better with a knife than she is(Having grown up in the 1950s when my father taught me about such things by giving me a jack Knife when I was 5. I promptly wanted to see how sharp it was and I still have the scare across my right thumb print from that day to show for it. But needless to say that isn't something you do twice so I became very good with a knife doing almost anything I needed to with it during the 1950s. The same with a .22 rifle and other caliber pistols and rifles because that was just the way things were done then if you were a young man 5 to 8 years old.

My daughter isn't entirely comfortable around knives even at 17. But then again she is a girly girl and likely will get both a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree from college because of the way she is and since my wife has two bachelor's degrees and an MBA.

So, anyway back to the horrors of 1969.

I had a pretty good life growing up only really marred by whooping cough and Blunt trauma childhood epilepsy. Otherwise, I always had my father, my mother and my mother's mother living with us growing up. And generally speaking this was a good thing as long as I had a bicycle to get away from all the supervision whenever I wanted after age 5 when I was allowed to ride away miles at a time. Or rather, I would just get on and go and if my bike was gone they knew where I was. Gone.

And for me mostly this was a very good thing unless I met someone bigger and stronger who threatened me or my life. But this didn't happen very often thankfully. And boys then were just expected to survive near death experiences from people or cars or whatever from about ages 4 or 5. We were expected to be young men and survive whatever came to prepare ourselves for adulthood. This was just expected of us then. And many of us died and were maimed. Natural selection.

Skip forwards to 1969. This year was the single craziest year of my life. How does one define a crazy year. It is a year that doesn't make any sense no matter how you tell the story. The year was just insane in both good and bad ways. But the problem is that when you have so much both good and bad at the same time the likelihood of surviving these experiences both emotionally, psychologically and physically might be quite small. And the same was true of me. I just barely survived 1969 and 1970.

I thank all my friends and relatives mostly now and God because without all of them I wouldn't be around now.

It sort of all started I think when I was working 12 hours a day at Reynolds and Reynolds from Midnight to Noon 7 days a week. At the time I would have told you I was trying to break into the computer programming and computer operations fields in business. I was working for a company that ran accounting computer systems for most automated car dealerships in the state of California. We had several million dollars worth of equipment in a large room in a building about 100 feet long and 100 feet wide or more. Back then it was all Optical scanners with IBM 360 computers connected to Univac Optical Scanners connected indirectly to punch card reproducers, key punch, sorters etc. and I had to know how to operate all these types of equipment and to do some custom programming jobs as well. So, I was 20 and breaking into the field after taking several courses in college on the subjects including computer programming in COBOL and FORTRAN. Later around 1978 I learned Basic as well and taught Basic and MS DOS to my kids on my first microcomputers at home.

But first I had to survive 1969 and 1970. So, an angel came to me while I was working there and said to me, "You cannot do what you did in Atlantis Again. This will not be allowed. You will either quite this job or you will be fired. It is your choice."

I was incredibly crestfallen because I knew from previous experiences with angels that they are always right. So, even though I really hated this job because I could adjust to the hours I wanted to prove to my parents that I was a successful young man. However, I wasn't going to be allowed to do this. First, because I couldn't adjust to the sleep schedule I slept less and less until I fell asleep driving my brand new 1968 Camaro and bent my front bumper on the back of someone's car. But, because I was only 20 I still refused to quit this job even though I was not going to ever adapt to those hours (midnight to noon) 7 days a week. So, I got fired.

If you are really attached to an idea or point of view often you just can't give it up. At this point I sort of became sort of self destructive. Because I had no idea what to do with my life now. I was lost and confused. This is where it all started.

When you are 20 you might think you know everything but you don't. You really have no idea about a whole lot of things yet because you just don't have enough real life experience to know. So, each person only knows about what they have been exposed to in their lives, by their friends and relatives and by their schools and colleges and jobs.

So, my point of view is that "Only by the Grace of God did I actually survive 1969 and 1970 at all.

The biggest problem was what I didn't know about life and this looking back is what almost killed me.

For example, I didn't know that I could live without the religion I was raised in. I didn't know I could live without the girlfriend I planned to marry then. I didn't know I could survive without my chosen career which was as a Computer programmer. So, it took me about 5 or 10 years to learn that I could survive without all these things. So, in the meantime I was likely really close to suicide or (dying by just taking too many risks on a regular basis.

Because basically, I didn't want to live without my girlfriend that I planned to marry, the religion I had been raised, or my career in computer programming and Computer engineering.

