I Trained To Do This Blog At NASA

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I must have been living faster than the speed of life all the time by the 1970s. Otherwise how the heck would I have ended up at NASA in the first place? My job there was primarily editing the inhouse newspaper that went to 50 thousand or so employees and journalists, covering work at LBJ Space Center in Houston. So I'd gather news about the space shuttle and related projects and report on it to this wide but closely targeted audience, much like I did with City of Angels from Jan. 2007 until the blog fizzled and burned up in the atmosphere, pretty much, in 2010....

(Expect more of the story on the period I was at NASA in posts coming in 2013-2014)

I lived a life led by compulsions put in me when a Catholic priest "sexualized" me at age five. Promiscuity, or "sexual confusion," is an inevitable effect on the victim of child sex assault, as we grow up, when and if we make it to adulthood. Add to it that in my case the molester was a priest, God and the sky got added in to the confusion.... I ended up in my thirties chasing astronauts in Houston, and the period I worked at NASA, 1978-1983, is a time I remember in dark shame.

This could be a comedy routine: Thanks to Fr. Horne-y, I had to be with men in high places, connected to the sky, so I went to work at NASA.

The KC-135 aircraft on which we are flying in these shots was known as the "vomit comet" because the jet flew parabolas- up and down and up and down. Astronauts and techs tested equipment and ways for humans to endure low gravity in space by riding on these KC135 flights over the Gulf of Mexico.

You got zero-gravity during the apex and double gravity while in the bottom half of the parabola (see illustration). Everyone throws up on the vomit comet, especially the first time they ride it. Me, I had no nausea at all, and I attributed it to the soda crackers in my flight suit pocket. But my t-shirt hidden under the zipper told the true story, "Better Living Through Chemicals," illustrated with a graphic leaf of fine cannibas.

I knew is 1979 that cannabis was being used to stop nausea. It was Texas, easy to get weed, if you were fearless.... I mean, in that state in the 1970s they still put you in prison for possession of less than an ounce.

For these zero-G trips, I drove onto the Air Force Base used by LBJ Space Center, parked, pulled out a baggie or unwrapped a hidden piece of foil, toked on the joint I'd taken out, then suited up for the flight.

Nothing could stop me by then.

I was impervious, having gotten into and survived several scrapes with death by 1979, such as this one in 1966. So when I was at NASA, I could do anything, even toke up on pot on an Air Force base in my car, before getting on a test flight to cover experiments as a journalst.

Plus, I was always in pursuit of the priest. There was always this underlying breathlessness as I confused sex with everything else in life, while trying to be straight and professional.

My job on these flights was to take pictures and then do a story for release to media and for the inhouse newspaper, Space News Roundup. I had the journalist grad's dream job, and I literally screwed it up, by confusing men who had a connection to the sky with the priest I had been pursuing in compulsion since puberty.

Here is the story that resulted from one of these flights: (Top and bottom half of P. 4, see front page below:)

Page 1 of issue w/above story.
WOW!
Look what else I found! I edited and recorded these updates of Skylab as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, remember that?


EDITING NORAD?
Me? Kay Ebeling?
Who once passed a hasheesh pipe with Timothy Leary?
Man, what a pedophile priest affected compulsive pursuit in life can lead you into... (PS: Never shared my scientific results, on the use of marijuana to prevent nausea in space, with NASA bosses at the time though...)
All this ability I had, all this skill, and I never experienced success, because of the compulsion. My sexual acting out, done almost by rote like I was pre-conditioned, always got me shunned and ousted. No matter how good a job I did, no matter how upright and disciplined and productive I made myself- I'd always get fired.

Getting fired from NASA, now that's a story... More to come
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MORE Skylab Re-Entry Copy:




I think there was a call-in number for people to get updates, and it ran these recorded messages. We manned the newsroom 24-hours as Skylab re-entered, only mission I ever got to work on while I was at NASA....

Like Everyone Else in L.A.?

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When I came back from Texas in 1983, I was so lost and demoralized, and once again found myself on Sunset Boulevard. That day I’d driven up from my parents’ house where they'd retired in South Orange County.

I had the idea all I had to do was walk into a literary agency office, tell them, "I used to write for NASA Public Affairs," show them my portfolio of Space News Roundups from LBJ Space Center in Houston. Say, “I used to edit these, and 25 thousand people received them in their inbox every other Friday.” (Don't know what i planned to say if they ask me why I left NASA, as always I was going faster than the speed of life, did not stop to look at that problem.)

Now that I was an out of work journalist in L.A, I had to get get an agent, I figured. So I got the address of an agency in about the 9200 block of Sunset, past Doheny, where it curves away from the Strip and starts into Beverly Hills.

I’d been in Texas since about 1970. But still this street was home, not the whole city of L.A., not the east side suburbs where I grew up, but Sunset Boulevard. Last time I’d been a resident of Hollywood was in 1969.

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Now I entered this glass slick building with no one stopping me in 1983 in the lobby, even though it was a Beverly Hills office building with all kinds of movie industry businesses inside, probably even celebrities. I just walked in and pushed the elevator button, went up a few flights, and walked into the office of Well Known Literary Agency. They had a phone listing with their address in the Yellow Pages that I’d read in my parents’ kitchen.

