![]() My very first business card printed from my father's computer read: wanderer, scientist, terrible dancer. Now only one of those words remains. Then to New York City for a wet-lab position studying stem cells at New York Medical College. My projects involved the senescence of bone marrow stem cells the renal effects of kidney stem cell apoptosis. I assisted in the discovery of a novel binding protein for the E2A protein using the Yeast II Hybrid system & co-authored three papers about this research & even defended a poster at the American Society of Nephrology meeting.
I finally saved enough to fulfill my boyhood dream of going to India for a year & brought my kid sister Tessa along for the ride. We shared a little flat in the slums while she sister worked in Bollywood & I ended up as a writer on the March to Tibet: a four month protest march of Tibetan monks, nuns and laypeople beginning in the Dalai Lama's home-in-exile of Dharamsala to New Delhi and then onto the border. I wrote biographies of the marchers, articles for Western publications and one obituary. Because of India's laws against foreigners participating in political protests, I was arrested twice and finally deported. ![]() Now it's been a few cycles of saving up a grubstake in NYC by science tutoring, moving and other gigs. Then hitting the road. I started writing my first book in Mexico but realized that it was too big for me at the time. I wound up in Brussels trying to do a graphic novel about the above March to Tibet & though that one hit the skids on the first try, I've always wanted to come back & finish her off. Most recently, I spent four years on the road researching a graphic novel about cannabis that eventually came to be based on Moby Dick. I've completed two of the chapters finished but there's many to go because all 135 chapters from Melville gave the finest structure on which to hang all the glories of the anadamide molecule & all the horrors of the Amerikan Ahab's War on Weed. Here's my first finished graphic novel, "SUNset" & my second, "The CROWN – Volume 1: How to Shoot an Elephant" |