WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

Wade,

Long time conspiracy aware, very recently aware of Your work (I am wholly impressed!).

As One who has studied economics thoroughly (though "casually" - no degree) for the last 50ish years, I came to a conclusion, that was subsequent confirmed by My belated reading of Jeremy Rifkin's Entropy, that all money represents is meaningful energy expended.

(One can grasp this most easily by considering the first hunter, gatherer, farmer, miner. The stuff They gained/used was free: critters, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seed, sun, soil, rain, ores. It was the meaningful energy expended that gave "value" to the stuff: the killing, picking, tilling, weeding, harvesting, mining, transporting.)

Clearly, then, adding abundantly what money represents, via free energy for external uses and robots for Human energy in jobs no One wants to do, will eliminate the need for money entirely.

Because of My early childhood experiences, I am fully aware that free energy production on this planet has been obtainable for well over 50 years, and looking at the present level of robotics, I have concluded that We Humans now have what it would take to eliminate poverty, hunger, war, and the control the power elite presently have over Us.

I also am aware that principles, a code, a fractal seed for society, should be put in place to accommodate a chaos-driven free emergence of positive nature. Driven by a very strong Betterment Ethic, I have attempted to construct such a seed and would appreciate Your thoughts on what I have constructed.

I have it posted on a very small forum (and in an older incarnation on ATS), the link to which is: http://www.openlounge.org/forum/free...platform/#p629

The childhood experiences I speak of - and which move Me to consider You a "kindred spirit" - stem from the fact that My father was a CalTech graduate who worked for Convair on electrogravitics through the 1950's (and likely well beyond) in San Diego.

His excitement for His work defined My very early years. My memories start at about the age of one, and I have a very clear memory of Him beaming at Me for saying, at the age of about two, "electrogravitics." He would come home from work eager to share with His first-born toddler what His work entailed. He would try to explain the principles of electrogravitics, and how it all worked - though I admit to being baffled by these finer details.

He also would describe the experimental successes on days when the rigs were tested, describing flying disks and overunity. I had better success in grasping these descriptions.

But most of all I easily could see the world He told Me I would be growing up in: cars would fly, cities would float, "jet" pack (sans jet) would be available, and...We would have all the energy We could use.

Then one night He came home late from work and woke Me up to tell Me We couldn't talk about the flying cars, the cities and "jet" packs, the free energy. We couldn't even say the word, "electrogravitics," because, "They want it secret for now." That was when I was around three years old. I presume He was late at work being briefed and taking an oath relative to the fact that the work was going into black ops.

After that night He never talked about His work again. I do have a memory from some time later, when I saw The Jetsons for the first time, insisting to My cousin, whose house My family was at, that We could make the jet packs. My father scowled at Me and said, "Remember what We talked about?"

I do know that He worked closely at times with the military...and reading Your story from So.Ca. (though Ventura and not San Diego) with military connection, I felt a connection form and felt that I would love to communicate with You.

I thank You so much for the plethora of work You have provided Us all with on www.ahealedplanet.net. Though I had come to the same conclusions as You have, being conspiracy aware, it is nice to have such well-documented detail to fill in the picture I had constructed.

Wade I think that your post # 458 is your best yet.
Thx
g

Edit: Thats actually post 1458, sorry folks for error.

Hi Zenith:

Yeah, when we get there. But who is the manager when we aren’t? Somebody runs the Sun, and it ain’t me. I think I understand your hypothetical question, but am not sure. I am not too keen on guiding voices these days:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice3

so, my advice to some past self might be, “If you hear a guiding voice, beware!” :)

Hi Sandy:

You are doing better than I am. I have refused to play competitive games ever since college. I can’t do it.

Well met, Amaterasu:

Awesome little platform. I am cool with it. I also have some stars to steer by, such as this little visit to a future Earth:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/visions.htm#roads1

there, everybody is a vegetarian (for those who aren’t Level 19s)

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level19

and no animals are killed or abused in that reality, and they have genetic engineering, but I agree that under a capitalistic, national-security paradigm, it is evil. On the miscreants, I see us eventually getting to their “treatment” being to heal them, not punish them or outcast them. Those are pretty high marks to hit, and I doubt that we can get there in my lifetime, but it would be nice to try.

Of course, your aerospace, anti-gravity tale is very familiar. It reads like a passage out of LaViolette’s book. I see more stories like yours from California than anyplace else, by far. You are in good company.

On energy and money; money only buys human effort, but energy leverages it. That is why a human in the USA, where the energy consumption is a nearly hundred times larger than the world’s poorest countries, the American makes a hundred times as much money. Yes, under an FE economy, money would begin to become meaningless.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/abund.htm#trek

Hi Gardner:

Thanks. It is often surprising to me which of my writings people like. I wish that my comprehensive/energy writings were the most popular part ones on my site, but no, it is the American Empire, Columbus, Paul Bragg, and conspiracy essays. :)

Best,

Wade

Felt like bumping this thread before I move on from the forum today...regards all.

Bye CdnSirian.

It was nice to have you stay a while.

Wade

I can't seem to reply with quote - I get the "loading" spinny thing and it just sits there (My machine is old and decrepit) - so I will copy and paste and tag here:

Quote:

---

On energy and money; money only buys human effort, but energy leverages it.

---

Money is not needed for positive Human effort: witness Linux. What the programmers get is recognition, appreciation, status, lauds, and Self-satisfaction. Once money is removed via free energy and robotics, these are the "coin" We will use. And with the Betterment Ethic promoted, People who better the planet will be "rich." And it is because the programmers are in Their bliss programming that They take the time to better things with Their efforts.

EDIT to add: You may be interested in the future I have visited... I present it in a science "fiction" novella I wrote. It is available here: http://files.abovetopsecret.com/file...70b7b43ddc.pdf

Hi Amaterasu:

My point is that money only buys human effort. It does not buy anything else. We are the only animals on Earth motivated by money, or at least I think so:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/simon.htm#dolphins

:)

I am highly familiar with the free software movement,

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/freesoft.htm

and had lengthy exchanges with one of the field’s biggest names, and he was a deeply-entrenched Level 3 guy:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level3

You can’t wave money at a plant and inspire it to grow, or get ore to mine itself. Energy is what leveraged human ability into what we call the industrialized world. Humans have not changed, anatomically, in two hundred thousand years. An American is not biologically different than an Ethiopian. It is the level of energy that they have access to, and what comes with it, which makes their lives so starkly different.

The human journey has always been defined by the energy issue:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/upcoming.htm#succinct

and that won’t change when free energy makes its appearance, but it can leverage the human journey in ways that are hard to presently imagine. And, yes, money becomes obsolete in an abundance-based society. Material gain stops being a motivator in a world of material abundance. I see it in high tech, where I work around rich people all day. Many never need to work again, but there they are, doing it. They moved up Maslow’s hierarchy a level or two from the rest of us.

Best,

Wade

Seems We're saying the same thing. [smile] I hope You have time to read My book. Though it is less "futuristic" than the future experience You linked to in Your first reply, still, it illustrates that things will get done, but in bliss and harmony, love and respect, in abundance.

Thanks for Your replies.

Hi:

As threatened, I am consolidating my LA Days posts. I am playing editor a little, and adding a little new material, too. As with the Godzilla posts, I have to split the entries to fit them into Avalon.

This will be an auto-biographical post that will highlight some early experiences that set me on my path. I could not escape living in the Big City when I got out of college. Avalon is the first place that I have written about these experiences, and I can see that those experiences primed me, so to speak, to be inspired to not only join up with Dennis, but chase him across the USA:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#chasing

So, here goes.

Although born in Seattle, I was raised in Southern California because my parents discovered sunshine when my father was in the Marines. My parents will die in the sunshine, while I love living among the lakes, trees and flowers of the Pacific Northwest. I was raised in Ventura, which is about an hour from LA, but is in another universe. Ventura is a beach town, and the local surf spots are in Beach Boys songs, and my brother surfed them. LA is another matter altogether.

While growing up, the only time I went to LA was to go to a Dodgers game, the museums, the airport, and one of my childhood friends went to UCLA and I visited him there. When we went to the natural history museum when I was about 14, when we entered the San Fernando Valley I got a tremendous headache from the air pollution, and it lasted all day until we came back out of the Valley.

I chased my girlfriend to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Poly_San_Luis_Obispo

I did not even know if they had a business school when I chased her there. She ended the relationship the week after we got there. I got lucky in that Cal Poly had a reputable business school. I went from being the science prodigy to the accounting prodigy when that voice told me to study business:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice

I got the highest test score in the university’s history on the national accounting exam, and when I graduated in 1981, the Big Eight (today the Big Four) accounting firms in LA rolled out the red carpet for me, but I did not want to live in LA. My uncle introduced me to the mountains, with my first backpack at age 17, and I was hooked:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/pics.htm

I began inquiring with the Big Eight firms in Seattle a year before graduation. In 1980, the Seattle economy was all about Boeing and the timber industry. Nobody had heard of Bill Gates yet. I picked the worst recession in forty years to graduate from college, and the Big Eight firms in Seattle were not hiring. Given the choice of career or lifestyle, I chose lifestyle, and moved in with my grandparents in Seattle, determined to make a go of it in Seattle. After a sobering tax season in early 1982, where they fired me soon after April 15th, the tax filing deadline for individuals, I was crawling back to Ventura, and hired on with a Big Eight firm in LA, beginning in January 1983.

While Seattle was an urban environment and my grandparents lived on Queen Anne Hill that overlooked downtown, LA was an entirely different experience. I first lived in Culver City, which is about ten miles from downtown LA. It was where many of LA’s black professionals lived. About the only greenery in town was the lawn at the cemetery across the street from my apartment complex. My office was in downtown Los Angeles. I spent three years living in Los Angeles, and my average commute was an hour each way. As an auditor, I did not spend much time in our downtown office, but worked at clients. I spent weeks sleeping on friends’ floors when I worked in the San Fernando Valley or Orange Country, so my commute would not be two hours each way.

During my first year, however, I worked in Skid Row Los Angeles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Ro...es,_California

auditing the redevelopment agency, which rehabbed the slums, or at least tried to. It was only about a half mile from my office, but it was a hellish half mile. The Greyhound Bus station was about a block from where I worked at the redevelopment agency. I worked in Skid Row for about six months altogether, on various clients. When I first began working there, it was the summer of 1983, during “smog season.” In the summer, the air pollution was so bad in downtown Los Angeles that my office skyscraper was not visible until I was less than a mile from it. I recall days looking out of my skyscraper’s windows during smog season, and I could not even see streets a quarter of a mile away. The air pollution was even worse in Skid Row, with the buses and other diesel vehicles. I had sneezing fits for months when I worked in Skid Row. When I walked outside for a five minutes and came back in and blew my nose, there was soot on the tissue paper. In public accounting back then, bringing your lunch from home was forbidden. We were expected to eat at restaurants for every lunch, and I had to relinquish my vegetarian ways in those days:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/veggie.htm

Something happened after my first month in Skid Row that I have never been able to explain. Driving into the downtown labyrinth, where it was invisible in the smog bank until I was within a mile of it, was part of the tableau. I also drove a 1973 Pinto with no air conditioning, so I had the window down. As I got off the freeway and drove into Skid Row, the businesses had not yet opened, and they all had bars on the windows and doors like fortresses. Some homeless were still sleeping on the ground, while some others were moving as they prepared for the day’s bustle. The experience was like driving into Hell. One day, after a month of doing that every day, I started to lose it. I burst into tears as I was driving, almost in a panic, as I drove into Hell once again. I couldn’t do it anymore. But something happened during the event: it never bothered me again. I worked in Skid Row for several more months in the next year, and it did not trouble me again. I have theories about what changed in my mind that day, but I will probably never really know what happened. It may have been some kind of survival mechanism that kicked in. The things that I saw in the next couple of years will follow, but I was never overwhelmed by them. But, it was about then that my drinking problems began; a habit that I did not give up until I was forty-two.

Several events from my Skid Row days will give an idea of what that world was like, and how it influenced my subsequent free energy efforts. The audit itself was brutal. The redevelopment agency was not computerized, but there was an army of accountants maintaining manual records. They had multi-million-dollar unreconciled amounts, which made it a nightmare to audit. Examining the offering documents relating to the bonds that they sold to the public were ambiguous as to the redevelopment agency’s legal obligations. When we talked to the attorneys who created the documents, we were informed that the documents were intentionally ambiguous, so the agency could slip off the hook if necessary, with their obligations decided in the courtroom (basically, lawyers intentionally created documents that would give lawyers more work in the future – that kind of institutional dishonesty I later found was standard operating procedure).

Because it was a government job, there were laws that stated that our Big Eight firm could not perform the audit by itself, but had to hire a minority-owned auditing firm to assist with the audit; a sweet black woman from a minority firm was assigned to our team, and she performed the most mundane tasks. She was about my age. She had been on the audit for a few years. The poor woman believed that working with a Big Eight firm on the audit was going to enhance her career. Her employer was not going to tell her any differently. Our company was not going to tell her any differently. We were forced to eat out at lunch every day; lunch was intended to be a social event. At lunch she asked me one day about that very issue, of how much her career would be helped by working with us on that audit. In a preview, I suppose, of what my life’s work would become, I told her the truth. She was devastated. Would I do something like that again? I think so.

During those months, on another day, she and I walked to lunch, about a block from our office. As we rounded the corner, a dead Mexican-American man laid on the sidewalk, right in front of us. He had just died. I think that it was the first time that I had seen a dead body. He died traumatically – probably not by crime, but by suicide or accident. About ten feet away stood a policewoman. Nobody stood around the body, and maybe the policewoman was standing there so that nobody would (or loot the body), but we just kept walking, passing a few feet from the body. About fifty meters later we entered the eating establishment for lunch. I don’t recall us talking about the body. By that time, it was just one of the many nightmarish sights that attended life in Skid Row. A half-hour later, we walked out of the establishment to go back to work, and the body was gone. There was no trace left of him.