I said, "I'm here, I want to get a job writing for television or films, so I need an agent," in my elongated A's of L.A. with acquired Texan twang.

The receptionist stopped short, she was a city girl laughing at this Texas newcomer, even though L.A. is my hometown. She gave a grin meant for someone not me, and said, "No agent will talk to you unless you show up with a large body of work."

I said, A large body of work? But I have these Space News Roundups full of stories I wrote.

She shook her head. Doesn't matter.

What's a body of work, I asked. She said:

Like fifteen, twenty, completed full length feature film scripts, not just one novel but several novels you've gotten published.

Oh, I said.

I left the office, crossed the street, and sat on a bench, just sat, looking at the sleek office building I'd just left. Just sat there looking at it.

Five years later I left L.A. with newborn Lizzie and moved to Humboldt County, convinced that a baby would keep me at home, plus moving to the country, I’d finally sit down and write that body of work.

Never did.

Ended up getting a job and entering the frenzy chaos and exhaustion of life as a single mother.

In 1993 in Eureka I had this bizarre experience as my daughter turned age five. Right then and there I remembered what happened to me at the hands of Father Thomas Barry Horne of Bartlett Illinois when I was five years old myself. It all became clear and vivid as I looked at my daughter as I was hiding her from the front windows.

And it came clear in my head because I hadn't been in the bars in two years.

I confirmed what happened at the hands of Father Horne over the phone with family members. Then entered the world of hundreds of thousands of crime victims of pedophile priests all over the world, and all that has led to where I am today.

To this day, when I look at my daughter, I see myself at her age. It’s hard right now that she’s age 22, as I did my worst… sexual confusion… acting out around that age. I want to move away from my daughter so I don't have to see those horrible years of my life every time I look at her.

All those greasy body fluid filled nights...

In 2007 I finally figured out how to start a blog and created one about pedophile priests, the crime victims, and the perpetrators. I found hundreds of stories, maybe thousands of stories, and started writing them.

The other day I realized that now, without setting out to accomplish it, I have a large body of work to show to an agent.

Wonder if that one literary agency is still in that building on Sunset Boulevard. Maybe I should look them up… wonder if I could get in the door in 2010.

Should just go sit on that bench and look at the building again.

-kay ebeling, today

In Pursuit of Timothy Leary, years before I realized it was really pursuit of the priest,

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I'm still the same person as the hippie who came out of Hollywood and started people singing:

All we are saying is give peace a chance

At a spontaneous event at Mystic Arts Bookstore in Laguna Beach, Summer 1969.

The same hippie girl who hitchhiked into Boulder for The Holy Man Jam in the student square a few months later, and as the clouds threatened rain, I jumped on the stage and did a sun dance,

and the sun come out.

The crowd hollered out, her name is Sunshine, your name is Sunshine.

And everyone started calling me Sunshine.

It stuck.

Two years later my common law mother in law even called me Sunshine, when I was living in her basement with her son and our baby. My own parents did not call me.

I left the Holy Man Jam in Boulder with a car full of hippies from Texas, we were segueing into Eastern Mystics with Swami Satchidananda, our guru, I moved to Dallas to live in the Integral Yoga Ashram.

Swami Satchidananda came through on a visit one week to “initiate” us, and he gave everyone a secret mantra and a Hindu name.

Except me.

Me, he said, “You are Sunshine. I can’t give you any other name, that is your initiated name, just like it was, Sunshine.”

Today at age 62, after four years of dealing with the Holy Roman Catholic Church and its upside down treatment of pedophile priest victims,

One would not be inclined to call me Sunshine.

One of the grown up victims, I am, which may explain my pursuit of Timothy Leary, Gurus, and astronauts- men with connections to the heavens...

Sun Shine!
is how I signed articles and letters for years, into the mid-1970s.
I always wrote, even in elementary school, I'd write stories through the summers.

What happened to Sunshine?

Somewhere along the way I lost that enthusiasm, that almost manic approach to life that brought rooms alive, that ignited projects, that got a gaggle of disconnected hippies to all sing together.

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

At the Mystic Arts Bookstore in Laguna Beach 1969.

Hmm, maybe I should give peace a chance now.

In 1969, running away from Hollywood, I was hitchhiking up and down Highway Five, the Santa Ana freeway (there was no 405 yet), to go north you went on Highway One, twisting through Big Sur.

Always Running always living faster than the speed of life.

I was standing on an onramp somewhere south of Long Beach. A carful of guys got mad when I wasn't a hooker, when I really was hitchhiking not turning tricks, so they dropped me on some Anaheim area street, and I lugged my bags back to the freeway, my thumb stuck out as I stood on the onramp.

Looking for Timothy Leary. He had a ranch, I'd heard, inland from Laguna, you got to him through Laguna Canyon, Laguna Beach, the Mystic Arts Bookstore.

Just off Sunset Boulevard I had left an apartment full of belongings behind, had not even dealt with mounds and mounds of clothes, had left them in a friend's closet.

I packed a duffelbag for my trip in pursuit of Timothy Leary, and it was imbalanced and awkward, due to the portable typewriter I also packed, and a stack of typing paper, ribbons...

Left behind an apartment half a block from

Sunset Boulevard,

on Leland Way.

Left a mound of clothes a half block from Sunset Boulevard. Weeks later that mound of clothes followed me to Laguna Canyon.

-more to come