When I say I was raised like a Little Prince, I mean it! This was the palace . . .

. . . and speaking of which, here's my wonderful father, a gentle man and a scholar, holding me when I was maybe around the age of 1. Now I know that was literally the age of Oneness, the timeless presence of a pure being that still lives in the Garden of Paradise!

Because we lived in northern Thailand and only saw TV during our furloughs in the USA every 4 years, the "idiot box" held a special Magick for us. I'm probably between ages 4 and 5 here, in Colorado, obviously amused by something I'm watching. How clearly I recall those elasticized suspenders with their little chromed clips to adjust them! This same year, I asked my mother to make me a fairy costume for Halloween: I envisioned gauzy painted wings and moth-like antennas. Despite her good heart, my mother insisted a boy ought more appropriately to be dressed as the small white rabbit I became.

The first book that I wrote is called "King of the Monkeys" featuring drawings by Yours Truly and a few words of text penciled in by my mother, to whom I must have dictated the few pages of the story.  Sometimes of a Saturday morning my parents would place me into a three-wheel man-powered taxi and send me out across Chieng Mai and out into the country towards the foothills to where my little friend Lenore Young lived. Her daddy ran the local zoo. Most often upon my arrival there would be a bear cub or leopard in a cage within the front gate on the way towards the house. On a particular Saturday, in the cage was a pig-tail macaque monkey no more than a matter of a few weeks old. Entranced, I stood rooted to the spot observing this small being in total fascination. Lenore said with a trace of impatience, "Do you want the monkey? If we go on into the house, I'll ask my dad if you can have him. I'm quite sure you can." I stared at her in absolute wonderment and gratitude: "Oh, yes, please!"

Back in Thailand where I appear to have been sprouting like the proverbial weed, I fondly and vividly recall our regular vacations in the mountains not far from Chieng Mai where we lived. "I WILL LOOK UNTO THE HILLS, FROM WHENCE COMETH MY HELP," an engraved and painted board that my lovely mother has mounted on her back porch, quotes the scriptures. You see us perched on a giant log in the tropical rain forest, happy as clams.

"They that go down to the sea in ships," is another quote, but not, I think from the Bible. Is it Homer? Anyway, the wonderful "Heron" sailboat that we had marvelous adventures with sailing on the Gulf of Thailand, was built by the father of my friend Jo-Jo (AKA Jonathan) Downs. Most exciting was to sail out past Chopstick Mountain protruding like a Chinese ink-painting from where ocean & land met, into the vaster gulf where lay Lion Island. Its leonine silhouette claimed the horizon, tantalizing as Bali Hai. Upon approach the islet turned out to be a sheer, slanted spine of rock thrusting up from the seabed, surrounded by coral, brilliant fish & even small octopi. We climbed the ridge and snorkeled in the shallows. In a sea-cave we found tiger-eye gems.

Following my idyllic childhood in the north, when I was finished with 3rd grade we moved south to Bangkok, just as Vietnam was heating up to scorching. During these strange years we also spent a 2 year furlough in Berkeley, California (1963 and '64). Also a 6-month furlough during 1967, so I witnessed the famous Summer of Love. In these images (above and below left) you see my evolution from a happy boy of 8 or 9 to an ultra-sensitive and somewhat-brooding, shy adolescent.

The first shows the further development of a lifelong theme: my love for holding a warm, living creature in my arms; me with my "cocker-dauschund" Teddy.

Anyway, you see me becoming profoundly self-conscious as in the para-military P.E. program of International School Bangkok, forced to shower with the other boys, I compared myself and found myself lacking. At the same time, aware of my own intelligence and artistic talent, I was also somewhat arrogant. 

Thirdly (left) you see me suffering terribly from my first ever hangover, and one of the few I've ever experienced! The night before, with my sister and a few friends, I'd been to a French restaurant. We had some wine, then I had several mixed drinks. Misery, indeed! At age 15 I'm seen at Bangkok International Airport, garlanded and awaiting departure appearing half-dead, or is it half alive?!

We returned to my beloved Berkeley, California, to live indefinitely in 1969. Though my parents worried about me, I felt intensely happy, totally at H.O.M.E. in the free-wheeling carnival atmosphere of that hotbed of countercultural extremity. Daily I roamed that most magnificent of campuses, UCB. Telegraph Avenue, those few intergalactic blocks of street people leading north to Sather Gate, became my mind-manifesting substrate. When Abbey Road was released, I recall walking from our house on Regent Street to campus, hearing various speaker systems pealing out that Magickal recording all the way along!

When my sister encountered a lost puppy in what the people had renamed "Ho Chi Min Park," the amazing being named Sagebrush entered our lives.