I read the daily paper from about age nine to thirty, thinking that I was getting the news. Reading all the lying stories about Dennis beat that out of me:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post300436

My alternative media studies began soon after that:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#big

But in my LA days, I read the Los Angeles Times for an hour each morning before going to work. The A-section was the first one and the largest, and had the most “news” in it, so I read it first. Near the back of that section was miscellaneous news, including the “police blotter,” which briefly noted some of the noteworthy police-involved events of the day. On a morning when I was working in Skid Row, at about 6:30 AM I read about an event that happened several hours earlier, at about 1:00 AM. At the street corner where the redevelopment agency was, kitty corner from where we encountered that dead body, the police arrested a white man who seemed like he was on PCP. The cops handcuffed him and put him in the back seat of their police car. Somehow, the man was able to get into the driver’s seat of the police car and began driving it away. He ran over one cop, and the other cop leapt onto the roof of the car, holding onto the siren-light on the roof as the car sped away, and emptied his revolver though the roof, with enough bullets hitting the driver so that he was unable to continue driving. The account did not say if the driver or cop who was run over died in the incident, but I remember reading that account, thinking that it was an interesting night in Skid Row. If that event had happened in Seattle or many other big cities in the USA, it would have been one of the stories of the year. In LA, it made page 17 of the newspaper, with about a column-inch or two of coverage.

There were homeless everywhere in Skid Row. I would be walking briskly down the sidewalk in my suit, and the homeless would be using the gutters as toilets as I walked by. I once walked around a corner near my office, to see a woman in business attire leap over an arcing urine stream as she walked down the street, which spewed from some drugged out man, relieving himself in a stupor, who didn’t “put it away” when finished. The homeless situation was part of Reagan’s Revolution. While he was the California governor, Reagan began defunding the social safety net, and when he was president, it was more of the same. While spending billions on Star Wars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_O...ers_of_science

he threw people onto the street. I studied the homeless situation, and periodically there were articles on the homeless in the LA Times. One article was about a homeless man who lost his legs in WWII, and was an alcoholic. He reminisced about how back in the “good old days,” the homeless men in Skid Row were alcoholics, often men who got cleaned out in a divorce. But he lamented that in the present day, most of the homeless talked to themselves. The warm weather of LA led to a phenomenon known as “Greyhound Therapy.” Mental health clinics in America’s urban Northeast and Midwest that were strapped for funding would buy patients a one-way Greyhound bus ticket to LA, and ten minutes after getting off the bus, the patient was a denizen of Skid Row. While Hitler euthanized them, Reagan threw them onto the streets:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#reagan

My accounting firm not only audited the redevelopment agency, but while I was there, we got the Head Start account. Head Start is a program to help inner-city children:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Start_program

So, its offices were in the worst parts of LA, and its LA headquarters was in Watts. I wore a suit and tie every day for the first twelve years of my career, until the corporate world went casual. A guy that I worked with was assigned to the Head Start job. On his first day, as he got out of his nice car in his suit, he was the only white guy within miles; he did not get fifty feet from his car before he was mugged. He got “lucky” and only had to give up his wallet. After that, my accounting firm allowed the dress code to be relaxed for the Head Start job, so that the white auditors would blend in a little.

Meanwhile, at my gig at the redevelopment agency, a freshly-minted college graduate was assigned to the job. I was a few years older, due to my adventures so far. She was the valedictorian from a Christian college in Southern California. Her business attire was even more wholesome than most, with some lacey frill on her blouse on most days. For the next few months, I watched her transformation as she got her “welcome” to the profession and LA. Although I was a coveted recruit when I was in college, that did not mean anything once I began my career, especially in downtown LA. I was treated pretty brutally in one of my first reviews, a review that I did not think was fair, and it just about scuttled my career there before it began. I think it was just a product of the shark tank. That woman went through similar cognitive dissonance. She continually talked to me about her academic achievements. She did not come right out and say it, but she was thinking, “I was valedictorian! What the hell am I doing here?” I really felt badly for her, but did not say, “Welcome to Hell!”

She was also engaged to her college sweetheart who graduated at the same time and was in our audit group. He was assigned to the Head Start job while she was at the redevelopment agency. She said that every day that her fiancée was on the job, his clothes got rattier and rattier, as he tried to blend in. By the end of the job, he looked like he was homeless. The Head Start job was one of the “hot potato” jobs in the office that nobody wanted. The next spring was promotion time, and the senior on the Head Start job was promoted to manager, so they assigned the Head Start senior slot to an attractive white woman. She quit the next day, deciding to enroll in graduate school.

One day, that former valedictorian and I were walking back from lunch to the redevelopment agency, at the same intersection where that handcuffed guy tried driving away in the cop car. As we crossed the street, coming toward us was a homeless black man. He was mumbling something to somebody behind us. Just as he was right in front of us, a few feet away, he exposed himself, in that well-endowed African way, nearly hitting that woman with me. It seemed to be his way of making a point with whomever he was mumbling at. We kept walking and I did not react to that display, but wondered what the effect on her would be. At we reached the sidewalk, we stood there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her roll her eyes and shake her head. It may have been her moment when she resigned herself to Hell. She stopped talking about her academic credentials after that.

The redevelopment agency was my first “big job” of my Big Eight career. I have typical horrible “doctor’s” handwriting, it is related to my position in the “autism spectrum” – and on that job my supervisor made me write in block capitals, which I have done ever since, but thank God for keyboards, if I had to write for a living, I would have found a way out of it. I also had to figure out how the audit was supposed to work, which meant studying the work papers. I ended up “eating time” on that job, which means working and not recording the hours – working without pay. I went into the redevelopment agency office on some weekends, and saw what Skid Row was like on the weekend. I also was there at night a few times, and that was a truly scary experience.

On one of my weekend visits to the office, I walked to get lunch and I walked into a street event. I don’t know what the Mexicans call it, but some streets were closed, on a Sunday, I believe, and the streets were lined with street vendors and their portable tables. Each table sold trinkets and other wares. The street was packed with Mexicans, and it extended down one street as far as I could see – it may have run for miles. It was kind of a festival atmosphere, with families of parents and children. It was kind of like a Disneyland experience for them. It was about 100 degrees, under a smog blanket, with people packed in like sardines, buying trinkets, without a green, living thing to be seen. And they were having a good time! These were the Mexicans who had escaped to the USA. They “made it.” It was one of the saddest sights that I saw in LA.

My career with the Big Eight was not a good one. I did not do well in the shark tank. I became kind of a lost waif in the office and got the worst jobs. One of them was that I became the inventory king. Businesses that had made goods had to have inventories performed once a year as part of the audit. I performed dozens of inventories during my LA days. Some were of tightly-run Japanese conglomerates with spotless warehouses, while others were industrial wasteland companies making heavy industry parts. I also inventoried a sweatshop. It was in the garment district, close to my office. It was a leather-making factory where they made leather purses and similar articles. On inventory day, the facilities shut down so the inventory can be performed and audited. When I inventoried the leather-making facility, I eventually entered a room where most of the manufacturing took place. The room was on the facility’s top floor. The building was about a hundred years old, and I can’t recall if the rest of the building had air conditioning, but that room definitely did not. I performed that inventory in February, so that I did not get to see it in its 100-degree glory, but I could only imagine it. That room was perhaps sixty meters long, and there were three rows of sewing machines, with about fifty machines in each row. At the end of the room was a fan, with blades about ten feet long.

As I walked through that room, my mind conjured what it must have looked like in August, with the factory in full swing: 150 Mexican women, feverishly working in the 100 degree heat, with that fan blowing the leatherworking fumes into the outside air and cooling the sweating women. It looked hellish.

About a year later, I inventoried the sweatshop version for men. One of my audits was of a company that made a world-famous accoutrement for Mexican low-rider cars. It was privately-owned. It turned out later that they were trying to deceive the auditors, so we resigned from the engagement, but not before I audited their inventories at a few facilities on the same day. As with the leather sweatshop, the facilities were closed for inventory day. While the leather factory had a largely women’s workforce, this heavy industrial business had a male labor force. As the scion of the business’s owner drove me to one of their factories, not far from where I lived in Redondo Beach (a few miles behind the fun beach towns were industrial wastelands where the Mexicans and blacks lived), we drove through a barrio. Poor Mexican children played in the streets. The scion was the manager of the factory that we visited. As we parked and approached the building, he pointed out an item of interest: a bullet hole in the front door. As we walked into the building and through the offices, he showed me how the bullet passed through successive office walls, to eventually lodge in the wall right above his desk. I recall that the shooting happened at night, so it did not endanger anybody, but the scion told it as a funny story. He planned to excavate that bullet and keep it as a souvenir. Then I went about my inventory duties.

While seeing the sewing room in the leather sweatshop was a sobering moment, it paled beside what this heavy industrial factory’s conditions were like, where the Mexican men worked. Again, it was closed, so I could only imagine what it must have looked like when running, but it was a version of Hell that I saw in my mind’s eye. While inventorying that facility, I had to use the restroom. Then I got a better glimpse of what the workers’ lives were like. It was the most disgusting restroom that I ever saw. The floor around the urinals was coated with the industrial gunk on the bottom of the workers’ shoes. The restroom looked like it had not been cleaned in years. I used the urinal from about ten feet away from it.

I was in the audit department, and auditor experience is required for becoming a California CPA. So, people from the other departments, such as the tax department, would be assigned to audits to get the auditing experience needed to earn their CPA certificate. Performing an inventory audit was one of the required tasks, so I supervised accountants from other departments who needed to get that experience. The most memorable was an inventory that I did in West LA. A man from the tax department was assigned to me for the audit. But he lived east of LA, near Riverside. It would have more than two hours to drive to the client’s warehouse. He slept on my couch the night before, and we talked about life in LA. He had been a university professor in Tennessee, and was recruited to LA to play in the Big Leagues for a while, before going back to teaching. He had never seen LA before he moved there. He lived in one of those smoggy, industrial wasteland areas east of LA, where he could afford to live with his family. He heard the usual Hollywood tales of fun and sun, and figured that LA must be something like Florida. He felt so deceived. He said that as soon as he put in his two years, he was getting as far from LA as he could. I said that I was putting in my LA Days time, too, and would be right behind him. Over the years, I have periodically encountered accountants who began their careers in downtown LA, particularly in the 1980s, while living in places like La Verne, and all we can talk about is how happy we are that we aren’t living in LA. :)

During my Big Eight days I not only did inventories, but I also did one of the other disagreeable jobs in the office – branch auditing. Our firm audited a business in New York City, for instance, but it had a satellite office in LA. Our LA office would farm out a staff auditor to audit the branch. If you did a great job or a horrible job, it really did not have any impact on your career, because the people running the engagement were in New York. When you did branch audits, you were effectively removed from your home office. It certainly did not assist your career. I had many dead-end audit experiences like that. But, I was often very friendly with our clients, and that was probably the only saving grace of what I did. I recall being on one of those branch audits, and got to know the secretary. I am not sure how the subject came up, but she related her own sweatshop tale. She went to work as a secretary for an industrial company. Most factories have offices in the front, with the factory in the back. She went to work as a secretary for a family-owned business, but it turned out to be more like a mob family. She said the front office was opulent, where the owner/managers worked. At the back of the office was the door to the factory, which was off limits to her. The factory was full of Mexicans, and most were illegal aliens, as it turned out. Illegal immigrants had almost no rights. Every Monday morning, the factory manager would walk out onto the factory floor and fire somebody, randomly. That was their managerial style, keeping the employees in a state of terror. The woman was only there a week when it began smelling like a mob operation to her. One day, she was asked to do something that seemed unethical, or she saw something that looked unethical. She spoke up. The manager said something like, “Are you giving me some lip, Broad?!” She lowered her head and shut up. At lunch time, she said that she needed to get something from her car. She got in her car and drove away, and never returned.

While that may seem like a harsh way to manage people, especially people with no legal recourse, one of my college roommates had a similar experience with mob-like companies and their managerial style. He became the CFO of several companies. One of them was an industrial company in Orange County. Right after he started, the CEO took him to New York, to meet their money guys. It was a boiler-room operation on Long Island. As they met the owner of the operation, he showed them around. They had a big bullpen of young, twenty-something young men who cold-called America’s rich, trying to get them to invest their money. In my career, I have been a corporate officer, and when your equity awards are reported to the SEC, you start getting calls from those young men, trying to get you to invest your money. I was new to the executive game back then (this is nearly twenty years ago), and at first, I had no idea how they knew to call me. I eventually figured it out.

On the day that my roomie got his tour of that boiler-room facility, the owner told him how he managed the bullpen. Every Monday morning, he would walk out onto the bullpen floor and randomly fire somebody. Like that mob-like factory, that bullpen operation, and the company that my friend had just hired onto, smelled mob-like. He quit a few weeks later. When he told the CEO that he was resigning, the CEO said, “So, you are f***ing me, eh?” My roomie got out of there as fast as he could. The operation turned out to be mob-like, and my roomie eventually testified at the trial of that CEO and his company. It seems that they were engaged in illegal securities activity, and my roomie was subpoenaed to testify.

As Dennis discovered, the mob and capitalism are happy bedfellows. Dennis has survived several mob hit attempts, and had his companies stolen by them on the East Coast. He eventually discovered that the mob acts with more integrity than the government does.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#lawsuit

As Smedley Butler eventually discovered, people like Al Capone are small fry compared to the hyper-capitalists:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#butler

As I mentioned, I began studying the homeless during my LA days, partly because it was thrust in my face. The homeless, beggars, the mentally ill left to fend for themselves - it was my daily reality. On the streets of Skid Row, short spindly trees were planted in the sidewalks. The trees had trunks a few inches across and grew ten feet high or so. There was metal grating, maybe a meter square, which “exposed” some soil around the roots. They were some of Earth’s more bedraggled trees. One day, as I walked down a Skid Row street, I walked past a woman lying in a pile of plastic trash bags, at the base of one of those trees. Over the next few weeks, I had to walk down that street several times, and that woman was always there. She was an old Mexican woman. During those weeks, I once had to drive down that street. Not only was she lying there, but she had probably just “used the bathroom,” because her bare butt was sticking out, facing traffic, almost like a street sign, as I drove down the street.

