WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Ah Ernie:

It is all good. Thanks for being here. I take your observations seriously. They come from a real place, always.

Love,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

LA Days, Part 5

I am going to lighten up the LA Days a little. 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 Dakota 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 discus 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 it 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. 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 in 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 then 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.

Well, I am off to go climb a mountain. I may not make another post until next week, depending on how the climbing goes. It is not technical, but it is scrambly in parts, and it looks like I will be doing it in snow. I am not really looking forward to it, but it has been planned for years with one of my college roomies.

Best,

Wade

[sandy]

Enjoy and safe hiking to all >>>>>>>>>>

[Ernie Nemeth]

Thanks Wade and all who post here, it has been an honor.

This thread and Illie's along with Ulli's (Ilie and Ulli, funny) are truly an inspiration.

Wade, you know where I am if you need me (why I have no idea). Perhaps we will meet in our dreams and go for a hike in the mountains together one day.

Love you all!

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Well, play time is over for now. I just got back from climbing Mount Saint Helens. We got “weathered out” before we got to the top. Visibility was less than a hundred meters, and when it began sleeting on us (and the snow likely got thick higher up), less than two thousand feet from the top, it was time to turn back. Of the forty people with permits to climb that day, I doubt that any made it to the top. A bunch who already turned around, defeated, passed us as we ascended. We had not even gotten to the hard part yet, but what we climbed up looked like the moon. I’ll probably be back on a sunny day, if I am lucky. People have to reserve a spot several months in advance.

My next LA days posts will go back into the not-so-fun stuff, such as how I was damaged by the experience, damage that I still suffer from, and how it improbably launched me into my days with Dennis. As usual, it ended up being way larger than life. I’ll try to get those posts done in the next week or two, and then I will be concentrating on that Brian O essay.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi all:

More LA Days posts coming soon, but first, yesterday, I had another elevator experience with the Orwellian Telescreen. The screen had a blurb that said something like, “Most of the IEDs [Improvised Explosive Device – ed.] used in Afghanistan by insurgents against the USA’s troops came from Pakistan.” I’ll bet that about thirty years ago in Pravda, the following headline could be found: “Most of the missiles and weaponry used in Afghanistan by insurgents against the CCCP’s troops came from Pakistan.” Of course, almost all of that materiel was made in the USA, as the USA eventually admitted:

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

The biggest CIA operation ever was arming and training those Afghani “insurgents,” at a price tag of between $3 to $6 billion, and Arab rich boy Osama bin Laden became the USA’s poster boy for the “jihad.”

The irony can be overwhelming at times, but passes unnoticed, all memory and context disappearing down the memory hole:

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

It is really amazing to live in the world that Orwell foresaw, while everybody denies that it happened very closely to how he envisioned it.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

LA Days, Part 6:

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 kinds of social settings.

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 in a few posts, 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:

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

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 really a way 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, and many of those older students, about ten years older than the rest of us, were pretty common, and 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 (like 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 work strain 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.

Time to run of to work now. More coming soon.

Best,

Wade

[Ilie Pandia]

Wow, this so similar to my experience in the corporate world . I did not have a mentor, and looking back I've made a lot of "career-limiting moves" that explain a lot of things... I used to speak my mind about the phony "networking" and that obviously did not make me very popular . The feeling I got is that most of my colleagues where enjoying this, and they were cut out for this kind of interaction...

[Wade Frazier]

LA Days, Part 7:

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.

I mentioned the fierce air pollution in an earlier post:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post321647

but the denizens of LA did their best to ignore it. 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 on 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 stuff 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 in the pavement. The Sears store did not properly tighten the lug nuts on my tires.

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 was somehow able to get 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, 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 took 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. The party was attended by all of the people 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. I am glad that I was not there for it.

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 in the previous post; the roommate graduated from Cal Poly, was married, and her husband was still at Cal Poly, finishing his degree. I visited them once, to go over some work papers on a job that I was handing over to the roommate.

A few years later, after I quit public accounting and was with Dennis, 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 was 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.

Gotta run to work now.

Best,

Wade

[eaglespirit]

Hmmmmm Wade...Lots of LA, CA intertwined memories and somewhat similar experiences...oh my!

Thanks for sharing. Made me go through my own memory files of the times from '77 to '79 in southern Cal : )

As Ilie stated...I think many of Us that connect this way have had some interesting and somewhat similar experiences that bring Us here together.

[Wade Frazier]

Here is a little Steve Jobs eulogy. Growing up in Southern California and going to Cal Poly, along with stints of trying to live in Seattle, gave me a certain perspective on the high tech field, which I am in today. In college, my programming and information systems classes were way too easy for me. After college, I tried to get into the Big Eight’s computer systems consulting arm, and even got an interview with the leading company, but fell about one programming class short. In late 1983, my Big Eight accounting firm bought three thousand of the first Macintoshes, as we began using personal computers for our audits. Before then, it was all paper spreadsheets, ten-key adding machines, pencils, and vinyl erasers. My first computer for my personal use was a Mac Plus, bought in 1989.

