: About Me

I was raised in upper state New York during and after WW II by poor, but loving Italian-American parents. While attending high school I studied classical trumpet at Eastman School of Music in Rochester,N.Y., later enrolling for one year at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, N.Y.. The following year I began a four-year program at the University of California in Berkeley and attended graduation ceremonies in 1962, but failed to receive my B.A. in Liberal Arts for lack of a non-credit course in American History.

I was accepted by the Officers' Candidate School in the U.S. Air Force at San Antonio, Texas, but a traumatic event which I describe in my journals led to an Administrative Discharge "under honorable conditions", along with my simultaneously renouncing my faith in the Roman Catholic Church.

In the mid-sixties I managed to sabotage a successful four-year career in corporate accounting in the San Francisco Bay Area through drug abuse, winding up selling beaded jewelry on the pavement in front of Cody's Bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in "Beserk-ley". This was the Timothy Leary hippie era of "Tune In, Turn On & Drop Out".
(Leary forgot to add "Burn Out" to his famous banner.)

I initiated a free jewelry-making class next to the recently bombed-out offices of the Black Panther Party in Oakland (I eventually would be stoned by my own students, all young African American males, while waiting at a bus stop. Years later I find insight into this in "The Seat of the Soul" by Gary Zukav: "Individuals who experience what might be thought of as a martyr attitude see themselves as giving all that they have to others. They see this as a form of loving, but in truth the love that they give is contaminated because it is so filled with sorrow for themselves."; and later, freeing myself from the welfare rolls, I secured a janitorial position cleaning toilets at a prestigious resort hotel in the Berkeley hills, where I would eventually be awarded a small back-pay lawsuit. This jettisoned me on a two-week vacation to Mexico in 1982 that would unexpectedly morph into a twenty-four year "layover" living and working (sometimes illegally) on the Mexican Riviera in the state of Jalisco.

It was there that I became an intimate friend of the famous peyote-eating Huichol Indians, aboriginal offshoots of the Aztecs, whose ancient sacred territory is still located northeast of Puerto Vallarta. I made friends with numerous Huichol artisans and "marakames" or shamans and would later give several major exhibitions of their sacred bead and yarn art in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Rochester, N.Y.

During my near quarter-century stay in Mexico, there began to occur a series of extraordinary coincidences which included a "limpia" or spiritual cleansing by a Huichol shaman, and the discovery of a strange object at sea that would lead me to Southeast Asia in search of a Thai or Filipino bride for a wheelchair-bound African-American friend.

But the most unusual event was my one day being handed a "dangerous" manuscript handwritten in a trance in a foreign language that included a vivid description of one of my past lives in the sixteenth century as a Polynesian warrior living on the west coast of Mexico, impelling me to begin a book-in-progress titled A TALE OF TWO TALES The Strange Story of "Cave of the Dead Canoe"*. My first story that will be posted on HELIUM is titled "My Traveling Buddha" and is the first chapter of this book.

*CAVE OF THE DEAD CANOE by Andrew Macquire as channeled by Frank E. Thomas, Modern English translation by Jody Overend, Copyright 1992 and registered Screenwriters' Guild 1992 by Jody Overend, All rights reserved.

My passion is ...

to become the grandest version of the greatest vision I ever held about who I am (inspired by CWG books 1-3)

I know too much about ...

the Huichol Indians of Mexico, their art, their culture and their shamans

My parents always told me ...

to be loving and generous

My childhood ambition ...

was to be a writer.

My favorite memory ...

eating chocolate covered "mole" chicken & watermelon popsicles with the black seeds still in them -in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Why I write ...

to express at every moment what I am now learning & to help give people back to themselves

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Conversations with God an uncommon dialogue by Neale Donald Walsh; The Flight of the Eagle by Jiddu Krishnamurti; a long way gone Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah; The Heartless Stone a journey through the world of diamonds, deceit and desire by Tom Zoellner; The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav and Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski and listening to my nephew Joey Brucato's new CD release "FREE", jamming with drummer Steve Gadd and Tony Levin on bass @ myspace.com/brucatoband

My first job ...

setting pins at a semi-automatic bowling hall on Ridge Rd. East in Rochester, NY late 1950's

My best moment ...

So many -right now it's this...

My inspiration ...

I have many heroes & she-roes, most of them are writers & thinkers, including Shirley Maclaine, Maya Angelou, Marianne Williamson, Neale Donald Walsch, Henry Miller, Eckhart Tolle ("The Power of Now"), Jiddu Krishnamurti, Deepak Chopra & Gary Zukav, but my main inspiration is God, (who else?)

Religion & Spirituality > Thoughts on God Contemplating the existence of God

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STEPHEN HAWKING: An Emperor Without Words I was mildly amused to read that quadraplegic British scientist Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds of the New Millennium, now claims that the universe was not created by "God". His latest book "The Grand Design" (presumably his, since "God" is now -scientifically-speaking, of course- kaput!) goes hand-in-glove to make a forceful atheistic fist with another of its ilk "God Is Not Great", by Vanity Fair's starchild Christopher Hitchens. Full disclosure: In all fairness I have not read either book, and I'm still hallucinating o...

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