As fate would have it, a couple of weeks later, there was another LA Times story on the homeless, and the article was about that woman. She was in her sixties and had lived under that tree for the previous eighteen months. She was a Mexican national. Across the street was a take-out chicken window. The reporter’s investigation revealed that the woman somehow had money, and the only place she ever ate was at that chicken window, and the chicken window and her trash bag home under that tree were the only places that she had been in the previous eighteen months. When it rained, she took shelter under the eaves of the building next to the tree.

The plastic trash bags were her toilet, I believe. And she apparently could have lived in a sheltered situation. She did not have to be homeless, but preferred living under that tree over her other options. I thought for a long time about her situation, and sometimes still do.

I sometimes saw crime in Skid Row, but it was relatively rare in the daylight. I once saw the distressed aftermath of an Asian woman who had her necklace ripped from her neck by somebody running past her.

Those days in LA were “transformative” in that I saw Hell and wanted to abolish it. I was so idealistic and naïve:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#believing

in those days. What also bothered me greatly, and contributed to my underachieving career in public accounting, was the nagging suspicion that what I was doing for living provided no net benefit to society. It became clear years later that that was indeed the case:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#getting

Those were by far the unhappiest years of my life. I had subsequent years that were more nightmarish:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#mr

or emotionally agonizing:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#journey

but those years were my unhappiest, as I received a healthy dose of the real world.

Being raised in Ventura, and wishing I was in Seattle, I moved as soon as I could to where the air was a little cleaner, and that was the beach. I moved to Redondo Beach and spent my last years living in LA there. The prevailing sea breeze blew the smog east of LA, to places such as Riverside and San Bernardino. It was rarely smoggy in Redondo Beach; the thick kind that hurt your lungs to breathe (ozone does that).

I also escaped to friends in Bishop whenever I could, and hiked and cross-country skied in the Sierras. I hiked in the Santa Monica Mountains whenever I could, too, but long hikes meant hiking through housing tracts. It was a far cry from the Cascades, but it got me a breather from the crush of people in LA. I was once dead stopped on the freeway at midnight. “Rush hour” was a misnomer in LA. The “rush” lasted all day and into the night.

I lived there when the 1984 Olympics were held. I attended the trials (I was a javelin thrower in college, and watched a bunch of the guys that I used to compete against at the trials), but there was so much fear of how bad the traffic and congestion would be that pretty much the entire city went on vacation during the Olympics, and my office shut down for the entire two weeks, and I hiked in the mountains for a week of it. Traffic was lighter than ever during the Olympics, to everybody’s surprise. Near Skid Row was about a square city block of wiry grass called Pershing Square. It had an underground parking lot, and the ground level was grass, where legions of homeless people could be found. Pershing Square was about the only patch of lawn in or near downtown Los Angeles, but it was deeply tainted by its environment, like those bedraggled trees growing out of the sidewalks. People walked briskly past Pershing Square.

About two weeks before the Olympics, I walked past Pershing Square and was stunned. Flowerbeds had been planted, and there was a popcorn vendor in a shiny new stand (there were a few new stands like that dotting Pershing Square’s perimeter), and the homeless had disappeared. I later discovered what had happened. I had already read some stories about how the City of LA built an internment camp for the homeless east of downtown, to put on LA’s best face during the Olympics. That was where the homeless had disappeared to when I saw the makeover that Pershing Square received. A few days later, Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow presided over the grand opening of the new Pershing Square. I read her speech, and she said that the new Pershing Square would be a “wonderful place for a family to spend the afternoon.” I was flabbergasted. They put a fresh coat of paint on Hell, temporarily removed its denizens, and they acted like it was a new Disneyland. It was a Potemkin Park.

Of all the disheartening aspects of my life in LA, the air pollution was one of the worst. My mentor’s engine:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#glimpse

would have eliminated almost all urban air pollution (carbon dioxide would have been almost its sole pollutant), and I had yet to hear about free energy, but the desire to end air pollution became very strong in me during my LA days. A few air pollution anecdotes should make it clearer, if it is not already. I had a friend in Riverside from my trip to Europe:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#europe

whom I regularly visited, and we would hike at Idyllwild, which was on a plateau on the far east end of the LA basin. On the drive out of the basin up to Idyllwild one summer’s day, there was a scenic viewpoint at around a thousand meters elevation or so, where you could look out across the LA basin. That was before I had a camera, and I wish I had a picture from that day. The view from that spot stretched across the entire LA basin and beyond, with more than fifty miles of visibility that day. Part of the reason for LA’s intense air pollution is because it is ringed by mountains and an inversion layer can form, locking the pollution in the basin. It was that way that day. As I looked out across the LA basin, it was like looking out at the ocean, but the ocean was black. The entire LA basin was an impenetrable sea of black air, but my viewpoint was above it. And dotting the basin like islands in the ocean were the tops of the mountains around the LA basin, poking through the black air. I remember thinking, “I live down there in that blackness.”

During my LA days, I also traveled a lot. In those three years working in the Big Eight, I was out of town on engagements for about six months. I burned out on business travel during those days. One day, I was on a plane that was coming in for landing at LA International airport (LAX), in Inglewood. While we were high in the air and looking down, the lights of LA looked pretty normal. But as the plane came in for landing, it flew through the smog layer. Suddenly, there was a mass of brown air flowing past our windows, kind of like a sludge. It looked like we were a submarine sailing through a sewer. The passengers all shrieked in disgust and horror. And LAX is on the ocean, where the smog was tame compared to the inland areas.

I’ll tell one last smog story. In Seattle, today at my office, it has been sunny for the past few days, and the distant air over the Cascades looks tinged with brown. It is air pollution (nitrous oxide), but it takes several days of sunny weather for the air pollution to become obvious. Once in a great while, an inversion layer forms in the summer, and once I almost smelled ozone, in fourteen years of living here for this stint. That is how Seattle’s air pollution is – not much of an issue. The rain saves us, although Puget Sound does not appreciate it.

LA is ringed with mountain ranges, but when I lived there, you virtually never saw them. I am not kidding – the San Gabriel Mountains behind LA were visible for maybe twenty days a year. The rest of the time, the smog hid them. Once every few years, we would get a storm that would provide the kind of backdrop for the skyscrapers that are at this link:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/...220-story.html

That kind of scene is often on LA postcards, but in my years in LA I saw it about once, and it is a vivid memory. I visited my parents in Ventura often during my LA days, and one Sunday I drove back to Redondo, right after a rain, and as I drove down the San Fernando Valley, I was amazed to see the downtown skyscrapers from twenty miles away or so, with the snowy mountains behind them. I saw that calendar shot. The next morning, I had to drive back into the San Fernando Valley. At about 8:30 AM, I drove over Sepulveda Pass, which separates the beach cities and West LA from the San Fernando Valley:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepulveda_Pass

I was wondering what kind of view I would get, about fourteen hours after I saw that calendar shot scene the evening before. I could not even see across the Valley. The mountains were completely obscured by the smog bank. It took the smog bank less than one rush hour to recover to its mountain-hiding best. It was awesome.

I am going to lighten up the LA Days a little at this stage of the story. It was not all bad by any means. I met some of my best friends in LA. While I was precocious and a prodigy:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#_edn4

my childhood was pretty normal. I was an athlete, was given music lessons until it became obvious that I had no musical ability, and had a pretty normal baby-boomer, tract home existence while growing up. I was placed in organized baseball in the second grade, and my father took my brother and me to our first Dodgers game when I was about ten. I became a pitcher, and eventually a collegiate javelin thrower and high jumper. I got “imprinted” on sports, especially baseball, basketball and eventually, golf. Jerry West was my hero growing up, and I encountered him in the Lakers’s back office one day, and in an instant of eye contact, I could tell how much of a people person he was, in a good way.

Mr. Professor:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#mr

was raised on a North Dakotan farm, and when he was about twelve years old he saw his first basketball game, when the Lakers (when they were the Minneapolis Lakers) played an exhibition game at a local gymnasium. He moved to California at about the same time that the Lakers did. He was a javelin thrower and discus thrower in college who won the state discuss throw, and I almost had my junior college school record in the javelin throw (I missed it by less than a foot). So, we had plenty in common besides accounting and Dennis.

The last time that I saw him alive was in the late 1990s in New Jersey, as we helped out Dennis in the accounting area. Mr. Professor’s diabetes complications got so bad that he could no longer sleep lying down, and slept in a chair in the building’s TV room, and as fate would have it, the Lakers were in the playoffs (the Kobe and Shaq days, before they started winning championships), and we watched the Lakers games together. Because that was the last thing that we did together while he was alive, I doubt that I can ever totally shake being a Lakers fan. I once was able to watch a Lakers game from a couple of rows behind Jack Nicholson, during Magic Johnson’s Showtime era, and being a basketball player myself when younger, it was an awesome experience to watch those giants playing at such a high level up close. It was a lot different than seeing it on TV.

Because I was a pitcher and Dodgers fan, Sandy Koufax was a god to me, even though he retired before I became interested in baseball. It is ironic to me today that I follow sports at all. I have refused to participate in any kind of competitive activity for nearly fifteen years, but I still follow sports. I wonder if I will finally lose interest in this lifetime, or if FE happens and competitive anything becomes an obsolete idea. My wife likes that I follow sports, as it makes me more “normal.” :)

When I lived in Culver City, during the first year of my Big Eight career, I was not working the long hours quite yet, and I was quite the movie buff when growing up. I watched Star Wars nine times in the theaters, and Raiders of the Lost Ark about twelve times. At night, my apartment in Culver City was only a ten minute drive from Westwood, which was next to UCLA and Beverly Hills. It was about the only place in the entire LA basin where walking at night was not only safe but fun. I went to movies constantly, in Westwood and in Beverly Hills. I saw plenty of art and foreign films. Academy Award nominee movies played at those venues, and Academy members attended such showings for free. I was constantly running into movie stars. I never approached any of them, but they were as thick as flies in Westwood, Century City and Beverly Hills.

Being raised in Ventura, encountering movie stars was not unusual, and you quickly realized that they were just people. My brother attended school with Marlon Brando’s son and once played soccer with Marlon, but their lives were disasters. Marlon’s son killed somebody:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Brando

and Marlon’s son and daughter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Brand

both led unhappy lives before their early deaths. I heard many sad stories of famous actors and actresses during my years in Southern California. All that fame and money is a double-edged sword.

Sometimes I worked out of our Century City office and parked in Beverly Hills neighborhoods for free and walked into the office. In Beverly Hills, the rich tried to recreate the yards and gardens of the Pacific Northwest, with their imported water and Mexican gardeners, but they could never quite pull it off. And in those more innocent days, somebody could park a beat-up Pinto in front of their house for the day for free, as he worked at the Century Plaza. :) I gave pals from out-of-town tours sometimes, and if they wanted to see a movie star, I would take them to my haunts, and it would not be long until we ran into one. Nobody approached the movie stars that I ever saw. People left them alone to live their lives. I often found myself in social situations with movie stars and other celebrities, and they were often kind of invisible, not seeking attention. I think that they got enough of it already, and wanted to just be treated normally when they were not playing the celebrity game.

If you had enough money, LA was livable, as you paid others to do the dirty work. But for the rest of us who had to drive during “Rush Hour,” audit sweatshops and work in Skid Row, it was not so pleasant. I escaped LA whenever I could. If somebody offered me a million dollars a year to work in LA, I would tell them that it was not enough money. I never want to see the place again.

About half of my friends during my LA days were either in the entertainment business, were trying to break into it, or used to be in it. My friends and even family members were actors, musicians, writers, directors, producers, managers, support staff, and so on. Just as a kid raised in fishing village probably became a fisherman, kids raised around LA often went into entertainment. I acted on stage, to audiences of a thousand sometimes, while growing up. I did some Hollywood auditions when young. I had some talent (due to my artisan soul role, most likely http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#michael). So, I grew up around aspiring actors and actresses, athletes, musicians, etc. Some made it, but most didn’t. Or they had their brief moments in the sun, but their careers soon ended. Those fields are insanely competitive. For every Tom Cruise, thousands never make it, but end up waiting on tables, driving cabs, and so on. I helped support some of my aspiring pals at times, as they would go years between paychecks. They would get a $250K payday, and then nothing for years. That kind of feast-or-famine aspect is endemic in the business.

I once knew a guy who was a porn flick producer. He was an aspiring screenwriter, but producing porn flicks paid the bills until he got his break (which never came). One of the cute girls in my high school classes became a porn magazine model a few years out of high school, which was quite the event at the local liquor store when that issue came out. That was just part of the terrain. I had my fair share of babe girlfriends while growing up in a Southern California beach town. One became a model, and others could have.

So, because of my close association with the entertainment business and the media, it was doubly shocking to see how the media treated Dennis and our efforts:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post300436

That was a brutal way to wake up to the dark side of all of that stuff.

In LA, if people were friendly toward me, especially if we just met, it was usually because they were trying to get something from me. Some wanted me to be their boy toy, both heterosexual and homosexual, and others wanted to get me into their Amway network as their down-line, and so on. I was such an innocent from the sticks in those days. Those Skid Row days were part of my baptism in the jungle, and it took me about a year before I learned to keep my eyes in front of me and to be wary of the friendly approach, in numerous and diverse social settings.