When we used the first Macs, hard drives had not come out yet, so all of our data was on floppy disks. The first software that we used was vended by Apple, but in the second year, we began using software by a company named Microsoft. I used the predecessor of Excel (Multiplan) and Word. I liked the stuff, and when that voice told me to move to Seattle in March 1986:

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

I wanted to work for Microsoft, and could have landed a job with them. If I had, I would not be working for a living today, but I also would not have met Dennis. As traumatic as my ride with Dennis was, I am glad that I took the path that I did. As will become evident later, that was one of several “forks in the road” that was offered up to me, and several times I could have fallen away from Dennis as other temptations were dangled in front of me.

After my Big Eight days, my professional machines were always Windows machines, and I ended up joining the “evil empire” on the personal computer front in 1995, but I really wanted to stay in the Apple camp, but by that time, it had become a niche product for graphics design people and grandmothers, so when the PowerPC ended up not really being able to emulate a Windows machine very well, I had to leave Apple behind. But, they made the best stuff when Jobs was at the helm. His creative genius, and working backward from the user experience, is what made Apple what it was. Mr. Mentor:

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

and Dennis:

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

had the Jobs-like genius. Very few technical types have it; they tend to be plodders. The greatest breakthroughs in physics and technology usually had creative insight to thank for it, not left brain analytics:

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

The greatest geniuses had both, with the right and left sides of their brains working together. To also have the heart in charge is when inventors can truly become dangerous to the status quo. Dennis and Mr. Mentor were like that.

What Jobs did was unique in the high tech field. He made stuff that everybody wanted to use, because that was his intention. That is almost an afterthought at companies like Microsoft. I bought my wife an iPhone and my mother an iPad. An Interview with John Scully last year really told it well, I think:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...1096309840.htm

Jobs will be greatly missed.

Best,

Wade

[sandy]

Hey Guys,

Just had to add that it was really no different for the ladies either, at least in my case...................networking>>>plastic city, sexual escapades every where and it all boils down to power and control>>>>>>>>>>>>>I walked away from my highly successful partnership and business and 3 Accounting Partners as I couldn't hack the greed, dishonesty, arrogance and hidden agendas that prevailed all communication.

However this did not change the sick environment of the world I witnessed as in stepping down and working the front lines again the same dynamics prevail in the middle and lower end jobs as well. Competition, low esteem, power tripping on and on is a human condition and when one stops playing or never played or even knew of these games>............naivety becomes a thing of the past.

All apart of the social condition (ing) and I have witnessed it from within my home growing up as a child, in the work force at large, in society at large, thus the dynamics of the state the world as it lays before us, for all who have the courage to see.

[lightseeker]

Thank you Wade and welcome.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Sandy:

Yes, everybody is playing the scarcity game! Whatever level of the game people are playing at, they are still playing. I have bunch of psychologist pals, and sexual abuse is one of the most common ones that are treated. Some pals catered to the lower-end economic strata, and the hillbilly cliché of abusing daughters is alive and well. Many years ago, when this subject was discussed, one of my pals served the affluent, and after hearing a hillbilly tale, I said to my friend that she probably did not have to deal with that kind of stuff in her practice. She replied that yes, she did. The only difference was that Dad wore designer jeans instead of overalls.

Hi lightseeker.

Happy reading,

Wade

[Ilie Pandia]

Hello,

You know that feeling when you find a book that you think it should be read by everyone and you wonder why is not mandatory ?

Well, I've "stumbled" on such a book. The book is "Conversations with God" by Neale Donald Walsch.

I post this here as I feel its message is connected to the Free Energy issue and the current state of affairs on this planet.

And I must thank Wade and God Herself for pointing out this book to me (along with the writings of Fuller, Michael Roads, Joseph Chillon Pearce, Seth and many others)

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Ilie:

I don’t get any credit for Pearce. Yes, a lot of CWG is practical. There are also absurdities in them, and Walsch got a little too sucked up into Hollywood, but there is a lot of good stuff in them. There are many names for what can be considered “High Teachings,” and many are of a mystical nature. The best mystical stuff that I know of is, in the end, designed to assist us in living our Earthly lives, providing unusual insight, often from otherworldly perspectives. Improving life on Earth is always going to be, at its root, an economic issue, at least while we are living in scarcity. Once we resolve the scarcity issue and the threats that our current ways pose to each other and to our fellow species, then we will get to move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs a notch or two, and stop playing the survival game, the follow the rules game, the “I win, you lose” game (those three games are the games of Michael’s infant, baby and young souls http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#michael), and so on.