What helped me more than anything else survive these times? I think my parents, my friends, their parents, and psychology to today and a whole lot of girlfriends. I wasn't really interested in Alcohol or drugs because I had already seen what it did to friends and acquaintances who were now either dead or dysfunctional. So, even though I still knew people who used various different things (because everyone did then who went to college) I wasn't interested in any of that because I had already seen first hand the deaths, the insanity and the maiming of many people I knew at that time.

However, I was a physical risk taker. I flew planes, gliders, hang gliders, rode motorcycles, was a rock climber, surfer, mountain climber etc and i was a Scuba Diver and free diver etc. Anything that required co-ordination that was fun and good exercise (including girlfriends) I was into. So, just surviving until my girlfriend (a different one in 1973)  got pregnant when I was 25 was a real chore for me.

I can remember after I moved back in with my parents in Poway, near San Diego, California back from Venice in Los Angeles. I realized many of my friends were getting into drugs and alcohol and I needed to separate from them because some of them were getting dangerous. So, I moved back in with my parents first in Poway so I could return to college which I did.

However, let me get back to when I first got fired from my job at Reynolds and Reynolds working with computers and peripherals in I think it was January 1969. I was destitute and forlorn and felt like life had just thrown me off a cliff (even though the angel told me this exactly was going to happen). I was really mad at God for destroying my chosen career and had no idea what I should do with my life career wise. My girlfriend was going to college at Oakland University near Detroit, Michigan. (I had met her at a church camp in Shasta Springs and again in Chicago at a church convention there. We had gone steady for 2 years even though one of us lived in California (me) and she lived in Royal Oak near Detroit.

Once I had been fired from my job she said on the phone, "Why don't you leave your Camaro in California and just fly back here and get a job with General Motors or Ford?" I missed her a lot and I agreed and fly back there. However, the problem for me was that the temperature NEVER (got above 32 degrees Fahrenheit) and I'm from Los Angeles with Palm Trees and 70 degrees or more often in the winters. So, this wasn't going to work for me. Also, I expected mountains there because she said she skied there. However, I learned her mountains were not more than 100 to 200 feet high (although there were forest like she said everywhere). So, immediately I was disappointed that there were no mountains like there are in California and I was freezing to death there. (temperatures down to zero while I was there). And I wasn't a mid westerner. Don't get me wrong I like midwesterners and even loved my midwestern girlfriend. But, there are so darned nice all the time I found it sort of embarrassing as someone from California. Because though we are polite we are not as nice as people are in the midwest. We are much more matter of fact and pragmatic and a little more distant than midwesterners tend to be. I think it is because there are so many different kinds of people from all over the world in Los Angeles and San Francisco, so they are more melting pots of world people. Whereas the Michigan I got to know was very very white and midwestern and I wasn't used to this extreme whiteness, even though I am white myself. So, though I found them incredibly sweet and helpful I sort of felt smothered by all this incredible attention bestowed on me as someone from California. It was as if they had never met anyone from California before. Whereas because of Church Conclaves I had met a whole lot of people from the Midwest and from all over the world.
So, I was much more worldly and different in this respect. So, to me, their points of view often seemed sort of provincial and naive, which is precious but it is still naive.

So, after about 2 weeks of living in her brother's room and freezing to death and ice skating on ponds in parks and going to church with my girlfriend I was screaming inside to go back home to California where it was warm and I didn't have to wear about 4 or 5 articles of clothing (just above the waist alone to feel warm at all.)

So, I flew home after listening to my girlfriend cry for several hours. Also, this was not a sexual relationship because we were very religious. That would have to wait until we married. (I thought).

However, in June she came in 1969 to live with my parents (at this time I still lived with my parents because I was both working and going to college. So, I rented my own apartment and gave my girlfriend my room in my parents 3 bedroom apartment there in Glendale, California. I rented an apartment by the month within a mile of my parent's place.

However, one evening after she got off work at the Cleaners(her summer job in Burbank I think), I got off work as an Electrician which I had worked at with my father since I came back from Michigan in February 1969. As we walked through Griffith Park near Glendale and Hollywood and Burbank I asked her if we were going to have a normal sexual relationship after we were married? However, her answer I knew i couldn't live with. She told me she didn't want to have sex at all and didn't want children and I knew since I wanted both that likely I was going to have to break up with her eventually. I didn't beg her to change her mind like some people would because I realized then we lived in very different worlds. I felt sick because I hadn't noticed we lived in such different worlds before. It was like I had been engaged to a nun who wanted to live with me without children or sex and I was sort of horrified about the whole thing. I broke up with her within a few days and she went up to Shasta Springs and spent the summer there working at our church camp. I was sick at having to make this decision because I really loved her but was practical enough to know i couldn't do this to her or me (marry her under these circumstances ever). So, we both were very brokenhearted and partly as a result of this i was suicidal pretty much off and on until my girlfriend got pregnant 4 years later in 1973.