During my day in LA in the Big Eight, I was such a fish out of water. We are assigned counseling managers and partners. I liked them and they were trying to help me, but I was hopeless. In one session, after about a year at the firm, my counseling manager and I had a very frank lunchtime conversation in our session. He told me that I wasn’t playing the game the right way. My shoes were not shiny enough, I did not look like I was having a good time at the endless parties, and that I needed to “play the game” if I wanted to get ahead (that was his literal advice – I am not taking poetic license here). I then told him about my dreams of changing the energy industry and the other things that I had been groomed for. He understood, and wished me the best in achieving my dreams, which obviously did not have much to do with auditing corporations. We had an understanding after that, an understanding that I sure did not have much of a career ahead of me in public accounting. :)


End of LA Days, Part 1

LA Days, Part 2:

At work, the expectation was that we had to work hard and play hard. But, the lives of those around me were disasters. That dynamic will be seen soon, but here is a preview. I was expected to eat meat and drink alcohol. If I did not, it was considered a “career-limiting move.” I gave up being a vegetarian during those years and developed a drinking problem that I did not kick until I was forty-two, just in time for my midlife crisis:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/opinions.htm#crisis

If I drank during my monster of a midlife crisis, I may not be alive today. Not only were we expected to eat meat and drink but, at least one night a week, we were supposed to attend cocktail parties. It was not really voluntary, like the United Way “charity” that we were supposed to give to, or all of the “charitable” activities that we were supposed to engage in. That so-called “charitable” activity was intended to create business opportunities. The captains of business were expected to join charities and run them. It was intended to put a smiley face on capitalism, as I later learned. Charity is a poor substitute for justice, but capitalism throwing a few public crumbs to its victims was part of the act.

The ideal cocktail party experience was about ninety minutes long, where you talked to thirty people for three minutes each. It was all about “mingling” and creating social arrangements that could be exploited for business opportunities. Like so many things, they rarely openly admitted what it was really all about, but sometimes they did. After a couple of years of endless phony cocktail parties, a manager told me that they kept lists of those who did not attend the parties. Failing to attend was indeed a “career-limiting move.” I eventually developed a social phobia, being endlessly forced into those phony social situations. There were several reasons why they were phony. Being semi-voluntary was one of them. Also, the very people I was socializing with were the bodies that I would have to crawl over to the top. I wanted no part of crawling to the top (you had to work there two years to get your CPA license, and some people quit on their second anniversary date), but one partner who counseled me said it bluntly: if I wanted to advance in the company, I had to crawl over the bodies of my peers. It created a shark-tank environment, and I saw such highly dysfunctional lives that it blew me away. I don’t have time this morning to describe all of it, but here is an example.

One of my college roomies ended up in the Big Eight in Costa Mesa, which was the other end of the world compared to downtown LA. It was like comparing frolicking on the beach with surviving in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. But even in Costa Mesa, his counseling partner (you were assigned a manager and partner to mentor you) said that he blew through three marriages on his way to making partner, and it was a price that he was happy to pay. You rarely heard it admitted aloud like that, but most partners thought that way, I believe.

I attended Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, which was an entirely different universe than LA, kind of like comparing Bonanza to Blade Runner. It was fairly common to see people who either got some degree in the humanities or joined the military upon high school graduation, or they just worked for a living after high school. They eventually figured out that if they wanted to be able to comfortably retire before they were seventy, they had better get a marketable skill. Many of those older students, about ten years older than the rest of us, were pretty common; they were usually great students who had no interest in learning how to drink and have sex. They knew what they were there for, and studied hard. One of my fellow students was about ten years older than me. She was also at the top of the class, she was married, and her husband also attended Cal Poly. She graduated about a year ahead of him, and she moved to the San Fernando Valley upon graduation, while he finished up in San Luis Obispo. When I went back with Dennis in 1996-1997 in New Jersey, my wife lived in the Bay Area, playing nanny to her sister’s infant children. I saw my wife once a month for about six months, and the entire experience was like a bad dream. I highly sympathize with couples who are separated like that. It can be hard on the marriage.

Well, my older pal wanted no part of the Big Eight shark tank when she graduated, and hired on with a small, regional firm in The Valley. Even so, she still worked the long hours during tax season (such as 70-80 hour weeks), and it put a strain on her marriage. She made an appointment to meet with her counseling manager, and told her what the workload was doing to her marriage. The response from her counseling manager was essentially, “Then you should get a divorce. What do you need him for?” That was not the dog-eat-dog Big Eight, but the kinder, gentler existence at a small regional firm in The Valley.

I will get to some of the dysfunction that I saw in the lives around me soon, but I want to give some idea of what life was like in LA, to help illuminate maybe why their lives were so dysfunctional.

LA’s denizens did their best to ignore the air pollution. Almost everybody that I knew was not from LA, but had migrated there, often from the East Coast or Midwest; from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and so on. I had some pals from Chicago, and every year, when the Rose Bowl would be on TV during New Year’s Day, when it was usually sunny and 70 degrees, and the Midwest and East Coast would be having snow, another spurt of migration to LA would begin. There are literally stats on dynamics like that. I lived in Boston, Ohio and New Jersey, so am no stranger to winter, but I’ll take snow over killer smog any day. But it was not that way for my weather-phobic friends from out east. During my first year in LA, in about February, I was visiting friends in The Valley and it was a first degree smog alert. If you were outside for long, especially if you did any exercise, your lungs would burn and you could not get a full lung of air, because of the ozone. Usually the summer was smog season, but on this day, it was February, and we had a first degree alert, because it was sunny and about 85 degrees. As I was visiting my friend from Chicago, his mother was visiting and another woman friend from Chicago was there.

The woman said to my friend’s mother how wonderful it was to have 85 degree and sunny weather in February, and I replied that I could not breathe. It literally did not matter to them. All that mattered was that it was 85 and sunny in February, smog be damned. I had yet to experience the snowy winters out east, but I had a hard time imaging that people would choose strangling air pollution over more extreme temperatures. But they did.

During my first year in LA, I had new tires put on my Pinto, at the local Sears store. I had not performed much maintenance on my car yet. A few days later, I was pulling into the REI parking lot to get some outdoor gear, and heard a sound come from my tire. As I parked, I resolved to investigate the sound, but promptly forgot to as I got out of the car. A couple of days later I was driving home on the 405 freeway, going about sixty miles per hour, when I heard a horrible rattling sound coming from my tire, and I quickly moved to the right lane and headed toward an off-ramp. Just as I got to the off-ramp, my tire fell off and it began rolling down the off-ramp as my axle skidded on the pavement. The Sears store did not properly tighten my tires’ lug nuts.

If that tire had fallen off when I was in the fast lane, I might be here to write this today. So, there I was in my suit and tie, running after my tire. I retrieved it and somehow got the jack under the axle and lift the car so I could get the tire on. I had to bend back some sheet metal that was bent as the car collapsed onto its axle, and I robbed a lug nut from the other tires and was able to limp home. I went to the Sears store and told them what had happened. I did not know what to expect. The guy (whom I bought the tires from a few days earlier) went into the back, and I heard him yelling in Spanish, and he came out with a lug nut to give me, and that was it. I vividly remember as I got home thinking, “That was no big deal, just another day in LA.” After that, I became my own mechanic and stopped trusting the “professionals.” The hellish commutes, working in Skid Row, working in a shark tank – this was just how life was, and the tire incident did not really bother me.

About a year later, I was driving to work, stopped in traffic about a mile from downtown, in the “fast” lane closest to the median. My car window was down as it usually was, as it was my “air conditioning.” Sitting in traffic became kind of a meditation for me. The traffic going the other way – away from downtown – was moving at normal speed. A big truck (which turned out to be hauling liquor - not an 18-wheeler, but what is called a “straight truck”

http://safetycollege.ca/programs/straight-truck-driver ) made a loud braking noise in the outbound lanes and caught my attention. As it passed by me, within ten feet or so, on the other side of the median, it began to flip. After it passed me, I watched in my mirror, and I saw cars fly into the air, hit by the flipping truck. The entire event lasted maybe fifteen seconds. When it was over, the truck was upside down, with its tires pointing at the sky. I remember how quiet everything seemed after that truck came to a halt on its back. It became the traffic story of the morning, as traffic became backed up for miles as they cleared the accident. It was just another morning on the LA freeways. I once tried to help in the bloody aftermath of an accident on the freeway, using my Silva training to try to psychically stabilize a bleeding and partially comatose victim. Those kinds of events were memorable, but not really remarkable, not in the context of working and commuting in LA. My drinking problems began around the same time, and they may well have been related.

With those kinds of events being normal days in LA, I wonder how much it contributed to the lives of those around me. Because I am in the autism spectrum (closer to normal than Gates, Einstein or Newton, who all likely have/had Asperger’s), I am pretty oblivious to social cues and clues. Women usually had to throw themselves at me for a year before I did anything about it. So, what follows is a story that kind of epitomizes the catastrophes of the personal lives of my colleagues. I was oblivious to the situation, too, until the only colleague from those days that I kept in touch with told me about it, several years later. This story begins on a banking job near the LAX airport. I was a staff auditor. My supervisor (a senior auditor) went to Cal Poly with me. She was also on the track team as a high jumper, and she was also a cheerleader. The lead manager on the job married a woman whom I went to high school with in Ventura. It can be a small world at times. The head senior on the job had a wife who was several months pregnant with their first child. The lead manager who married my high school chum somehow scheduled another manager on the job. That other manager was a married woman about the other manager’s age – late twenties, and she was with him on other jobs. That kind of chumminess was common in the office, where pals would get on the same jobs together.

Near the airport were sleazy strip bars, and on our audit, we went to one for lunch at least once. I think it was just the guys, but I thought that it was kind of strange that we would be having lunch at a strip joint (and it was the first time that I ever saw a place like that). When the audit was finished about a month later, the lead manager took us out for a celebration, to that strip joint. The attendees were that lead manager and his manager sidekick, the senior with the pregnant wife, the cheerleader senior, that buddy whom I kept in touch with, and me. The six of us sat at that table in the strip joint and were boisterous patrons. The strippers were also the waitresses, rotating stripping and waitressing duties, and one pulled her top down right at our table, I suppose because the lead manager was tipping lavishly. That night was one of my life’s strangest. I did not know what to make of it, taking women colleagues to a strip joint. A few months later, that head senior had a pool party at his house, to further celebrate that audit. I was pretty much into my full-blown social phobia by then, and wanted to be anywhere else but at that pool party, which happened to be scheduled on my birthday. The party was attended by all of those at that strip joint event, and they brought their spouses along, including that high school chum. I stayed just long enough to not be insulting. I later heard that the pool party turned into a drunken affair that lasted into the night, and ended with some teary altercations.

At that time, I lived in Redondo Beach, and that former cheerleader lived about a mile from me. She had a roommate whose situation was like that situation that I presented earlier; the roommate graduated from Cal Poly, was married, and her husband was still at Cal Poly, finishing his degree. I visited them once, to present some work papers on a job that I was handing over to the roommate.

Several years later, my buddy that I kept in touch with told me what was happening on that audit. That manager who married my high school chum was sleeping with that other manager. They eventually left their spouses, got married, and had a family. The head senior with the pregnant wife was sleeping with the cheerleader, who tried to get him to leave his wife. He may have showed some “character” when he decided to not leave his pregnant wife for the cheerleader. Not to be deterred, the cheerleader eventually stole her roommate’s husband away, and married him. My buddy divorced his wife not long after that. When I heard all of that, years later, it was incredible to me. Peyton Place had nothing on that situation, and I was oblivious to it as it happened under my nose. Those two philandering husbands eventually made partner. They never got caught. When I was on another job with that buddy, on the city government of a California beach town, the senior on that job got caught in bed with his wife’s best friend. Unlike those other philandering husbands, he got caught, which ended his career.

Was I seeing an unusual situation? I doubt it. It was just life in LA. When I have told that story to friends over the years, I have openly wondered if I was seeing the effects of the hedonistic 1980s, the effect of living in LA, or the effects of high-pressure careers. We have generally come to the conclusion that it may have been a little bit of each.

In the end, it was another aspect of my LA existence that ultimately propelled me on my journey with Dennis and beyond.

As I have stated, the year that I lived in Culver City, I regularly went to the movies in Westwood and Beverly Hills. When I moved to Redondo Beach, where I spent my last two years during my first stint working in LA, I was rather isolated from all of that, living in a beach enclave. My first year, even though I was in Skid Row for much of it, was not all that stressful. The next year, with the seventy-hour weeks during the busy season, was when I began having stress problems. During my first job out of college, at that small CPA firm in Seattle, I had a headache every waking hour for my entire three-month tenure there. I thought that maybe it had to do with the climate change, but I now know that it was my first stress episode.

My second busy season in LA saw the stress symptoms return. My social phobia and drinking problems were pretty well established by then, and in that second busy season, I began to get shortness of breath. I could not get a full lungful of air. I suspected that it was stress-related, but I was not sure. When the busy season ended in March, the symptoms went away. And right at that time, I went to the beach that I lived a couple of blocks from, on a sunny April Saturday. As I walked on the beach for the first time since I moved there, it hit me that the previous six months of my life was a blur of working. Six months of my life was gone, just like that. I kind of resented having my life go past in a blur of long hours at the office.

I also developed tendinitis in my knees and shoulders in those days; the former college athlete discovered that he could not sit at a desk for six months and go climb mountains or play baseball. I learned valuable lessons about my mortality in those days, and learned to manage my body. That is why I looked forward to whipping the athletic midlife crisis in minutes. But you don’t get to have the midlife crisis of your choosing. :)

In college, I betrayed a friend. It was a sexual betrayal. It was a pretty small sin in retrospect, admitted by all involved, but it was my life’s greatest crime, and it helped turn me into the most loyal friend that anybody could hope for. It probably had something to do with sacrificing my life to spring Dennis from jail:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#it

Two of my teachers went through the Casanova midlife crisis with their high school students (one went to prison, and other had his career end – both were in their mid-forties when they did it – or at least got caught doing it, and I knew both of them; when it happened, I was not too surprised), and I looked forward to whipping that midlife crisis in minutes, too. But mine was something entirely different, and it snuck in my back door while I waited for it on my front porch:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/opinions.htm#crisis

But in LA, I was many years from my midlife crisis, just trying to survive. I fasted on the rare occasions when I was by myself on jobs, but the meat and restaurant food eating, and the alcohol, took its toll. Friends said that I reeked in those days, with my body a kind of toxic waste dump.

