Nort: Finding Myself in the Big Apple in the Sixties

Only their enigma brains cold decode each norts 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 Joes 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 Joes 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