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