I must have already been a Buddhist monk in my last life, perhaps living in one of the various Buddhist temples in one of the many foggy back alleys in my native San Francisco, maybe deep in the bustle and chatter of Japantown or Chinatown. But I could not have been a very good monk. Distracted for many years by the vicissitudes of soap-operatic life, entangling myself in the most spectacularly worldly way in its snarl, I nonetheless managed to break free from the thicket of mundane existence, at least enough to regain my bearings and to become a monk, to pass through the looking-glass in a land where this generally makes little sense.