When the next busy season came, back came the breathing problems. That winter was when I was out of town on that big Savings and Loan audit, and eventually found out about the Easter Bunny:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#getting

I was on that job because I was kind of a lost waif in the office. Nobody was volunteering for the job. When that audit was over and I went back to LA, the breathing problems did not disappear. For the next year, I gasped for air every waking hour. I had my two years in by then, and planned to get a job in Seattle that summer. By that time, there was no more going to movies after work during the week. On the weekends, I just hung around the house and drank. Also, compact discs had just come out, and I went crazy that year buying CDs, being an audio freak. That summer, I went to Seattle and looked for work. I was not able to land anything in a couple of weeks up there. I figured that I was pretty marketable by that time, and I was right, but in two weeks in the summer, I was unable to land anything. I decided that the only way that I would be able to get in in Seattle was to save up a war chest and spend a year looking for work up there.

I was also quite the mystical student, and spent lots of time in places like the Bodhi Tree bookstore (I found Roads’s first book in a bookstore near my home in those Redondo Beach days), was involved in several spiritual groups, sometimes running them. And I did “healing” work in those days:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post194267

I came to realize that the New Age scene in LA was largely bogus. For every real person, there were a hundred pretenders. The relatively few men in the scene (the New Age scene was about 80-90% women) were usually in “guru” roles and used their position to get laid:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/opinions.htm#mystical

and perform other abuses of their positions, and like Sandy posted, the women played along, too. No victims there. One of the greatest hazards that I have faced in my work is New Agey women (often from LA) who want to turn me into some kind of New Age hero. When I reject that role, then their claws come out. My “fan base” is primarily comprised of post-menopausal women, and my “enemy base” is partly comprised of my “peers” – white, educated, American men:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/purpose.htm#peers

All of my close friends’ mothers kind of adopted me when I was growing up. They all wanted me for their son, and that dynamic has been with me for my entire life, which amuses my wife.

Driving on the LA freeways everyday was quite an experience. It was actually safer during rush hour, because the drivers were all “professionals,” and knew that they would not live long playing freeway squirrel. The weekends were when the crazies came out. While driving one day, I got an idea for a bumper sticker. It was a picture of a horned Viking helmet, with crossed battleaxes below it, with a caption saying, “Freeway Warrior.” It was just a little ahead of its time, as a couple of years later, people began shooting at each other on the LA freeways, and “Road Rage” became a phenomenon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_rage

I did not live or work there when it began, but when I heard about it, it was no surprise.

When my breathing problems did not go away in the spring, and my summer of 1985 attempt to get a job in Seattle came up empty, I resigned myself to being trapped in LA for a long time. I also decided to go to a doctor for my breathing problems. Even back then, I would only go to holistic doctors, and I got a physical examination (and did not have another one for twenty-five years). My doctor said that my breathing problems were textbook stress symptoms, and he advised me to quit my job before a health catastrophe befell me. It was nice advice, but I did not feel that I had an easy way out. I was also crazy loyal to my CPA firm, of all things, and did not want to leave them just when the busy season was starting, even though I really did not have much of a career there. Within weeks of that exam, I was kind of kicked out of my audit group, and the manager whom I worked for on that Savings and Loan audit the year before took me in, and I spent the winter out of town again (ironically, it is the same town that my wife was born and raised in, but she had already moved to the town that I was raised in, Ventura). Because my stress symptoms did not go away the previous spring, I could tell that the coming busy season would be a nightmare for me, and it was. My brain kind of stopped working. My entire body tingled, along with the shortness of breath, and I was unable to concentrate.

One day it came to a head. I was obviously pretty useless at work, and I had a meeting with my manager. I would not be promoted in the spring, and in the Big Eight, it was “up or out.” But, I had been so loyal that my manager said that I could leave on my terms. When that audit was over, I did not even have to come into the office in LA, but could just take time off and look for work. When I found a job to my liking, then they would let me leave. It was a very kind gesture from that manager, who was one of the “good guys” who made partner the next year. I was elated. Even though I was trapped in LA, I had at least arranged a graceful exit into industry. Big Eighters, even underachievers like me, were highly marketable. That winter, those of us who spent months on that audit did not have to live in a hotel like the previous winter, but I had my own furnished apartment.

That evening, I drove back to my apartment, ecstatic. It was the first “good news” that I had had in years. As I walked up to the door of my apartment and reached into my pocket for my key ring, it was not there. I had already had the voice in my head and other paranormal events, and I could hear The Twilight Zone music in my head as I fished in my pocket. I knew that I was being “f***ed with” by those unseen “friends” as my keys disappeared, and it was obviously related to my moment of light when I had that talk with my manager. When I was sixteen, my father gave me a grenade ring from his Marine days as my first key ring. That grenade ring is my key ring today. I have never lost my keys in my life, except for that night. That key ring had my apartment key and office keys on it. It was a kind of temporary key ring that did not have my car keys and other “permanent” keys on it. But I lost those keys, and knew that I had to have lost them between the office and my apartment. So I drove several miles back to the office to retrace my steps. My office was in a bad part of town, and the office was deserted at night. It was raining that night as I pulled into the parking lot. Just as I pulled into the parking lot, one of my life’s most dramatic scenes awaited me. A car in the deserted parking lot was driving after a woman, who was running at my car. She ran up to my window, screaming, begging to be let in. It looked like the car was trying to run her over. I opened my passenger door and she got in as my car was still rolling. The other car did not pursue me as I drove away.

As we pulled away from my office, I looked at my passenger. Her face was swollen, with one eye partially shut. She looked about eighteen years old, and a very rough eighteen. She quickly told what had just happened. She was a prostitute, and had just transacted a little business in the front seat of that car that was chasing her. When she finished her job, instead of paying her, the customer began beating her up. I don’t know if he intended to run her over or make her “disappear,” but rescuing that hooker was one of strangest nights of my life, and on the heels of being told that day that I could enjoy an easy exit from public accounting, I realized that there was a lot more than met the eye to that series of events. I knew that “they” were messing with me once again. I offered to drive the hooker to the hospital, but she declined the offer. We went to a store to get some medical supplies to treat her wounds. It turned out that she lived near my office, and I eventually took her home. Once I dropped her off, I still had to find my keys. I knew that something was “up,” and what happened next was surreal. As I drove into the deserted parking lot, about a hundred meters away, something gleamed in the headlight of my car like a beacon. I drove up to the gleaming, and it was my key ring. The alarm bells were ringing loudly, but I did not know why.

I gave the woman some money as I let her out of the car (after all, her customer did not pay her). The next day, while I was at the office, the receptionist told me that somebody was in the lobby looking for me. Then began my month of “me and the hooker.” She asked for more money, and I gave it to her. Working out of town was fairly lucrative for a yuppie. I saved a few thousand dollars that winter, as I recall. For the next week, whether I was at the office or at my apartment, that hooker would find me or call me, begging for money. She was going to milk this “rich guy” from out of town, and I let her. I did not have the heart to say no, and every day, she came up with a new story for why she needed money. She had a husband, and child that had been taken away from her by the county and was being raised in an orphanage. One day she asked for money for food. Another day it was for a gift for her child. She later admitted that it pretty much all went to drugs for her husband, and cigarettes.

She eventually got bolder, and I got a call from her from her “office” on the street. She said that she wanted to take a bus to Nevada with her friends and have a nice day gambling and having fun, and if I gave her the money, she would not have to “go hooking” to earn that play money. Before you think I am the all-time sap, I was well aware of what was happening, but I was trying, in my naïve way, to help her out of the spiral that she was in. After about a week of this dance, I got a call from her, in jail. She had been picked up on the street by the cops for “solicitation.” She begged me to bail her out, and I did. I had a long talk with the bail bondsman, and he told me that people like her were not “worth it,” but as long as I was a paying customer, he would bail her out. Her bail was about $2K, as I recall, so I had to pay the bail bondsman $200 to post bail.

When she got out, she went right back to the streets. I spent some quality time with her during that month, and got to know some of how she ended up like she did. Her parents were hippies who first got her stoned when she was about seven, that kind of “parenting” defined her life, and she was on her own at around age sixteen. Prostitution was a way to make money. She was not all about milking the “rich guy.” She gave me a picture of her holding her daughter that I still have, a Polaroid shot that was likely one of her only pictures of her daughter. She even offered to “work off” what I gave her in sexual favors (an offer that I had no intention of accepting).

Her hearing came up in a couple of weeks, and she still hooked and we had our dance. I decided that I was going to limit my “investment” in this game to $1K, which is ultimately what it ended up costing me. On the day of the hearing, she did not appear, and the police found her on her normal street corner and jailed her, but not until after I had a fun conversation with the bail bondsman. Posting the bail bond was not the end of my liability. If she fled, I was liable for the entire $2K bond. I doubt that she intended to skip bail, but promptly forgot all about the situation after I bailed her out. She begged me once more from jail to bail her out, with all sorts of teary promises made. I told her that she needed to be in jail, and that bailing her out again (of course, the bail went way up for her, after skipping the courtroom appearance) was not going to happen.

She called me from jail more than once, and she accepted her condition. She was sentenced to about three months in the county jail. She said that she had learned her lesson and wanted to go to hairdresser school when she got out. Just before I moved back to LA, I mailed a postcard to jail, and wrote that best thing that she could do for her daughter was to get her life together, so she could become a responsible mother. I did not put my return address on the card, not wanting her to show up at my home in Redondo Beach in a few months. That was the last time that we communicated, and I would be greatly surprised if she really got her life together. I did not know what that was all about at the time, but now I think that it was some sort of “test” that my unseen friends were giving me.

I moved back home to Redondo and began seeking a job in “industry” (the accountant’s term for leaving public accounting). True to his word, my manager began trying to find me a job. I also contacted the recruiters (called headhunters in the industry). I was indeed marketable, but I was also beat. I had dark rings under my eyes. My friends later said that I looked a raccoon. I was so beat that I could not handle the idea of commuting on the LA freeways anymore. I wanted a job close to home in Redondo, or I would also consider getting a job in the Costa Mesa/Newport Beach area, and I let my manager know that.

A recruiter quickly got me an interview in the internal audit department of a famous fast food conglomerate, in Costa Mesa. I still laugh when I think about that interview. I said something like, “I don’t have to work overtime, do I?” That was probably the absolute worst thing to say. I was not exactly an eager go-getter at that moment. That interview was on a Friday, and they said that they would get back to me the next week. I got away to my friends’ place in Bishop that weekend, and on Monday I got several pieces of news. First, I got a call from my manager, who got me a phone interview with a bank near Newport Beach. It was a kind of gofer job for the bank president, of a pretty small bank. I was not too interested, but I am not sure if I was really interested in much of anything. At that time, I was willing to consider waiting on tables in Redondo, I was so burned out. Then I got a call from my manager, who lined up another interview for me. When I called and talked with them, asking where their office was, it turned out to be in one of the industrial wasteland towns that I did not want to come close to. That morning I also talked to the recruiter who got me my interview at that fast food company. I naturally blew that interview. I also signed up with another recruiter in LA, and his only lead so far was with that same fast food company. I called my manager, and said that the second interview that he set me up with was in an industrial wasteland. He tried to nicely tell me that I had to go where the opportunities were, and there weren’t too many that were close to the beach towns.

So, about eight years after that voice told me to go study business:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice

after I felt backed into a corner by forces beyond my control, I ended up in the same corner, but in far worse shape than when I was nineteen years old. I had hit rock bottom once again. For the second and so far last time in my life, I prayed for guidance, with all my heart.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice2

The next morning, the voice spoke up again. It was not as dramatic as when it told me to go study business, but within the first hour, the voice said, “Hey, you can starve as easily in Seattle as here, but you would like the experience better. What do you have to lose?” Like the “study business” message, that thought was totally alien to me. I had given up on living in Seattle anytime soon during the previous summer, so the thought really came from left field. But, I was instantly enthused. It was a Tuesday morning. By Friday, I had already given notice to my employer and landlord, and had stored most of my worldly possessions in my father’s backyard, and on Saturday morning I was driving to Seattle. I arrived on Monday, less than a week after that voice spoke to me. I moved back in with my grandparents, ready to live with them as long as it took for me to find work. I had a few thousand dollars in the bank, and could hold out a long time in my search. But first, LA had some parting moments for me.

That Tuesday morning, I was busy on the phone, talking to my manager, the recruiters, my landlord, my father, my grandfather, and so on. By that evening, I was taking the first load of my possessions to Ventura, which would not be retrieved until I landed a job in Seattle and had my own place. In that first load was my bed. I also had many of my more valuable possessions in my Pinto. For the first time (and far from the last), I tied down that bed onto the top of my car. Never having done it before, I believed that the one length of rope that I had was adequate. As I drove the surface streets to the 405 freeway, the bed did fine. But as soon as I got on the freeway and began going sixty miles an hour, I was rudely disabused of the notion that I had adequately secured the bed. It began “taking off” from the airflow, and bouncing up and down on my roof. I immediately got off the freeway, and had to find more rope. I got off the freeway at the first exit that I could, and it was the LAX off ramp, in Inglewood. That was a bad part of LA, particularly at night. I drove around, looking for a business that was open at night (not many were, in Inglewood). I found an open supermarket. When I worked in Culver City, it was where many of LA’s black professionals lived, and the local supermarket scene was like any suburban scene, of professional people buying their groceries. The grocery store in Inglewood was of the same local chain that I shopped at in Culver City, and the patrons were mostly black in both stores, but the Inglewood version might as well have been on another planet.

It was almost a circus scene in front of that store, with attractive black women being accosted by black men who offered to carry their groceries. In Inglewood, you could not pump your gas without some black man walking up to you and “offering” to pump your gas, for a “fee.” It was more menacing than those street urchins “washing” your car windows at stop lights, without asking you if they could. It was “value added” begging, but it was what they call “aggressive” begging that was not too far removed from robbery. So there I was, with my bed tied to the top of the car, with most of my valuable possessions in it, at a grocery store in Inglewood at night. I parked in the row of cars closest to the store front. I was the only white guy in the area, and as I found some rope in the store and waited in line to pay for it, I kept looking out at my car, making sure that nobody was looting it while I was in the store.

