Before we start off, reports are coming in from across the nation — my new book, Sit Down & Shut Up! is available in the shops. Some people who ordered it on-line already have their copies. So what are you waiting for? Go out and get yours today!
I spent some time this afternoon at the UCLA Book Fair signing copies. But my first official book signing is scheduled for May 17th at the Bodhi Tree Book Store in West Hollywood. On Saturday June 2nd I'll be at the Phoenix Zen Center with a couple other locations in Phoenix on the following 2 days. Then it's up to San Francisco the week after that. I'll post a full schedule soon.
Today's offering is a kind of "bonus track" to my latest piece for Suicide Girls (see the link to your left). In there I mentioned some crates of records I found while cleaning out my dad's closets. I also found a bunch of my old comics that my parents had saved. When I started college I was an art student. My ambition at the time was to be a professional cartoonist. But I wasn't quite ambitious enough. My teachers never really got anything I did. It was far too low-brow for them to comprehend. I mean, my lord, The Three Stooges?!?!?!
This here was the first piece of Buddhist inspired writing I ever did. Click on the picture to enlarge it to readable size. The Rinzai Stooges was the first and the second was Bedlam in Nirvana, which I'm saving for next week's Suicide Girls page. The date on that one is December 1984, so this one must be a month or so earlier. Tim McCarthy, my Zen teacher at the time, loved this and encouraged me to do more. But I only ever did those two.
The katakana in the final frame is completely wrong, by the way. All I knew of Japanese came from a book I got out of the library. It's supposed to say "Curly Roshi."
Enjoy!
