Vernonia Trilogy

By Doug Hawley

"Vernonia Trilogy" takes a look at three famous people from the small town in Northwest Oregon.  One becomes president despite an unusual politics, background, and family.  Another becomes a rock legend on Elvis' level.  The self-help guru competes with Oprah on a battle of the network gurus.  Small town fictional legends hang out with real life legends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Doug Hawley
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223943808

Doug Hawley

Doug Hawley is a little old man who lives in Lake Grove Oregon USA with editor Sharon and cat Kitzhaber.  Prior to early retirement he taught mathematics and worked as an actuary.  Mobility problems and local author Cheryl Strayed's book "Wild" inspired him to try writing again.  Subsequently he has produced around six hundred publications appearing in several countries.  He dabbles in most of the usual genres and some odd ones.  When not writing, he sleeps, eats, drinks, and volunteers.

Book preview

HERESY™

INTRODUCTION

You picked up this book because you are curious.  Are those that ask Are we here yet, known as Heretics™ (pronounced here – ticks) crazy?  Is their leader and the author of the book you are holding crazy?  Is it true that he and his movement have helped millions to lead more serene and productive lives?  Whom should you believe; the critics or those that are living Heresy™ (pronounced here-see).  I hope that you decide to get answers to those questions and the many others discussed in the following sections.  You should be warned – you will need to buy the book to get all you need to know.  You won’t be able to get through all of the text while standing around the book store.

Some more of what you will find herein:

The relationship of Heresy™ to religions and pop psych phenoms such as Venus – Mars, Inner Child, Codependency, Infinite Immersion, Explosive Love and Twelve Step Fever.

What about the leader, counselor, genius who discovered Heresy™?

What the movement will and will not do for you.

How to make the most of the movement.

Where are the nearest meetings?

Is this thing a cult or what?  Will it take all of my money?

If I’m a Heretic™ do I ignore the past and the future?

Does Heresy™ mean the same thing as being in the moment or getting there is all the fun?

Is it true that the biggest names in sports, politics, and entertainment are Heretics™ or at least sympathetic?

Will you be embarrassed in ten years to admit you were a Heretic, as you are now to admit you were a Moonie or a Scientologist?

What are those other self-help guys really like – see Battle of the Gurus.

Could I get more from a book by a bad poet who drums?

If you’re not careful this book will change your life in a good way.  Read on brothers and sisters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Please note – the following is partially linear with sidebars about romance and such wonders.

I can’t brag about my sordid past as most of the best selling self help ripoff artists can.  If you are to believe those charlatans you must have completely screwed up your life with multiple addictions, serial and parallel psychotic relationships and family issues up to and including incest and fratricide before you can become a self-help leader.  Sorry to break the news, but it is possible to know how to improve your life and that of others without making every mistake in the book first.  You can find, or better yet ignore, your inner child without years of debilitating alcohol ingestion.  You can find out the home planet of the various genders without having a sex change.  The list of self acquired handicaps by the experts is endless and disgusting.

Suffice ir to say that I have sampled legal and illegal drugs.  They have never ruled my life and I have always been able to leave them alone.  Maybe some controversial substances have helped me though some tough times, but free sex and piles of money would have helped more.  Think about it.  My family life was nearer to the Nelsons than the Mansons.  That is not to say that we are all warm and fuzzy, but there is no member of my family that I can’t be civil with for up to an hour and thirty six minutes at a time.  Would being hated by my sister or having shot at my father make me a wiser person?  I think not.

What of my advanced degrees?  Well, yes in REAL science, specifically biology, not in karmaic / chakratic / shrinkaroo /chromaromatics mumbo-jumbo.  If you really want to blow your money and your life, drop this book and pick up Codependency Rules for Siblings by Dorothy Margaret Hambleton, Ph. D. in Relationship Dynamics.  If you are not convinced that phony degrees are worse than useless, there is no help for you, not even this book based on lectures and seminars that have helped millions.

Now you know who I am not.