After I bought my rope, I went to my car and began tying my bed down as fast as I could. Just as I started tying my bed down, a Mexican low-rider car pulled to a stop a few feet from my car, in the lane between my car and the store. Several Mexicans jumped out of the car. They had no interest in me; they began to go after a couple of black, teenage boys who were just then walking into the store. This was in such a bad part of town that such stores had armed guards. And standing in front of the store was the armed guard whom I did not initially notice. The guard was a matronly black woman. The Mexican nearest to me had a tire iron in his hand. They were obviously planning on having a violent encounter with those black boys, and the guard walked up to the tire-iron-bearing Mexican, saying something like, “You aren’t going to do that at my store!” She was eating a sandwich at the time, holding it in her left hand, as she walked over to the Mexicans. The Mexican with the tire iron kept walking toward the black boys, and said something to the guard. In an instant, she had her pistol out and pointed in the face of the Mexican, with the pistol barrel almost touching his nose. He did not even flinch, and taunted her, with her pistol in his face. As I watched the confrontation play out, I kept tying my bed down as fast as I could. Before I finished tying my bed down, the Mexicans finally saw reason, and got back into their car and drove away. The guard never even let go of her sandwich during the confrontation, and as the low-rider drove away, she resumed eating her sandwich as she holstered her pistol. It was as if nothing had happened. That guard was probably involved with confrontations like that all night long. As I drove away from that store, I was thinking, “Thank God I am moving away from LA!” Now, fast forward several years, when I was living in Ohio and the movie Grand Canyon came out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canyon_(1991_film)

The Lakers had their arena in Inglewood at the time, at The Forum. The opening scene of Grand Canyon was about Kevin Cline’s character getting lost on his way from a Lakers game at night, and being lost on the streets of Inglewood. He nearly became a victim of gang violence when Danny Glover’s character saved him, which began the movie’s central relationship. When the movie came out, I remember critics saying that the movie exaggerated the dangers of Inglewood at night. When I read those reviews, I said to myself, “Well, they obviously have never been in Inglewood at night.” That movie turned out to be one of those “life imitates art” situations, because a few months later, the Rodney King beating verdict initiated riots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

and Inglewood became a war zone. Those downplaying movie critics ate their words in spectacular fashion. One more “strange” event happened during the week that I left. As I drove to Ventura with another load of my possessions, before dawn, so I could beat rush hour, a car began honking at me on the freeway. It was a former girlfriend whom I once considered marrying. I avoided getting involved with women in my LA days, not wanting to get tangled up with some woman who was born and raised in LA and could not imagine leaving, with me trapped in LA for the rest of my life. That girlfriend was a college chum from the Bay Area and, like me, the only jobs were in LA when we graduated, so she worked in a skyscraper close to me in downtown. She threw herself at me for a year before I reciprocated and we had a brief romantic relationship. It was the only time in my LA years when I was next to somebody in a car that knew me. It was extraordinary to have her honking and waving at me on that freeway. Less than a year later, she became one of my smallest investors when I raised the money in Boston (she invested $500):

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#chasing

but led the attack on me soon thereafter, essentially accusing me of stealing that money from her. After our fourth conversation in about a two-month period, where she was accusing me of criminal motivation, I was in tears, and Dennis decided to offer all of my investors double their money back (there were plenty of interested parties by that time). It was one of the seminal moments of my loss of innocence during my days with Dennis. I would endure many betrayals by friends and family in the next couple of years, and that ex-girlfriend’s behavior gave me a preview of what was coming. My stress symptoms began coming back then, and a year later, I looked like a raccoon again, as we tried surviving the death blows that were aimed at us in Ventura:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#mr

So, on the Saturday morning after my Tuesday epiphany, I was leaving LA. I almost gave it the finger in my rear-view mirror as I drove out of LA, saying to myself, “I am never going to live here again!“ Imagine the irony of me driving to LA to work, less than three years later. Never say never.

End of LA Days, Part 2

LA Days, Part 3:

I saw my father in Ventura that Saturday, and stayed with friends in San Luis Obispo that night, and stayed with a college roomie in the Bay Area the next night. On Monday evening, I was rolling up to my grandparents’ home in Seattle, determined to finally make it in Seattle that time. It was my fourth attempt. On Tuesday, I got my resume together, on Wednesday, I contacted the headhunter firms, and on Thursday afternoon I met with one of Seattle’s prominent recruiters. He said that with my resume, it would not be difficult for me to find something to my liking in a month or two. I said that if it took a year, that would be fine by me, and I prepared for a long search, but I was in my paradise, and hiked in the mountains every week with my cousin for the next several months, in what turned out to be the best hiking year of my life. Today, I look back, and find it hard to believe the incredible hiking shape that I got into that summer. Our average day hike was twelve miles with a four thousand foot elevation gain. 1986 was the happiest year of my life, and 1988 was my worst, by far.

So, I went to bed on that Thursday night in my grandparent’s basement, feeling confident and excited. I planned to do more searching on my own, but I figured that I would hear from that recruiter in the next few weeks or months. The next morning, at about 9 AM, I was lying in bed, half asleep, and the phone rang. I heard my grandmother’s ponderous steps as she walked to the phone on the floor above me, and I heard her steps as she went to the basement door and called to me, telling me that I had a phone call. I was very surprised to hear that recruiter’s voice, whom I had first talked to late-afternoon the day before. I may have even said something like. “That was quick.” He asked me if I could be ready that afternoon for an interview at a “solar company.” At that moment, it felt like a lightning bolt hit me. In my LA days, my friends knew how unhappy I was and how I wanted to change the world of energy. But I felt trapped in a career path that was leading me nowhere near that goal, and I wondered when I would finally embark on that path and do something important with my life. I knew at that moment that that was what the voice was leading me to. It was only ten days since that voice told me to move to Seattle. That “solar company” was owned by a guy named Dennis Lee. The rest, as they say, is history.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#hitting

I was by no means healed from my LA days, and Dennis later said that I was literally shaking in the interview that I had with him and his wife. It was a combination of excitement and the rigors of my LA life.

I was then in for the wildest ride of my life, being Indiana Jones’s sidekick. Soon after Dennis hired me, I moved out from my grandparents’ house and roomed with an aspiring screenwriter in Seattle who moved to LA the next year to pursue that career path. My belongings were not yet retrieved from California, and I slept on my sleeping pad in my sleeping bag on the floor of my bedroom. One night, after only a few weeks at Dennis’s company, I was in this exalted, altered state all night long, in a kind of waking dream. That has only happened twice in my life, and I was reverberating from the lightning bolt. Dennis could not get rid of me. Working long hours for free for months for Dennis, before my boss engineered the theft of the company:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient1

was only a gentle preview of what was in store. Even though I starved that year, it was the happiest one of my life, and the last time that I met with my roommate before I chased Dennis out to Boston, he said that I looked fifteen years younger than I did several months previously, when I met him. That story of how I ended up meeting Dennis became part of the folklore around him. I became a celebrity years later, got a standing ovation once, and snuck out of the room to avoid others. I was a very reluctant celebrity, but my name and face were all over Dennis’s books and videos. I do not like being recognized in public. When I am treated like a celebrity, people are usually trying to get something from me. It is not fun for me, especially when I am an introvert of the hermit archetype, with a social phobia, that comes and goes, to boot.

My days in Seattle with Dennis were the true beginning of my education. My life thus far and my LA days were just a prerequisite, as I soon discovered. I was on fire, after that lightning bolt hit me. Working for free for months was a joy. I was finally involved with my life’s work. I believed that I had found people who were on the same mission. As I discovered over the next few months, almost nobody was involved because of what it could do for humanity and the planet, but what it could do for them. Almost everybody was in it for themselves, except for Dennis, his wife and maybe one or two others. I had many sobering moments in 1986 in Seattle, but two stand out. The first was when Dennis had his company stolen in a theft engineered by my boss. He was hired to properly execute a stock transaction. Instead, he purposely did not get it executed, and used his “negligence” to engineer the theft of the company:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#theft

The Mormon involvement may have been the GCs showing their hand:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/journey.htm#mormon

or it may have just been the opportunism of Mormons, it being the religion of the ambitious in the Western USA. The second salient moment was watching the feeding frenzy over the carcass of Dennis’s company:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient2

Just before leaving Boston, and I mean just before, as in I was about to drive out of town, towing a trailer behind my Pinto, bizarre events conspired to keep me there over the weekend. I incredibly spent that weekend with a woman, whom I subsequently tried to have a bi-costal relationship with, but she soon ended it. I had largely lived like a monk for the previous several years, and that brief relationship I now realize was another “test,” and a cruel one at that, placed in front of me by my “friends.” I drove out of Seattle in tears. Ending my fourth attempt to live in Seattle that way tore my heart out, and was one of the hardest things that I ever did. Pursuing my life’s work was not easy by any means. I kept having “tests” thrown in my face, over and over.

In Boston I really began losing my innocence. I was midway through the longest fast of my life (45 days) as 1986 ended, largely because it was cheaper than eating. That winter, I lived with Dennis and his family. Dennis and I talked late into the night that winter, as I heard his life’s story, and what a story. What he had already lived through was pretty unbelievable to the average person.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#dennis

But to Dennis, his story was just the story of somebody who came from a poor background and chased his dream. If they ever made a Hollywood movie out of his life, it would make Indiana Jones look like Walter Mitty. As much of a learning experience as Boston was:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#chasing

it was a gentle time for me, and some of my fondest memories of my days with Dennis were our days in Boston. When we moved to Ventura, that was when my education really took off. Although Ventura was my home town, and I am the reason that we ended up there, it was not my decision to move there. That is a long story that I can’t publicly discuss right now, but if you obtained Dennis’s books, you would see that I am only telling a fraction of my story in my public writings. My story is hard to believe, too, but I was really only a spear carrier during my days with Dennis. As Dennis told me that we were moving the operation to Ventura, part of me was amazed at the irony; I had moved away from Southern California only a little over a year previously, so happy to be away from there, and there I was, moving a free energy company there.

Ventura was where the fireworks really went off. While 1986 was my life’s happiest year, 1988 was my worst, by far. I got some compensation in those days, however. I got together with my future wife in 1988, just as they were lowering the sledgehammer on us, and the way that we met was another strange orchestration of events by my “friends,” and she witnessed what I lived though. I doubt that any woman could begin to understand what I had lived through, if she met me after my Ventura days. So, along with the harsh education came compensation. That was one of the most consistent aspects of my journey. Miraculous events would be sandwiched between nightmarish events that seemed orchestrated by unseen hands as a test. I am tired of being tested, but the fun never ends on Earth. :)

In the summer of 1988, with Dennis in jail and my witnessing innumerable naïve, cowardly, dishonorable, and criminal acts engaged in by family, friends, and “allies,” I woke up fast. Some of my more memorable events I cannot even discuss publicly, as I protect both the innocent and the guilty, but driving into the parking lot of our office, where several months earlier I watched a bunch of cop cars drive up in a cloud of dust as the raid began:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#mr

to then have Mr. Texas, Mr. Stooge and Mr. Engineer greet me, was one of those salient events that I can never forget:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient3

By that time, I was being forced into bankruptcy. But going bankrupt was the small stuff, a minor nuisance compared to everything else that happened. By September, with the business long gone, and Dennis in jail with the long wait for trial, I had to go back to the corporate world to pay rent, eat, and save up enough money so that I could file for bankruptcy. There I was in Ventura, looking for work. I went to one agency, to register with them. The woman had never heard of the Big Eight, and as she essentially challenged my credentials, behind her walked a woman who had worked at Dennis’s company, who now worked there. As Dennis was splashed across the media, and forty employees or so found themselves suddenly without jobs, you might say that my reputation in Ventura was not a good one. :) My mother taking those lying newspaper articles on tour to friends and family was also only a minor nuisance in those days:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post300436

So, if I was going to be able to work, not only was Ventura in the sticks, where they had never even heard of the Big Eight, I had a “radioactive” reputation in Ventura, so I had to find work in LA. That was about two-and-a-half years after I left it, vowing to never return. And the story gets “better.” I had not totally given up on Ventura, and took temporary jobs, and the first ones were on the northern end of the San Fernando Valley, still in Ventura County. I worked as an accounts payable clerk at one gig, and I ended up working for a guy who was years behind me in the Big Eight, who worked at my company in LA and knew who I was, whose brother I went to junior high school with in Ventura. I worked odd jobs like that, and the last one was deep in the Valley, in LA’s city limits; I was in the basement of a famous security company, reconciling a garnishment account for about a month. It was there that I took a day off from work to testify at Dennis’s preliminary hearing. That was the pivotal moment of my life, as Mr. Deputy made faces at me while I was on the witness stand:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#faces

Then came December. December 1988 was the blackest month of my life. Dennis would be thrown into solitary confinement for trying to throw a Christmas party for his inmates. I got a call from Mr. Researcher in his hiding place, as he bewailed his fate:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#mr

It was very hard to concentrate, as I went blind reconciling that garnishment account, reading microfiche all day long. And my “friends” were really twisting in the dagger. I previously mentioned my two philandering supervisors at that bank job:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post326342

My old Big Eight firm was the auditor of that security company, and those buddies by that time had attained the manager and partner rank, and they worked together on that job. One day, as I staggered out of the basement, to take a break from the microfiche, I walked past an office where they were both sitting! I waved at them, and they barely acknowledged me. It was known that I was in the basement. I went from underachieving CPA to literally the basement of my profession, with a radioactive reputation. I can’t recall if I found out about their philandering ways by that time, but I think that I did.

