I was born the second son of Bob and Mary Lou Folzenlogen on May 2nd, 1952, in Cincinnati, Ohio. My older brother is Bob. Jeff arrived a couple of years after me.

We lived in Gulf Manor, on Mayflower Ave, in a small, green, wooden structure that was unlike any other house in the neighborhood. All the others were two-story brick homes. Our home only had one floor, with a garage underneath. There was a big side porch with a metal awning. In our backyard we had one of those two-seater merry-go-rounds that you had to pump with your arms and legs. There was also a large shed back there that the previous owner had used as a chicken coop. Behind that was a little stretch of woods.

My Dad was a very handsome man. He worked for A-1 Dry Cleaners and later became the owner. He was drafted into the military, but sat out the Korean War with a knee injury. He grew up a couple of avenues over, toward the other end of the street. His family’s house was the first in the neighborhood. It was made of stone. They built the basement first, and lived in it while the rest of the house was being built. He said that during that time they would bathe in the utility tubs. He was the oldest of ten kids.

My Mom grew up on the same side of the neighborhood as my Dad, but on Mayflower Ave also. She was and still is a beauty. Photographs of her from back then have a movie star quality about them. She had one younger sister.

A famous family story is that, upon graduating from high school, a local doctor offered to pay the tuition for my Dad to go to medical school (as long as he agreed to do the same for some other kid once he became a doctor) but my Dad declined and got a job delivering dry cleaning instead, because he wanted to marry Mom before someone else did. He never did go to college.

Mom was a full time mother and housewife. “A great mother” (my Dad would always say), which she needed to be, because she ended up having eight kids.

We lived about a block away from one of the busy streets in the neighborhood. On the other side of that was a factory, Hilton Davis. If the wind was blowing in our direction, there was always a strong smell, but no one seemed to mind so much about such things back then. It was just the Hilton Davis smell.

Our neighbors to the left owned a bakery. Sometimes he would give us kids paper funnels full of cake icing that we would squeeze into our mouths.

Our neighbors to the right had some kind of calendar business. He would often give us stacks of shiny calendar photos that I would use to draw pictures from. Those were my earliest art experiences. My Mom would often do paint-by-number paintings, which also greatly inspired me. When my parents would go out for the evening and hire a babysitter, they would often set up a still life and we three boys would have drawing competitions. First prize was a quarter.

We had what I remember as being a cavernous black car. My Mom and Dad would sit in the front and we would sit in the back or stand and hang over the front seat. Rather than fight over window seats, the big thing was to get to sit on the hump that was in the middle of the back seat. I remember it as being hard, but you got to sit up a little higher. There were no seat belts. A favorite evening activity was to take a ride, looking for the origin of spotlights, which were often used as advertising when opening a new store or car lot. It was like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We would usually sing songs while driving in the car, usually “Down By The Old Mill Stream”, which we would sing in harmony.

One summer we vacationed at Lake Erie. I remember the dark gray sand. My Mom and Dad bought us Cowboy and Indian outfits.

Our family was Catholic. My Dad was a hardcore Catholic until the day he died. That being the case, the entire subject of sex was very taboo in our home. I always thought of all my relatives on my Dad’s side as being sexless. I remember wondering if they even had genitals. One time I asked my Dad how they knew if the baby was a boy or a girl before their hair grew long. He turned red and said he would tell me later, but he never did. I quickly realized my faux pas and was mortified for my Dad. Personally, I never bought into their shame. I always loved my body and was always interested in all things naked.

This next thing is very important. It pretty much defines the entire course of my life up to now.

One day, when I was five years old, I was sitting on the floor in front of our television watching some kind of game show. For whatever reason, I closed my eyes, and started repeating the word “me…me...me…” and something very profound happened. I had a cosmic experience. It was like a door opened in my heart and mind, and I was given this deep understanding concerning what life in this universe is actually about. It happened in an instant – the blink of an eye.

I opened my eyes and looked at the people on TV. Just then the mailman walked up onto the front porch. I turned and looked at him, and I knew, just somehow absolutely knew, that no one else understood this. It was in how people related to each other - their motivation and goals. I remember thinking that it was all very odd.

I’ve since heard or read about others who have had similar experiences. Like, for instance, a scientist who has spent his entire life trying to solve a complex problem, and then one night the answer comes to him in a flash while he is taking a bath. They describe the experience as being able to comprehend an entire library worth of information in a split second.

It was like that.

The experience had to do with the interconnectedness of everything – all people, all things: past, present and future. It was like I saw all time as being an endless movie. Before we were born, there were countless lives and events. After we die, there will be trillions of billions more. An individual life is little more than a single frame in an eternal movie. The purpose of life is the movie, not the isolated frame.

Fairly recently, I’ve come to understand that this experience had a lot to do with Quantum Physics, but at the time, I didn’t have a clue. All I knew was that it was unquestionably true, and that it was more real to me than parents or the house I lived in.

I was also given this little internal button, somewhere in the upper region of my chest, that I could mentally push and have the experience at will. This lasted until I was twenty-three. I’m sure I had the experience hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of times.

The next day I tried to explain the experience to my friend Ricky Pine back in the woods. It was like I was talking millions, but all he could hear was one thru ten. There simply was no way to explain what I was experiencing using words, as others did not possess the concepts that would allow them to wrap their mind around what I was saying.

That was when I realized that I was all alone.

It was like I was from another planet.

I went to kindergarten while living in this neighborhood. I remember my teacher as being very pretty. I was always called on to do the drawing on the blackboard. I remember crying every day before my Mom came to pick me up. I had no idea why.

That summer we moved to Dillonvale.