But wait, this was only the second or third horror of that year. There's much more to come.

Some people naively might think that "Love Conquers all!" But that is just a fairy tale way of looking at things. If a marriage isn't practical it is going to harm or destroy one or both people. You have to have a practical relationship that works for both of you or you are just looking for trouble. So, not being practical going into a marriage  only brings trouble.  Even if I was heartbroken and suicidal form this breakup and so was she ( heartbroken that is) I knew then that to make any other decision than the one I made would only harm one or both of us. I knew this for sure just as surely as my name is Fred.

But wait, it gets even crazier than this. My father and I were very religious then. Dad often went to church 3 times a week and often I did too. However, then the Electrical Contracting Company we were working for starting wiring pornography warehouses in the San Fernando Valley. Neither my father or I like the idea but this was what our company was doing. (MY father had had his own business Electrical Contracting but realized he could make more money working as a journeyman electrician. He found it hard to save money for income tax being a self employed Electrical Contractor and found it worked better for him financially working for someone else. I had worked from the time I was 12 summers and then throughout my junior year after School in High School while on the 4-4 plan then at Glendale High which was allowed for people apprentising to a trade then which meant you went to school 4 hours and then worked at your trade 4 hours each weekday during school. I took my history class during summer school that year to make extra money to buy a car when I was 16 during the year. I bought myself a 1956 Ford Stationwagon (my surf wagon) in 1964 when I just turned 16.

So, here are my Dad and I two religious people working wiring up a pornography warehouse in San Fernando Valley. ON top of this they had a man who just waited then all the time with his SEMI truck to take out all of the printing plates in case the place got raided as pornography laws were changing all the time back then. So, this printing warehouse sold it's stuff worldwide. But, it was always very strange for my father and I. Finally, it was just too much for my Dad and he quite his job and moved to San Diego where he could make 3 times as much money as he was making there in Los angeles. He retired making about 30 dollars an hour in 1980 when he was 65 I believe.

However, my Dad leaving and moving with my mother to San Diego did not work out well for me. I was 21 and leaving me alone in Los Angeles especially because my best friend had had to join the Air Force and was now in Viet Nam this  was not a good thing for me in keeping my life in one piece ongoing. However, I was 21 and didn't understand all this fully at the time. So, this is the next horror (my parents moving to San Diego) was another horror I didn't fully understand at the time.

So, for a while I stayed with my aunt who was a Hollywood actress and her Hollywood husband, Donald Curtis who was in things like "The Ten Commandments" and stuff like that. They also had a son Danny that was my cousin. He was about 16 years younger than I.

So, I liked their pool in the Hollywood Hills and swam a lot and hung out with my 5 year old cousin and his mother my aunt. But eventually, it got weird there and so I wanted to live on the beach so I could surf and body surf because I was still a surfer then. But, my friend that I always surfed with was now in Viet Nam and I didn't know I would never find him again until I was in my 40s. This would have been pretty depressing. But, because my parents moved to the San Diego Area and his mother moved to Santa Barbara and because we couldnt' locate each other when he got out this actually happened until I found him through Yahoo on the Internet in the 1990s.

So, this was another horror of 1969. Then, when I moved to Venice because I got a job there as an electrician that summer in August, the first night I was there somebody jumped out of an apartment a few doors away from my apartment onto his head. They said he was on LSD. This was the era I lived in there. And crazy things happened in Venice then and now too. Like the cat who someone Probably had given drugs to(poor cat) and I watched it behave more like a mountain lion than a cat but I'm not sure the cat survived this. This was Venice in 1969 that summer which often resembled Haight Ashbury at that time in San Francisco. I was as straight as an arrow being a churchgoing person then but I was pretty messed up from having to break up with my wife to be in June. So, I was pretty vulnerable at this point too.

By October I knew Venice in Los Angeles was just too crazy a place for me to survive so I quit my job and moved in with my parents in Poway near San Diego and registered for college down there. However, My church thought I had become to 1960s for them so they told me I had to leave the church. (Here was Horror number what? 8 or 10 at this point?). So, the year was quickly becoming a complete clusterfuck for want of a better name.