As I worked in that basement by day, I was working on my bankruptcy petition at night, and doing what I could to help Dennis and his family, who had moved in with Mr. Professor over the summer. They lived with Mr. Professor for years. When we sprung Dennis from jail, he and his family lived with Mr. Professor for about two years. Mr. Professor was the real hero in Ventura, and his heroics ended up costing him his life, and when that voice chimed in in my head, unbidden, as I was saying goodbye to his body:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#journey

saying that when it first talked to me, it was also to lead me to him, that was the last straw for me and that voice. I have not heard from it since, and I don’t want to, not if it has any more bright ideas like that. Hearing that voice for the last time propelled me into the dark phase of my midlife crisis, which lasted for several years and did not end until I received that White House invitation:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#crisis

Just as I finally got my bankruptcy petition ready to file, and had saved up enough money to file it, I landed a permanent job, in LA, in Tarzana, in The Valley. I filed the petition on a Friday, and began the permanent job on the following Monday. Over the weekend, I received another call from a friend, who called to announce his betrayal, a betrayal that cost me several thousand dollars, and the first thing that I did with my money from my new job was pay for his betrayal. I forgave him, but others were not as understanding. It was during that month that I saw myself getting a shotgun and “cleaning up” Ventura County’s corruption. That I could be brought to have thoughts like that, no matter how fleeting and instantly dismissed as a product of my pain, was absolutely the most horrifying part of my journey. But when Dennis was thrown in solitary confinement by Mr. Deputy and friends for trying to throw a Christmas party, I saw how utterly evil it all was, and I then devoted myself to breaking Dennis out of jail. When I sacrificed my life like that, it looked like Dennis had a snowball’s chance in hell. My sacrifice incredibly worked:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#it

I know and Dennis knows that some divine hand intervened at that moment, and would not let my gesture be a futile one. Once Mr. Professor and I busted Dennis out of jail, I knew that my heroics were no longer needed, and I then spent the next several years digging out of debt and putting my wife through graduate school in Ohio.

Incredibly, about a week after I got that job with that medical lab, the federal government was completing an unprecedented investigation and subsequently tried to wipe it out. I saw lying public officials, media smear campaigns and the rest:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#experience

I discovered that the medical racket worked very similarly to the energy racket. That medical lab, however, was owned by a rich medical doctor (one of the richest black men in the USA at the time), so the company survived and the doctor soon sold out to a Fortune 500 conglomerate. Within a year of my beginning at that lab, I was the highest-ranking employee in the administrative side of the company to survive the corporate slaughter that accompanies almost all take-overs, friendly or not.

I will finish my LA Days posts with some events from my days at that medical lab. By that time, the Road Rage phenomenon was well established, and that confrontation that I saw in front of that grocery store:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post327642

was actually relatively innocent compared to what was coming. If that grocery store encounter happened in 1989 when I was at that lab, instead of 1986 when I saw it, the Mexicans would not have been carrying tire irons, but would have opened fire with their Uzis. Drive-by shootings were in fashion by 1989, as LA descended into Hell. One day, I came to the office at that medical lab and the women in the accounts receivable department were absent (having doctors as customers quickly removed them from whatever pedestal American society put them atop – it was like entering a restaurant by the kitchen). They went home, upset that one of their fellow employees, a black woman, was walking down the street in her neighborhood the night before, and was killed in a drive-by shooting, which targeted some gang members. Many innocent bystanders were killed in drive-by shootings in those days, and my company was affected by it.

When I lived in LA, all of my friends experienced some kind of car crime, whether it was being hit in a hit-and-run accident, having their car broken into and their stereo stolen, or they simply had their car stolen, to be recovered by the police a week later, after it had been stripped in a chop shop, and so on. My driving a Pinto was also partly strategic in nature. Nobody would bother to strip or steal a beat up Pinto. But, when I worked in that medical lab, a novel and popular crime of the day was to slash a car’s tires while it was parked on a street or in a parking lot. When the car’s driver approached his/her car and found one or more tires flat, the thieves would magically appear from nowhere, as “Good Samaritans” to help the person out, and then they would rob him/her. That was the new “trick” that was being used at the time, and I had heard about it.

My medical lab was on Reseda Boulevard in Tarzana, close to the freeway. It was in a seedy part of town, with barbed-wire fence surrounding it. A few miles down Reseda Boulevard was my doctor, and one day I made a visit and parked my car on the street. When I came out, I noticed that one of my tires was flat. I saw that somebody had slashed the valve stem. Immediately suspecting that I was being set up for one of those “Good Samaritan” robberies, I drove away on my flat tire, to get out of the area before the “Good Samaritans” arrived. This was during the work day, and there I was, in my suit and tie, changing my flat tire in the smoggy, 100-degree heat. I changed the tire quickly, without being accosted, and drove back to my office. When I went to the parking lot at about 5:00, after my work day was finished, I saw that I had another flat tire. The would-be robbers had slashed two of my tires, but the second one had a slower leak, so it did not go entirely flat until hours later. But there I was, with my spare already used for the first slashed tire, and with another flat tire. I went back into the office and looked in the Yellow Pages for the closest garage that could fix one of my tires so I could drive home to Ventura. The closest one was two miles away down Reseda Boulevard. I wish that somebody was around to take my picture, because the memory was kind of funny. There I was in my business suit, running down Reseda Boulevard, rolling my tire to the gas station. Then I rolled the tire two miles back to the office, put it on my car, and drove home. As with the situation when the tire fell off of my car when I first moved to LA in 1983, that 1989 event was just another day in the hell of LA.

The next year, I got married, we sold my wife’s house and spent our honeymoon moving most of our possessions into storage and lived with Mr. Professor and his wife (Dennis and his family had moved out by that time, as Mr. Professor’s home became a boarding house). Mr. Professor went bankrupt the next year, as his efforts to help resurrect the business failed. Those events wrecked his health and shortened his life. I took his death very hard, but my wife said to not be too distraught, as he probably worked off about twenty lifetimes of karma and achieved sainthood. His wife has always assured me that he sacrificed his life willingly, and nobody blames me for his fate, but I own a piece it, and it will haunt me for the rest of my life. He also suffered like I did in that the Ventura County gangsters took vengeance on his family, in a way that I cannot publicly discuss, and it is also why his widow asked me to never mention his real name in my public writings. His involvement with Dennis also apparently led to attacks from his close relatives and subsequent estrangement from them. At his funeral, none of his relatives attended. Other than his wife and daughter, I was the only “family” there. That is the fate of the saints in our insane world.

I wish that that was the end of it for my Ventura days, but there was worse to come. Not only were many lives wrecked, but some people also lost their sanity in the mayhem, and one of them was a close family member who attacked me in a bout of paranoiac insanity, just as I was moving away to Ohio, and we became permanently estranged. It might have been the greatest blow of all. Also, the only friend in Ventura County who supported me during that nightmare later tried to compete with me in my radicalized understanding of how the world worked and my research that I undertook after I left Ventura:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#books

It was like debating a five-year-old whose notion of justice was cowboy movies. In his own way, Dennis knows far more than I ever will about the aspects of the Free Energy conundrum that he is intimately familiar with:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/conun.htm#summary

I have never heard of another person like Dennis. He is the only person on Earth that I know of who can successfully complete this application:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

But I took a different path, and if I did not think what I learned was valuable, I would have never created my website. But, as Jesus said, prophets have no honor in their hometown, and I have experienced that phenomenon numerous times on my journey. In fact, everybody whom I know who has played at the high levels all report similar estrangement from family and friends. It comes with the territory. That friend who supported me ended up not only attacking me, but tried to further attack me through my mother:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post249110

He did it in an anonymous and criminal way, but he was not smart enough to successfully hide his identity. After I unmasked him, he even escalated his criminality. He still attacks me to this day, when he can. One might say that Southern California, both LA and Ventura, left a sour taste in my mouth. :) But, to this day, I still get people trying to get me to go to Ventura and Southern California to “hang out.” It is like asking a concentration camp survivor to vacation at Auschwitz, when Auschwitz was still operational. I ain’t going back.

I believe that my life today is compensation for all that I have been through. I work in a skyscraper with a view of the Cascades, making more money than I have a right to expect, in the high tech industry, where I can run into the world’s richest man in the movie theater next to my office:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#gates

If I have to work for a living in corporate America, I really have a hard time imagining a better situation. My “going public” work of the past few years:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/public.htm#interviews

appears to be initiating a new phase of my efforts, and I already am turning down offers to be on TV and similar situations. I am trying, perhaps foolishly, to get this choir going from my desk, and not have to hit the road and risk my life. I really want to live a quiet life, and we will see how it goes. I want to help abolish Hell on Earth, and help Heaven on Earth manifest. It is really that simple for me.

OK, that is the end of my LA Days writings. Next up is updating my summary of this thread:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/public.htm#avalon

so that the thread is easier to navigate. Nearly 1,500 posts is a lot. :)

Best,

Wade

WHOA!!

Great compilation! I have read this a few times before you compiled it here Wade. However this time has to be the most endearing and connected experience in following your LA days writing.

The personal additions created a story compelling one to read on just to catch a few more experiences one could relate too in some way. Booze, parties, playing the corporate game, wondering what the heck am I doing, what is this all about??? Life Sucks!!

Had a few jaunts down memory lane, some good, some not so good and others funny and synchronicity in retrospect. Shortly after leaving the Corporate world, I often used to say to friends, after spending a year 1995-96 traveling on my own most of the time, covering many of the States, Mexico, Yukon and Alaska in my Dad's old small 1972 cab over motor home, that I could be happy being a bag lady as one didn't need much to sustain one's life. (got quite a lecture from a young fellow about road bandits when I had a blow out on the highway in Northern Nevada, so thank God he was a good Samaritan versus a road bandit) I too believe I have special friends :)

With great dismay on my friends part about becoming a bag lady, I would assure them that I would not end up on the street but more than likely in some small town, in a small house, by myself and would be happy and content as long as I could hook up the internet and stay connected that way. These were just words back then, BUT, Lo and Behold!! Here I am!! I also use to tell them (after 10 major surgeries) that I would have it made in the shade when I get old and would never have to see a hospital again as there was nothing left to take.......................This is the healthiest I have been and felt since I was a teenager!!

Life is too funny.................. We really are creators that need to stay conscious of our awesome ability to create>>>>>>>>>thank you from my heart to yours and from one of your greatest post-menopausal fans :)

BRAVO on the updates!!

l

Hi Sandy:

Thanks. Thanks for the “bag lady” story. Yes, you are “protected.” I know others like you who have done things of that kind and came out fine, with some “Samaritans” admonishing them for their “daring.” But this is Earth, so we all get bruises and scrapes, at the minimum.

This being the USA, and me seemingly doomed to work in big cities, there is no escaping the homeless situation. A couple hundred yards from where I ran into Bill Gates, homeless people sleep and beg. The Bellevue homeless, however, are a different kind of homeless, with laptops, cell phones, vans to sleep in, and denizens of the libraries, where some can be found reading on their park bench. Like that Mexican woman in LA, at least some of the homeless around here seem to have chosen it as at least a semi-voluntary lifestyle. A friend lived in the local homeless camp and studied the homeless up close, and almost all were there because they were mentally ill, on drugs or just out of incarceration, and they are all related and mutually-reinforcing conditions in the USA. But in the Bill Gates bubble, the homeless get organic produce, coffee, etc.

My days with Dennis beat out the need to live “nicely,” although I do so today. I could live in a tent if I had to, but prefer to have a nice, warm roof over my head. A few days living in a tent in the mountains each year is part of my spiritual upkeep. And when I get to experience stuff like this:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/pics.htm#lyman

I know that I am being looked after.

I kind of doubt that I will ever put much of this personal tale telling on my site. Avalon has become, in some ways, my “oral” history repository.

As I have looked back at my life, I think that I was being “set up” for the path that I took. My LA Days were preparation for meeting Dennis. As much as I did not want to do it, my “friends” wanted me to get a good taste of Hell on Earth.

Well, this thread has more than 100,000 views now. Seems like I was joining Avalon just the other day. My Avalon writings get more serious readers than my site does, it seems. It is an oasis that I was not expecting to appear, but here we are.

Seven inches on the ground right now, with a coat of ice on top. For you Canadians and those Americans who live east of here, seven inches is no big deal, but Seattle is not prepared for such events, and the area has been shut down for days now. Fortunately, in high tech, I can telecommute, which I am, but I am more efficient in the office, so I’ll probably try to get in.

Best,

Wade

Hi:

This will be a post on the human ego and FE, inspired by some recent exchanges and writing my Brian essay (which I hope to publish soon). I have stated it plenty on this thread: humanity is an egocentric herd animal. That is a seemingly paradoxical statement, but is nevertheless true. Herd behaviors exist to protect the herd’s individuals. In evolutionary parlance, it increases a species’ fitness. But when a species becomes ensouled, the challenge is a new one. Ensouled species can make choices that are not available to species with group souls. Humans can choose to be “good” or “evil.”

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#serving

It is the blessing and challenge of becoming sentient. At this time on Earth, the vast majority of humanity is not even trying to raise its level of awareness. When I heard Michael Roads say that only 3-5% this planet’s humans were even trying to raise their awareness:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...ads#post309392

I nodded my head in sad recognition. And of those who are even trying, very few of them have much success, especially the kind where they can put aside their scarcity-based conditioning long enough to simply imagine abundance:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

The Michael teachings are focused to a great degree on the human personality and how it is used to evolve the “essence,” which is another way of saying, “soul,” I believe. And each personality that incarnates gets its overleaves so that the soul can explore all of them over its lifetimes.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#overleaves

The Chief Feature is how fear primarily accesses the Earthly personality, and is the catalyst of all ego problems, IMO. Mine is impatience:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#reading

We all get one as the price of admission. The Chief Feature can only be “extinguished” through love, and that battle is rarely won, but if it is, it is usually achieved during the midlife crisis. I don’t think that my essence prevailed, so I still get to work with it, oh joy of joys. :)

Everybody that I have seen who has played at the FE game’s high levels has been accused of having a big ego (we all hailed from history's most arrogant nation, and that may have something to do with it). I think that they all wrestled with it, so the observation is not totally off the mark. Heck, before they lowered the boom on us in Ventura, I had fleeting fantasies of becoming the USA’s president, and I have seen others afflicted with much greater delusions of grandeur:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/conun.htm#grandeur

Before Dennis was jailed in Ventura, I could tell that Dennis also grappled with those issues. As his wife later told me, the jail and prison experience humbled Dennis. Body cavity searches can do that. :)

Brian wrote about it plenty in his later books: his early path of being an astronaut, Ivy League professor and advisor to presidential candidates tended to puff up his ego. I have seen Trombly, Greer, and others accused of being all ego. I understand the observation, and some of what is seen is damage from the meat grinder but, also, a lot of it is in the eye of the beholder.

