Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own l...
The gift of sobriety is clarity and a sense of connection - and travel only enhances that.
Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.
Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yard...
The thunder and bombast of what passes for news programming today--Motto: All terror, all the time
No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.
Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.
Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I under...
Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.
I too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be...
The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swep...
Look for a wave shaped like an A. . Hmm. I saw and and . I saw the alphabet and the alphabet. I saw . I saw no . Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to...
It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.
I treated the wound with antibiotic cream and let it close before doing any serious snorkeling—and incidentally, I do very much like the phrase serious snorkeling. If I could somehow figure out a way...
I'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.
Technically speaking, there are people in Nebraska. live been there. l met both of them.
It is an unfortunate reality for innate idlers that our modern world requires one to hold a job to maintain a sustainable existence. Idling, I find, if immensely underrated, even vilified by some who...
In Kiribati, the unimane and unaine (old women) are considered the guardians of the culture, a state of affairs that sets it apart from the United States, where the final arbiter for all things cultur...
If there is one indelible image from the Battle of Tarawa, it is a photo of dozens of dead Marines bobbing in the shallows just off what was called Red Beach II. I often launched my windsurfer from Re...
Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks because it makes other people less boring.