I remember one day in Venice a complete Solar Eclipse and it got completely dark in the daytime. This didn't feel very good. Also, that summer the AStronauts walked on the moon for the first time. This was wonderful but weird too.

So now, I"m ostracised from my parents church and all my friends from all around the world, All over the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and all over aren't suppose to even talk to me. I have been shunned by the church.

I am one of the few people that I know of who survived this that were under 25 when this happened. Most of the rest committed suicide and are now dead. This is one reason I don't have much respect for religions doing this to people. Because basically, it is murder and all churches need to be called on this sort of thing because it is murder.

So now, I have even another reason to commit suicide if I didn't have enough already.

Then, I had a friend who was a student at UCLA who is still my friend today (we still ski on Mt. Shasta together every year) and he and I and another friend  were climbing Mt. San Gorgonio which is the highest mountain in Southern California at over 11,000 feet. So, we had rented or borrowed three pairs of snow shoes because the snow was going to be 10 feet deep above 9,000 feet in some places as we climbed it.

This is horror number what? So, anyway I'm 21 almost 22 and these kids are 18 (freshman at UCLA) and his friend (about the same age) so I'm the adult and I feel responsible to get them home alive from this climb. So, anyway we get to I think it's called Slushy meadows or something like that before we reached that much snow yet. So, we tied the snowshoes on our backs and the ropes I used were cutting into my back and hurting. So, I said, "Go on ahead guys I'll meet you on ahead.

However, what I didn't know was that there were two trails to the top. I only knew of the right trail and they were going to take the left trail. So, as I kept going up I expected to find or catch up with them but I never saw them. So, it was getting late in the day (like 4pm) and nearing sundown when I finally reached the top and realized we had passed somehow. I felt crestfallen because now I was going to have to walk back in the dark. I had decided to take a short cut (after using my sliding plastic over my face so it wouldn't be ripped off by the 100 mph winds on the summit from blowing ice that was starting to cut my face to pieces before I used the plastic to protect my face and eyes from injury.

So, I used the plastic as a sled and sledded down from the summit bypassing the trail because since this was a 10 mile hike to the summit I had to somehow make time back or I would die from the cold because I wasn't prepared to spend the night in an emergency. Then I reached down to about 10,000 feet in the valley below the summit. I put on my snowshoes again because I knew the snow was 5 to 10 feet deep or more here. But, I didn't know that underneath the snow were giant manzanita bushes almost ten feet tall in some places. So, as I walked along innocently and very exhausted from climbing 11,000 feet high through a ten mile trail and trying to get out before I died up there in the dark, I fell through because the manzanita bush I was walking over was only six inches from the surface and I was poked about a 100 places in my body from the very sharp ironwood spikes inside the bush. So now, I was not only exhausted I might die there from my injuries. I let out a cry of rage and I think I was about to cry. But, I realized hanging upside down from my snowshoes in a manzanita bush wasn't how I wanted to die. So, i reached up and undid my snowshoes and fell into the bush further and was injured more. So, now my legs and arms are bloody from ironwood pokes and scratches and I find a way to climb up through the hole in the snow left by my body falling down through this and into the bush. So, I put back on my snowshoes but now it is completely dark. My heart sank because even though I had a little flashlight I knew the battery likely wouldn't last all the way back to my car. I finally made it back to the car by 9 or 10 that night and my father was there. He had been called by the other two boys because they were worried about me. And the forest ranger was already organizing a search party to recover my frozen body. I was so angry with my two 18 year old friends for running off and when I heard they had taken a trail I didn't even know about I was so mad that I made them hitch hike back to Palos Verdes for putting me into that dangerous situation. They never forgot that. Ever. But they respected me more after that. I was responsible and they were not and it almost cost me my life.

And we haven't even gotten to 1970 yet. But, the horrors of 1969 were enough to kill most people but somehow I survived them all and my friend survived Viet Nam Too even though I never saw him again until the 1990s.

1970

ON a certain level I think that I had been in denial of literally everything that had happened in my life during the last year to basically destroy all my plans for my life. By January 1970 I was having to begin to come to terms with everything and to realize "There was NO way forward for me." I remember walking down the beach in La Jolla and feeling alien and that I had no friends in the whole San Diego area. (Because I didn't) I grew up in Glendale in Los Angeles since I was 8 years old. So, San Diego (though I really loved the place (Swami's beach) for surfing and SRF Gardens to experience the Darshan of Yogananda above. I often went there for the presence of Yogananda who I could commune with still through those gardens even though he had passed away around 1950 or 51. I later learned that one of my best friends mother's was a very good and personal friend of Yogananda while he was alive.

