Only their enigma brains cold decode each nort’s encrypted meaning This is a true story about a middle-child introvert who grew up in a culture bound family in Buffalo during the 1950s, when life was simple, prescribed and predictable; you graduated high school (hopefully), and then either got a job, got married to jump start the future clan or joined the local mob; neck and aspirations not required. Believing himself absent the day that social skills were dispersed, Joe feels lost and invisible within his own family and longs to discover the ‘know-how’ that will reveal the secrets about how to connect with other people in his world. He searches for mentors from whom he believes he can acquire the know-how he so badly craves; credible adults, other kids and Charlie Chan aphorisms, but none of these help. True to his unplanful nature, he forgoes the neighborhood prescribed options and instead decides to enter a foreign world; college, where he meets people very different from his own neighborhood, including Nicole, a Long Island gal. Once again faced with decisions after graduation and on another impulse, he decides to follow Nicole to New York where he meets a bunch of characters who become his apartment ‘dwellers’ and falls into a series of odd jobs, drugs and wild adventures. But is is through those very experiences that he finally begins to learn the know-how that he has been searching for all his life; ‘the real joy in life is the going-not the getting there’, and he learns the Buddhist wisdom of anatta or ‘no self’ This books is a humorous, witty account of Joe’s personal search for authenticity, set within the context of the social-political events that were occurring in America in the fifties and sixties; the VietNam war, hippies, drugs, psychedelic music and the civil rights movement. The story is told with parallels between Joe’s personal revolution as it unfolds during the larger social-political revolution occurring at the time. Each chapter is introduced by a significant political and a cultural event