I was born Beauregard Douglas Holley several years ago in a state or territory of the US.  The details are not relevant, but I was too young for Viet Nam and too old for Desert Storm.  If you insist on learning more, there are various websites which will give you there version of the truth.  Most of them are completely bogus, but to try to correct them would be a waste of time and psychic energy.  The name I now use is a simplification of my birth name.

It is relevant that I got a degree in biostatistics and went to work for a drug company.  I acknowledge that my early choice was made on a basis of economics as much as altruism, but I did want to help with the physical ills of society.

Then as now, I was not a Company Man.  I couldn’t salute my boss who stole ideas and cheated on her husband.  My great success, which kept me employed and even got me a raise, was developing a patch which erased hickeys in 30 minutes.  Advertising the device was tricky because we (at that time) could not say what it really did.  We had to euphemistically claim to eliminate Surface Accumulated Blood (we called it SAB).  I think the public finally deciphered our message.  Makers of vibrators and tissues that are easy on the rectum initially faced the same problems.  For better or worse, the product should have been called Hickeygone, but we went with Saberace™.

I didn’t feel too bad about my work with hickeys.  I must say, that it’s a small but real problem for some people.  My success, however, got me pigeonholed as someone who could hit singles and doubles but had no prospects for homeruns.  That may be unfair.  At our small shop, we did not have the capital to go after cancer or any other major disease.  The best we could hope for was to shorten your cold or reduce the phlegm you produced while having an allergic reaction.

I worked for another five years at the company (again, the name is irrelevant – if you must know, look at some website) without even getting to the level of Saberace™.  I wasn’t getting rich and women with large breasts and small waists did not want to initiate kinky sex with me.  The best years of my life seemed to have come and gone even faster than a point guard in the NBA.  As a result, I entered a fugue state.  I may have been clinically depressed.  An aside – if you have any of warning signs of depression see a competent professional if such a thing exists and he can be found.  I am not licensed to help you and you are probably no fun at all.  Suicide was at that point a rational choice for me.

I considered various alternatives to suicide.  My observation was that followers of toxic parents, inner child, and other popular movements, were making the proponents rich, but the readers and practitioners of the various movements were generally really obnoxious and no more useful than they had been before hooking up with their bogus favorites.  Pop psych is 50% obvious, 50% dumb and 10% useful (figures do not add to 100% because of overlap).

My family had been Episcopalian.  The rituals were OK, but the core beliefs were, ironically, unbelievable.  As with all the Christian branches one had to accept an eternal God which changed over a few hundred years from a God of anger and war to a God of love.  Can you accept a God that can’t make up its mind?  Not I.  After checking out a few of the major non-Western religions, I could not find anything better, but I do have warm thoughts about Zoastrianism.  What’s not to like about a religion featuring Ahura Mazda?  I have no use for reincarnation – who can handle more than one life anyway?  Why bother with nontheistic religions?  You may as well make up your own belief as the terminal boredom of Unitarianism.  Don’t get me started on Buddhism.

Popular secular religions?  Save lives in the third world so they can die of AIDS or malnutrition later?  Gun control?  Save the southern winkfish?  Nuke aborted gay whales?  No thank you.  The only important movement to help humanity as a whole is population reduction.  If we don’t want nature to do it for us in some mass extinction from disease, or to do it for ourselves by war, we should lower the human population of the earth.  I’ve done my part.  By my own volition and by popular request I have no issue that admits to it.  Soapbox temporarily vacated.

Because I was young and self-centered at the time I was only concerned with saving myself.  Helping a huge segment of humanity did not occur to me until I  found my calling.

After abandoning any hope for help from pop-psych or religion, I decided to think about a hobby.  Cars I worked on would not run.  There were always parts left over.  The desk I built was massively inferior and more expensive than a store bought one.  Yoga, tai-chi and karate were OK, but I never got past the moves.  My first brush with celebrity started with a fan letter to Frank Spenser, the inventor of Stretchomatic™ (a machine for increasing flexibility), and later the president of the U.S.A.  He responded, and over the years we had a very useful exchange of ideas.  To learn more about Spenser read the excellent biography by Doug Hawley.  Despite the physical benefits and short term high, there was no enlightenment from exercise.

