Extra Biographical Materials:
"The Lost Years"

You may have noticed that while there are pictures of me as a child, and more recently as a middle-aged adult, there are very few pictures from the period in between. Some, seeing this gap in the documentary record, might surmise that I spent this period of roughly thirty years on some unusual mission. Traveling in India, perhaps. Communing with holy men. Studying in Lhasa, or Shambhala, or perhaps just sitting in a drugged stupor in Kathmandu.

They would be wrong. I rushed through this period in my autobiography because it was less eventful in terms of my development as an artist, and because I was a cuter child than adult. But aren't we all?

The fact is, I left Sacramento hardly at all, choosing, more or less by default, to stay in this glorious Peoria Of The West, this princely Podunk of the Pacific Coast. Overlapping with the first blooming of my art career was a period in which I did temporary labor jobs, renting myself out as a chimpanzee-for-hire. I chose temp work because of the freedom to refuse assignments, which bought for me that most precious of commodities, free time. The work I did was hard, dirty, and ill-paid. It built me up in some ways, and wore me down in others. Although my work record is extremely spotty, the nature of the work I did as low ape on the totem pole was such that I don't care to do any more of it in this lifetime if I can help it. Enough Dharma for me, thank you. Now it's on to Paradise and dancing girls.

But my self-imposed sentence in the gulag of working stiffs didn't go to waste. I needed some grounding in the "real world," and I got it. Now, older, grayer, and perhaps even wiser, I emerge from the Fortress of Solitude to resume the pursuit of my true destiny.

Here, then, are some pictures of me in the prime of my young adulthood, on up to my present somewhat overripe state. The weight goes down, the weight goes up. Facial hair comes and goes. He's fat, then he's scrawny, then for five minutes he's almost-kinda-sorta good-looking, then—uh-oh!—he's fat again. Real fat again. And then he gets serious about studying health and fitness and shapes up enough that he looks sort of okay again, albeit kind of eroded around the edges.

Enjoy!