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.
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...
Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.
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...
Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.
No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.
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...
Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.
The thunder and bombast of what passes for news programming today--Motto: All terror, all the time
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...
It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.
Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks because it makes other people less boring.
Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an envelo...
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...
For what is life, a good life, but the accumulation of small pleasures?
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...
It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Ame...
I'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.
There is one faction that believes George Bush is a simpleton with the brain capacity of plankton, and that is why we are in the mess we're in. Then there's another faction that believes George Bush i...
Showing 1 to 20 of 37 results