My life improved when I began to hike on weekends with a local group, the Norville Knees.  Each hike would get about 30 hikers for rambles of five to ten miles.  The fellow hikers were all interesting people with different approaches to life.  There were Hindu Indians from the computer industry, an Islamic storekeeper, a few Jewish professionals from various disciplines and many Latinos and various Asians along with white bread Americans.  All of them had different ideas about religion and philosophy from take care of number one to worship of various Hindu deities to the love of our savior.  Unconsciously, I was forming a Western based synthesis which incorporated bits of all of their thinking.

Hiking women were without much physical or psychic camouflage making hiking a much better place for meeting them. 

On a Sunday hike one spring we were walking through canyons and up hills.  I was getting one of my rare hiking highs.  Many of our party were complaining about how long it was taking to get to our lunch spot.  We knew that we would have lunch where a waterfall fell into a pond from which a crossover falls emerged.  Double Falls was famous in three states for its beauty, but the trail to it is very difficult.  A standard whine of hikers is Are we there yet?  At 1PM there had been five cries of Are we there yet?  The simmering fragments of Hinduism, Buddhism and the monotheisms came to me.  You are all asking the wrong question – ‘Are we Here yet’?  I pointed out that MY question got a much more positive answer than theirs.  We are always HERE and there is nothing wrong with that.

Are we here yet became a big joke and my newest catch phrase.  I was known for my bad and frequently home grown jokes – Did you hear about the gardening gambler who was so desperate that he bet his hedges?  Stuff like that.

After the hike I thought about my catchphrase.  Was there any there here or here there?  The semantics gave me a slight headache.  I could see some similarities to New Age froth such as –

Be in the moment (duh – what other moment would we be in)

It is the journey not the destination (give that a definite maybe)

All who wander are not lost (for those that are lost we send out search teams and find out that they are yahoos without a lick of sense visiting Idaho from Ohio)

Are we all saying the same thing and if so are we all correct or all wrong or neither?

It immediately occurred to me that Westerners could not fully realize the philosophy of someone who lived on rice in Nepal and had never read a Dashiell Hammett novel or watched a Star Trek (any of the series or movies).  Further New Age meant Old Superstition (and not in the good Rocking Stevie Wonder sense).

The puzzle I solved is how to start with a similar idea to Eastern philosophies and religions, the completely obvious, some Western science and my own experience to derive a complete framework for improving lives.  Even though I realize that the West will never completely appreciate or understand some of the nuances of Eastern thought, I have been amazed at the number of Heretics™ there in are Eastern Asia and the Indian subcontinent.  Apparently some of the Asian adherents feel some comfort with the Asian influences on Heresy™ while appreciating practical Western adaptations.  As befits a mostly Western discipline my riddles are more likely to derive from pop culture than mysticism.  Rather than The sound of one hand clapping I would use WWHSD (What would Homer Simpson Do).  WWHSD is usually a negative lesson.

We will look at the details of Heresy™ in later chapters, but excuse me while I talk about myself a little longer.  It is hard to find a good leader without a healthy ego.

As I absorbed my lessons, my outlook became better, I drank less and I quit smoking.  A member of our hiking club, Jody Kramer noticed the difference and asked what had come over me.  Thus I got my first grasshopper.  I called them grasshoppers from the old TV series Kung Fu until I got the slicker and used the more original term Heretic.  Jody continued to smoke, but not around his family and avoided a bitter divorce based on my lessons - which leads to my personal romance digression / sidebar.

Up until this point in my life I had paired with women who were either weird or disinterested in me.  As I came to know, it wasn’t that I had low esteem that doomed my life, it was that I had low value.  Only women with strange taste in men or those that felt the need for loser guys would get close to me.  I was usually complicit in them messing with my head.  The women who were serene and good did little