And, if it is about economics, then it is about energy above all, because energy runs the show, literally. Money is meaningless. Energy runs the real economy. Love is also the energy of Creation, so FE and ideas like Heaven on Earth are joined at the hip, and they merge pretty seamlessly with the “High Teachings.” I have taken those teachings to heart, and applied them to my journey, and I know that the only path to FE that anybody should really consider is the loving path:

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

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#stage1

I can’t overemphasize that too much. That is a big reason why I advocate the lamb’s path to FE. Not only has it never been tried before, it also aligns with the end goal.

So, yes, I think that work like CWG, Roads, Fuller, Seth, Michael, and so on, is right down the FE alley, so to speak. In the end, all of them are just teaching aids. We are the ones who have to do the work.

On a different topic, here is my Orwellian elevator moment of the morning...

In the USA right now, there are protests about how Wall Street essentially owns Washington D.C., with a big sit-in in Manhattan as I write this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelin...py_Wall_Street

Obama has made public and conciliatory comments about it, and the protests are spreading beyond Wall Street. I was in several peace marches before the USA invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. I was also in a march, marching beside the former governor of Washington, the night before the 1999 WTO meeting began, the day before it got ugly. I only marched for positive statements, never “protest.” Protesting comes from the victim mentality. If 1% of the “protestors” instead focused on making FE happen, we would have had it long ago. That is one of many facets of the conundrum. Just yesterday, the Seattle police busted the Seattle version of the Wall Street protests, throwing people into jail (I first wrote this in the morning, before the Republicans in DC began calling the protests “mobs” – how quaint ). The militant protestors, like the Black Bloc fools (for those who aren’t provocateurs) act out of adolescent “rebelliousness” and are worse than worthless for enabling positive change. They are playing the Young Warrior game:

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

But, the Seattle protestors were all peaceful as the police carried them out of there. I should not need to tell anybody about how USA’s urban cops often love busting heads. The Rodney King beating was just a day at the office for the LAPD, only that one got filmed.

But, the meme of the violent, civilization-threatening protestor had to be reinforced this morning in the elevator, with its vocabulary-building word of the day. The word was “debellate.” Yeah, I never heard of it, either. And the sentence the Telescreen used it in was: “The policeman debellated the angry protestor.” The Orwellian messages in the elevator are usually more subtle than that, but they need to get more forceful as the masses gets restless.

Best,

Wade

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

Wade, one of greviances by GC which OWS lists is suppresion of alternative energy

I was going to ask you about Seatle protest I am really supporting all those protests with all my heart. But many here on Avalon are afraid of this protest is initiated by GC or is going to be stealed like Tea Party...

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Robert:

Can you give a link to OWS mentioning FE? If they are, that would be interesting. What Level of the game are they playing? Again, “protest” means that the elites are already setting their agenda, GC involvement or not. Co-opting a protest becomes easy, when they are already setting themselves up against something.

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

If OWS is anything like the Tea Party, it is already doomed. The Tea Party was never interesting, IMO, and beauty queens taking it over was no great surprise.

The Seattle protest was a bunch of scruffy looking kids and what looked like college students. I think that OWS is going to be largely comprised of people who are unemployed or virtually so.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

LA Days, Part 8:

As I have stated, the year that I lived in Culver City, I went to the movies in Westwood and Beverly Hills all the time. 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 the greatest crime of my life, 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 42 when they did it – or at least got caught doing it, and I knew both of them, and 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 stunk 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 go away. For the next year, I gasped for air every waking hour. I had my two years in by then, and planned to try 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 the role that they try to stuff me into, 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.

I am nearing the end of my LA Days posts, at least my first stint in LA. 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 was going to 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.

Then, 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 insanely 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 the most dramatic scenes of my life awaited me. There was a car in the deserted parking lot, 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 that was following her did not follow 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 years old. She quickly told the story of what had 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 yards 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 came to the office looking for me. Then began my month of “me and the hooker.” She asked me for some more money, and I gave it to her. Working out of town was pretty 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 here 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, and that kind of “parenting” defined her life, 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 show up, 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 I now 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 moved most of my worldly goods to store 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 for the week. 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 stripping 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 stores like that 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, middle aged 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 inches from 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 like nothing had happened. I’ll bet that the guard was 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 danger 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 white 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, and 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 years in LA 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, but that will be in a future post. Never say never.

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 hard 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 in the 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 there 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, but 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#theft

was only a gentle preview of what was in store for me. 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.

Only a few LA days posts are left. Incredibly, my LA days were not finished after I met Dennis, and that story is coming.

I have a long weekend at the office ahead of me. We will see when I get the next posts written.

Best,

Wade

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

Wade, below is a link to OWS demands:
http://coupmedia.org/occupywallstree...l-demands-2009

It is still open. A living document as they say. Blocking of alternative forms of energy is mentioned near the end of that page.

Wade i am very sorry i invite you to another rabbit hole But maybe there is way out at the other end. And we will never know if we stay at our end

"Beware of stepping outside of your door. You never know where it might take you." a hobbit saying