An "Awesome" wedding
An invitation to a wedding in India, which I RSVP'd with a heartfelt "fuck yes." Two days of color and joy, then Goa... a chakra-unblocking shack, an oily straight-razor shave, and inevitable food poisoning.
read the full post →Quotes from my blog that Claude thinks are funny
An invitation to a wedding in India, which I RSVP'd with a heartfelt "fuck yes." Two days of color and joy, then Goa... a chakra-unblocking shack, an oily straight-razor shave, and inevitable food poisoning.
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I visit Wales (its flag has a dragon — reason enough), drink my way through England's pubs and the Lake District, and attend "Man Camp" with a friend who may be a serial killer.
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Sweden's Arctic north "beyond the Wall," where climate change cancels the snow and the lights, dinners are 96% salt, and my dad lands in the ER over two kilos of porcini.
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A week in Copenhagen with my oldest friend Woods: Pastries, a living Viking boat museum, an inescapable Danish pop earworm, and a regrettable run-in with Kim's pork cracklings.
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Dawn and I take an Italy vacation that unfolds against the dawn of the pandemic: Carnevale, Pompeii, Prague, a dead body in Naples, and a deep, abiding love of the Negroni.
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A Wim Hof retreat in the Costa Rican jungle with daily ice baths, breathwork, honey in the eyes, and campfire conversation ranging from sloths to reptilian overlords.
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A loving farewell to my grandma who lived a remarkable life that spanned more than a century.
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El Salvador has a reputation, and I found a country that mostly defies it. A short dispatch arguing the place is far better than its headlines.
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Sicily with the gang. Mount Etna and Palermo street food that climaxes with a deep-fried spleen sandwich. Magical.
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Malta: 5,000-year-old temples, a 4D movie that mists your face, terrifying drives through medieval streets, and place names so fun to say they're like Pop Rocks for your mouth.
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Part two of the Nicaragua road trip with more volcanoes, beaches, and beer, as I make the case that the country everyone questioned is quietly one of the best.
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"So... why Nicaragua?" Dawn and I road-trip the country everyone keeps asking us about: Volcanoes, colonial towns, and the start of an unexpectedly great little adventure.
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A photo-heavy ramble through England, Amsterdam, Belgium, and Italy. The highlights: a new love of Belgian beer, and getting to wield a broadsword in a castle museum.
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Turkey, where the airline loses my underwear for 17 days, the Blue Mosque can't compete with haggling for knock-off shorts, and Dawn threatens me with three creative fates.
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Halfway through brewing school, drowning in the 25 liters of beer I make each week, with a side trip to Edinburgh where every pub is mysteriously, suspiciously out of haggis.
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I go to beer school in Sunderland to study brewing, dodge Mackem-vs-Geordie warfare, and learn what once added "body" to a batch.
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I save Machu Picchu for last, mostly so nobody'd bust my balls about skipping it. Seven months on the road end in the clouds, with guinea pig that tastes like rabbit.
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From a freezing Andean village to the steaming Amazon. Pre-Inca burial grounds, a beer-loving coati, and a sleeping-pill haze in which I win a mug on a Jehovah's Witness bus.
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Three days across Bolivia's salt flats and Martian deserts in a Land Cruiser, turning into "Man Jerky" at altitude, where the guides' phones don't work.
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Floating among the clouds on Lake Titicaca, a homestay on Amantani, then a border crossing that delights me to no end.
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Peru begins with salchipapas (fries, sausage, and a fried egg), dune buggies over endless sand, an island made of bird poop, and me towering over an entire country of hobbits.
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Last days in Bangkok, including a friend faking a family emergency to quit his job only for the cabbie's "shortcut" to drive him straight past his own school at pickup time.
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I return to the houses I built years ago, now lived-in, the town transformed. I take the hint it's time to go when the cook drunk-dials my door at 11pm.
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Life settles into beach, training, and beer in Phuket. The 19-year-olds spar like kangaroos on meth.
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I train muay thai in Phuket, running a daily gauntlet of four girly bars to reach the gym and wearing enough Tiger Balm to be smelled across continents.
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Back in Bangkok for my friend Pop's wedding: a Thai celebration, old friends, and the start of another long stretch in my adopted second home.
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Months of cross-country footage cut into one rambling 15-minute travelogue. For those who prefer movies to books. You're welcome.
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The epic U.S. drive closes through Seattle and the redwoods. Final tally: 13,578 miles, 34 microbreweries.
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Yellowstone's geysers and bison give way to a Primus show out west; nature and Les Claypool in the same unlikely week of the road trip.
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I prove, scientifically, that friends make you fat, then cross the coma-inducing corn of Iowa and South Dakota toward a beard-measuring showdown with Mount Rushmore.
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A week in Canada, where the people are unsettlingly nice, Ottawa offers little but drunks outside grocery stores, and I catch my first-ever fish.
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Foggy Cape Cod, a regrettable pint of maple syrup, and a French-Canadian border guard who doesn't like the look of me and then Montreal, mid-protest and electric.
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Into the Northeast: The worst beer Dogfish Head ever made, my theory that New Jersey Guidos are basically Orcs, and the legend of a strip club called the Golden Banana.
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Up the Southern coast through haunting Savannah and Charleston, past too many Confederate flags, to Myrtle Beach: A 15-mile strip mall I describe in withering, loving detail.
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Through Memphis and the Delta: Beale Street blues, the gut-punch of the Civil Rights Museum, and Graceland, proof we should be glad Elvis chose music over interior decorating.