I have watched people accuse Dennis of having criminal motivation ever since I met him. In every single instance that I have seen, the assailants betrayed their own dishonesty as they attacked Dennis. As Jesus said, those with crime in their hearts are the first to accuse others of crimes. Every time I have seen people accuse Dennis of having criminal motivation, they have lied to make their case, and not little white lies, but Big Lies that served as the centerpieces of their attacks. In the FTC’s case and with other officials:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#ftc

http://openjurist.org/959/f2d/240/le...-sheriffs-dept

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#arrest

they cleverly conjoined charges that were dropped with what they got him on, to help fabricate the appearance that a crime had been committed or that Dennis pled guilty to one. They were professional and artful deceptions. But in the years since then, the people in the FE “field” lie outright about Dennis when attacking him:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/dennis.htm#dishonest

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#libel

and most of the rest of the “field” follows their lead.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/skeptic.htm

The irony of that libelous essay by a leading name in the field:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#libel

is that he exhorted his readers to seek humility to help make FE happen, in the same essay that he tells Big Lies about Dennis, to make Dennis seem a criminal. All of Dennis’s libelers have heard from me, as I have shown where they don’t have their “facts” straight, to put it charitably. They have never issued corrections or retractions, and their friends in the field even compound their lies, adding their own lying flourishes to them, as they repeat them.

Those kinds of behaviors are why Brian said that if FE happened, it would not be accomplished by people in the field today:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/camelot.htm#new

There are a hundred (thousand?) pretenders for every contender in the FE field. And when I see people accuse the leading names of having ego problems, I wonder how much of it is a projection of their own egos. The harshest attacks that I received from friends and family were made as they were robbing me or committing other crimes. Being accused of egocentrism or criminal motivation comes with the FE territory, I am sorry to say. I am not saying that we don’t have egos and don't sometimes lose the battle with them, but when I have seen people attack Dennis or Brian as they questioned their motivation, the attackers always did it for self-serving gain, either to make a name for themselves in the field, or to literally rob Dennis and Brian.

A notable recent effort to publicize FE you have seen me be conspicuously silent about. That is because it promotes disinformation about Dennis. Even after I contacted them a couple of times about it, the only change to their libelous presentation was to change the description of the libelous writings about Dennis; they removed the adjective “excellent” from their promotion of the libelous essay. More pretenders who think they are contenders, sadly. People can’t get to the FE finish line by telling or promoting lies.

What I try to do, and it is far easier said than done, is when I see people acting from their egos, whether it is when FE names appear to be acting from their egos, or when they weather the innumerable attacks that accuse them of malign motivation, is to realize that I am seeing an aspect of myself. In the big picture, we all create our realities, but this is a co-created reality on Earth, and we all show each other aspects of ourselves. That is part of the paradox of being here. All of those seemingly unsavory traits and behaviors are due to fear. Can we love and forgive when we encounter those dynamics? That may be the greatest challenge of all.

But when I forgive Mr. Skeptic for his crimes, for instance:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/dennis.htm#friends

it does not mean that I think that he is fit to lead an FE effort. I have witnessed him lay down his bloody ax after attacking Dennis, and then try to lead the effort in Dennis’s place. Bill the BPA Hit Man did the same thing:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hitman.htm#mutiny

They are obviously the last people on Earth to lead humanity to FE, especially as they are on the payroll of those keeping the lid on FE (Bill certainly was, and Mr. Skeptic likely is). You need saintly motivation to get over the FE finish line, and those people live on the opposite end of the spectrum, but they also fulfill their divine role, believe it or not. I will likely thank Mr. Deputy one day for teaching me the meaning of evil:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#faces

It really was the pivotal moment of my life. All that I have done since then had that radicalizing moment to thank for it. I obviously had many other salient moments of awakening:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#why

but that one stood out. It was the moment that finally drove it home for me.

Gotta go to work now.

Best,

Wade

Hope Everyone had a Great Weekend!

Just wanted to share a little story about patience.

Many years ago when I first sobered up I found one dilemma or obstacle after another. The 12 step program was a big part of maintaining my sobriety and finding a "God" of my understanding was a turning point for me.

I found that daily I was praying for patience and yet problem after problem kept coming>>>>two years into this scenario I had a tantrum and let my Higher Power know in no uncertain terms and language that he was not complying with my prayers and I truly was not gaining patience.

In my self reflecting calm and exhaustion a giggle started to rise and I began to laugh as insight after insight came through. How could I learn to overcome impatience, controlling issues, self-worth and on and on without problems or obstacles.....DUH!!

Now I know that problems are lessons of one aspect or another and they lay within me and my ego. Thus in this human experience I still find myself often assessing being stuck between a rock and a hard place>>>>>>>Ego and Love.

Being aware helps me to recognize being stuck very quickly these days and choosing LOVE is becoming easier and quicker with each passing day :) Without self admonition I might add and more often than not with more giggles and big self smiles at the wonder and creation of my human experience.

Sandy, You are living the 'acceleration'...thank you for being open and sharing.
As you stated personally, this is becoming stronger each day...and you living in this love is helping people all around you.

Hi Sandy:

Glad you are in the wonder of it, and I am sure that eaglespirit is right.

I vividly remember when I was in the darkest days of my journey, in about December 1988 or thereabout:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#it

with all the horror happening, there was corner of my mind that was fascinated with it. I think it might have been my “friends,” and I remember thinking something like, “Well, I am glad that you are having a good time being fascinated with it all, but it is not so fun on my end.” Then the miracle happened soon after, when I decided to sacrifice my life, which I am sure that “they” also orchestrated. One day, on the other side most likely, they will let me in on the joke. :)

Sleep tight,

Wade

Hi:

I am about to put in some long weeks at the office, and will likely be fairly quiet. I feel the need to reiterate my intention at Avalon. I am trying to get people to imagine FE and abundance. That really is it. I am not trying to encourage FE tinkerers or would-be rampart-scalers, debate FE physics, and so on. I played those games, and no longer have any interest in them. For those who want to do those things, there are many other places in the world to pursue those interests.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/purpose.htm#pursuit

There are only so many years in a life, and I burned up my life playing the FE game, digging out of debt, trying to put my life back together, and so on. I am trying to do something different, something where people are not putting their lives on the line to try to make the world a better place. Not many can do that, and I am not looking for those heroic needles in haystacks. There is only one person on Earth who I have heard of who could successfully complete this application:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

and I ain’t looking for any more of those.

Maybe somebody will get The Muppet Movie ending and make it over the FE finish line.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_pvAK...eature=related

Rossi’s gizmo does not count, but it at least is a step in the right direction, if he is really able to get it to market. I am not holding my breath (been there, done that), and there is far more to that situation than meets the eye, and I am not too interested in speculating on just what all that might be. Godzilla is not asleep, but maybe the “white hats” are prevailing, but they are not going to tell me if they are. I watch the Rossi story with a little interest, but not too much, not really. He is not the first person to get that far along.

But, I get patience training all the time at Avalon, as the thread is crashed by FE newbies who suggest the tinkerer path, or want to know my opinion on this or that tinkerer, or think that Godzilla can be sneaked past, etc. I really have no interest in those avenues, and am trying to do something different.

I know that FE technology is real:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/camelot.htm#underground

and if those people can’t bring it to the world, then a guy in his garage sure isn’t going to get his primitive prototype out there, generating FE, either.

If enough people can lay aside their scarcity-based indoctrination long enough:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

and can simply imagine what a world based on FE could look like:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/abund.htm#abundance

at minimum, it will be something that has never been seen before on Earth, but FE and abundance has proven unimaginable to about 99.999% of humanity so far, and that is just the way Godzilla likes it. I am hoping to help as many people reach Level 12 as possible:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level12

without wasting their lives in Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11. I am not interested in spending much time in breaking through the denial that can be found in Levels 1 to 3:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level1

or coaxing people out of Levels 5 or 8:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

They are stuck in those 5 and 8 levels for a reason, and I have no interest in trying to get them unstuck, and those other early levels are life-wreckers. For those in fear and denial, getting an FE machine delivered to their homes is the only cure for their malaise.

For FE newbies, it is natural to want to tell your friends, family and co-workers about FE. I have been there myself. For every person who might really take your message to heart, a hundred or more will think you are insane, will ostracize you, and so on. I have seen careers end over this stuff, and for those who get active on the FE front, it is a minefield that few survive. I have seen many wrecked and prematurely-ended lives, and the last thing that I need is to have any more of those on my conscience. I will be haunted for the rest of my days by Mr. Professor’s wrecked life and early death:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#journey

If Brian’s family allows me to publish what I plan to, you will get a taste of what his journey was like. Surviving a murder attempt just comes with the territory of what Brian did, as did going bankrupt, being defrocked, and so on. Such is the fate of the saints in our world.

But, if enough people can simply lay aside their indoctrination long enough to sing the abundance song in chorus, it just might help us get there. Like Brian did, I am hoping to help people think comprehensively.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#developing

Energy has always been the root of life on Earth and the human journey:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/upcoming.htm#revolutions

and FE can transform the human journey in ways that can be hard to imagine:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

and that is normal. Before every epochal change in the human journey:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#chart

the next phase was unimaginable to those living before the change. Maybe this time, for the biggest change ever, we can do it with more sentience than simply chasing ways to wrench more energy out of the environment, and devastating it in the process of our collective and blind self-centeredness.

That is my intention, and we will see how it goes. When I finish my energy essay, I plan to create an invitation-only forum someplace, maybe at Avalon, and I then plan to initiate a high-level conversation, far higher than has been seen on Avalon’s threads related to me so far.

We will see how it goes.

May 2012 be an interesting year,

Wade

I've been focusing my attention on human consciousness energy and how one actually mobilizes that--that's where the real power is. I've heard it said that the mitochondria of a human cell has enough energy in it to power NYC for 3 months or to that effect...

We already are Masters of the Universe...if we can but realize it.

Be well, Wade...

Quote:

---

Posted by Wade Frazier

Hi:

I am about to put in some long weeks at the office, and will likely be fairly quiet. I feel the need to reiterate my intention at Avalon. I am trying to get people to imagine FE and abundance. That really is it. I am not trying to encourage FE tinkerers or would-be rampart-scalers, debate FE physics, and so on. I played those games, and no longer have any interest in them. For those who want to do those things, there are many other places in the world to pursue those interests.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/purpose.htm#pursuit

There are only so many years in a life, and I burned up my life playing the FE game, digging out of debt, trying to put my life back together, and so on. I am trying to do something different, something where people are not putting their lives on the line to try to make the world a better place. Not many can do that, and I am not looking for those heroic needles in haystacks. There is only one person on Earth who I have heard of who could successfully complete this application:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

and I ain’t looking for any more of those.

Maybe somebody will get The Muppet Movie ending and make it over the FE finish line.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_pvAK...eature=related

Rossi’s gizmo does not count, but it at least is a step in the right direction, if he is really able to get it to market. I am not holding my breath (been there, done that), and there is far more to that situation than meets the eye, and I am not too interested in speculating on just what all that might be. Godzilla is not asleep, but maybe the “white hats” are prevailing, but they are not going to tell me if they are. I watch the Rossi story with a little interest, but not too much, not really. He is not the first person to get that far along.

But, I get patience training all the time at Avalon, as the thread is crashed by FE newbies who suggest the tinkerer path, or want to know my opinion on this or that tinkerer, or think that Godzilla can be sneaked past, etc. I really have no interest in those avenues, and am trying to do something different.

I know that FE technology is real:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/camelot.htm#underground

and if those people can’t bring it to the world, then a guy in his garage sure isn’t going to get his primitive prototype out there, generating FE, either.

If enough people can lay aside their scarcity-based indoctrination long enough:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

and can simply imagine what a world based on FE could look like:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/abund.htm#abundance

at minimum, it will be something that has never been seen before on Earth, but FE and abundance has proven unimaginable to about 99.999% of humanity so far, and that is just the way Godzilla likes it. I am hoping to help as many people reach Level 12 as possible:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level12

without wasting their lives in Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11. I am not interested in spending much time in breaking through the denial that can be found Levels 1 to 3:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level1

or coaxing people out of Levels 5 or 8:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

They are stuck in those 5 and 8 levels for a reason, and I have no interest in trying to get them unstuck, and those other early levels are life-wreckers. For those in fear and denial, getting an FE machine delivered to their homes is the only cure for their malaise.

For FE newbies, it is natural to want to tell your friends, family and co-workers about FE. I have been there myself. For every person who might really take your message to heart, a hundred or more will think you are insane, will ostracize you, and so on. I have seen careers end over this stuff, and for those who get active on the FE front, it is a minefield that few survive. I have seen many wrecked and prematurely-ended lives, and the last thing that I need is to have any more of those on my conscience. I will be haunted for the rest of my days by Mr. Professor’s wrecked life and early death:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#journey

If Brian’s family allows me to publish what I plan to, you will get a taste of what his journey was like. Surviving a murder attempt just comes with the territory of what Brian did, as did going bankrupt, being defrocked, and so on. Such is the fate of the saints in our world.

But, if enough people can simply lay aside their indoctrination long enough to sing the abundance song in chorus, it just might help us get there. Like Brian did, I am hoping to help people think comprehensively.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#developing

Energy has always been the root of life on Earth and the human journey:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/upcoming.htm#revolutions

and FE can transform the human journey in ways that can be hard to imagine:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

and that is normal. Before every epochal change in the human journey:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#chart

the next phase was unimaginable to those living before the change. Maybe this time, for the biggest change ever, we can do it with more sentience than simply chasing ways to wrench more energy out of the environment, and devastating it in the process of our collective and blind self-centeredness.

That is my intention, and we will see how it goes. When I finish my energy essay, I plan to create an invitation-only forum someplace, maybe at Avalon, and I then plan to initiate a high-level conversation, far higher than has been seen on Avalon’s threads related to me so far.

We will see how it goes.

May 2012 be an interesting year,

Wade

---

Don't worry Wade. We're all humming away in the background, till you get back here.