When I was ten years old, my father, a plumber, invited me to go out on jobs with him. After accompanying him a few times, we both knew that I, an awkward and dreamy boy who wasn’t adept at using tools or machinery and had no interest in acquiring the skill, preferred to stay at home, where I could sit on the floor drawing pictures. I was obsessed with drawing things in the air, primarily, biplanes dogfighting and boys flying about at treetop height. I often added captions to the pictures.

My yoga strength teaching and my yoga strength-training manual and scholarly writings on modern yoga have been available to the public for a number of years. But, by and large, familiarity with my artistic and literary endeavors, which, as you see, began in my childhood, has been limited to a few people. Now, I’m happy to write, with the publication of Tell Me About Yourself, one of my artistic and literary creations is finally out in the world.

The drawings and a rudimentary text for Tell Me About Yourself were actually created when I was living at 125 Second Avenue in New York City’s East Village during the mid-1970s. Although always knowing that the drawings were like men’s room graffiti, I only recently realized that their crudeness was part of the liberating punk aesthetic of the era. I greatly revised the characters’s responses during the last dozen years, and, with the addition of the narrator’s introductory and closing reflections, made the book into a memoir. So this work, it might be said, is a collaboration between a young man and an old man—both of them, in a way that I can barely comprehend, me.