So, basically I turned in some ways to "Autobiography of  a Yogi" (the book) for help. I also had always had experiences like the beginning ones in that book just like Yogananda did when young. So, as an intuitive I identified with Yogananda and wanted to be like his Paramguru Babaji and Lahiri Mahasaya. I was amazed that Lahiri mayasaya was married with children and worked for the railroad. In 1985 and 1986 when I often rode the steam trains across India I often thought of Lahiri Mayasaya working for the railroads to support his family then.

From about 1969 on I often carried a box of 10 or more paperback copies of "Autobiography of a Yogi" that I would give to hitchikers I picked up while driving all over California mostly then. I only stopped picking up hitchikers in 1973 when my live in girlfriend got pregnant and decided it wasn't a safe thing to do now that I was a father to be. Also, hitchhikers were starting to get crazier and it was starting to be less safe to pick people up.

1970 the horror was primarily that my whole life had been destroyed by 1969. This was the best way to put it. So, my primary horror of 1970 was to find a way to stay alive through it. This was a really big chore for me. I knew I needed to find a way even though everything in my being wanted to be dead.

But, I knew I had to be very self disciplined enough to somehow stay alive because I just couldn't do this to my parents, my relatives and my friends. So, sometimes I just bit my lower lip until it bled in trying to focus enough to stay alive another moment or another day.

One of the ways to stay alive I found was dating. If I had a girlfriend that loved me I had to stay alive for her so I wouldn't upset her with my death. So, I always tried to have a girlfriend for this purpose to make sure I had a reason to stay alive.  I was a very handsome and personable fellow back then and 6 feet 4 1/2 inches tall (6 foot six in boots and 6 foot five 1/2 in shoes)

So, horror became an every day experience starting in summer 1969 and kept right on going into 1970 and beyond. The horror was, "Will I be able to stay alive so I don't destroy my parents lives or my relatives lives or my friends lives?" I didn't know the answer but I tried very hard to want to be alive. I found I got sometimes incredibly spiritually high and my gifts started to grow. But, I started to notice something. The spiritually higher I got the more I went into a really awful state sometimes later.

So, I finally came to the conclusion that it wasn't the spiritual highs that could kill it was the pendulum swing to the other side after being spiritually high. So, I began to realize that one's 20s are actually very hard to survive for almost everyone. At this point I took it upon myself to help any friends of my own or that I met that God showed me to help to keep them alive someway somehow. So, for example, if I was working at a job and saw a friend of mine might kill themselves I would have no problem (if I sensed it could help) of quiting that job and staying with that person until they were out of danger. I refused to lose anyone to death who was in their 20s and a friend of mine just like I refused to die myself. So, in keeping others alive I also kept myself alive.

By 1971 I went back to school full time instead of part time and joined "Operation Share" which was volunteering time tutoring children. I also worked with a suicide hotline in that area as well trying to keep people alive. I also got into reading "Psychology Today" which was a magazine I found very helpful in me staying alive. I realized that the problems I was having related to problems in my family on both sides for generations and that I was just the latest recipient of these problems being passed down from various kinds of abuse. I realized everyone is abused growing up in various ways because it is inevitable because from one way of looking at us we are domesticated animals from birth. Understanding this fully was incredibly liberating for me.

Then I took a course in Cultural Anthropology and realized I was a natural shaman. The description of a "Natural Shaman" was "Someone who has psychologically died but whose body is still alive somehow who lives both in the world of the living and the world of the dead." I realized this was me. And I saw how I could be valuable to everyone I met in totally new ways by discovering that not only was I a trained minister by my church growing up I was also a "Natural primordial minister" as well.

However, then I came to realize that I could start another religion. I had friends that asked me to do something like this. I thought about it and this was my realization:

"The world has enough religions to confuse people and to drive them insane as it is. I refuse to confuse people by giving them even one more religion that they have to believe in."

However, what I realized is that I could teach people to communicate directly with God and how to create self unfoldment in their lives directly with God. In my late 20s I began to see the value of Buddhism. Because with Buddhism people who didn't even believe in God could be saved just by learning compassion for themselves and others.

So, in the end God driving me towards near suicide was also the key to my own enlightenment ongoing. So, I'm grateful to God now for putting me through all the things that he did. I was angry then but now I'm grateful because I couldn't be as useful as I am now to everyone I meet otherwise.

There is no one exactly like me that I have ever met, and I think God always wanted it that way.

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