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Alone on Route 66, I start talking to my car, watch a man fail to eat a 72-oz steak, and confirm that Oklahoma is, in fact, boring as fuck.
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The road trip rolls out of California: Big Sur's coast and a San Diego beer pilgrimage, and the Gaslamp Quarter.
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I quit my job with nothing lined up to go drive around the country. My grandma's verdict: "You have mental problems. You need to see a doctor." And so the road trip begins.
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Back to Viareggio for Carnevale: Four-story mechanized floats, costumes, and a hometown that shuts down for a month to party.
read the full post →Two shows in one week with the band. My brief, sweaty stint as a working musician, in pictures.
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I return to finish the Cité Soleil clinic and get rechristened by a pack of pantsless six-year-olds as "Kaka Bloc."
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A camera carried through one ordinary San Francisco week with open mics, street food, lowriders, homebrew, and far too many photos of the office.
read the full post →The whole Beijing-to-Moscow odyssey stitched into one video. Feel the power of the Panda.
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Across the Russian border to Irkutsk, the "Paris of Siberia" where the train nearly leaves Mae behind for good.
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The Trans-Mongolian begins in Beijing, where three of us in panda hats become genuine celebrities, the air is "burnt sienna," and the Forbidden Palace has a basketball court.
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Two weeks building a clinic in Cité Soleil with cement mixers that turn out to be "two guys with a shovel," a robbery at gunpoint, and a P.S. asking my grandma not to read paragraph two.
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I prep for Haiti by buying 32 pounds of Epsom salts and yelling "I need something for ringworm!" across a crowded drug store.
read the full post →My Led Zeppelin cover band plays its first gig. "I laughed, I cried, it was much better than Cats" and there were free beers backstage.
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A short, once-in-a-lifetime stop in Japan. A quieter bookend to the Asia trip, and a phrase I can't quite shake.
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Back to Thailand for Vince's beachside wedding preceded by a bachelor party best left in multiple-choice form, and a muay thai session against a 6'6" Kiwi who just kept punching my face.
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A cup of coffee in Hoi An somehow becomes a $200 suit, railroaded by a tiny tailor with raptor-talon toenails. Plus Sapa's blanket-sellers, who'd make terrifying cold-callers.
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My first three hours in Hanoi: ambushed by four giggling students, fed ice cream, photographed with fashion models, and nearly flattened playing human Frogger across the street.
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I train for months and drop 20 pounds as "Hungry Dave a.k.a. Asshole Dave," then step into the ring for an amateur muay thai bout that lasts all of four minutes.
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Iceland (cold, windy, like a faked Mars landing), then Italy, where every town's attraction is a cathedral and my dad ambushes my vegetarian friends with ten kinds of grappa.
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Four days in Havana on a whim. A Russian-jet flight on Cubana Airlines, warm beer, daiquiris, and a baseball game that dissolves into chaos.
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San Francisco's Bay to Breakers — 7 miles that are 3% race and 97% public depravity.
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Because nothing says "I love you" like beating the hell out of strangers in a public square.
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I trudge toward Annapurna Base Camp at 14,000 feet, drinking beer that tastes like a urine sample and plotting Mark's death the whole way up.
read the full post →How a single tube of caulk, dropped down an air vent, snowballed into jackhammers, a $500 repair, and a winter with no bathroom sink.
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Three weeks chasing the World Cup across Germany in a beat-up Volvo, then running with the bulls in Pamplona. Lesson learned: bulls are big, and Max won't wait up for you.
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Six months in Thailand end. I reflect on a country abandoning itself to tourism, a wall of fish on a scuba trip, and why selling a girl named Porn is perfectly legal.
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With the houses nearly done, we keep morale up through an escalating inter-team mooning campaign that culminates in the first-ever Ass Pyramid launched from a moving truck.
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Christmas in Thailand brings me a hot shower at last, an epic battle with a four-inch spider, and accidentally buying menstrual medicine for a cough.
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Pouring concrete, digging out a septic ring packed like Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, and inventing increasingly absurd lies for the Monday volunteer meeting.
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A more reflective stretch in Khao Lak talking about the people behind the houses, the friendships forming, and why I keep choosing the shovel.
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I get promoted to project manager under Dean, a Bobcat-wielding psycho and end up in drag for Halloween. Regrets ensue.
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Building houses under Chan, a giggling Thai foreman who treats near-fatal cement-mixer accidents as comedy. Plus a busload of flight attendants which is nothing like the Playboy fantasy.
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I arrive to build houses for tsunami survivors in Khao Lak and promptly earn the nickname "Septic Boy," see a Patpong ping pong show, and manage to get constipated in Thailand.
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Carnevale in my hometown of Viareggio: a month-long blowout of giant papier-mâché floats. Just like Rio, but a lower risk of venereal disease.
read the full post →I volunteer as a Christmas elf on a whim and accidentally become the North Pole's heartthrob.
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Five days before the wedding: no tux, no reception, no rings. I best-man through the chaos, a garden-hose shower called "The Tube," and an unforgettable Paris hostel roommate.
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Diving Ko Tao, surviving the chaos of the Full Moon party, and a growing conviction that beach buckets are personally out to injure me.
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I turn 31, survive an off-road motorbike meltdown to a remote Thai village, and take a Thai massage that ends with a knee to the gut.
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Three miserable days in Singapore before Thailand rescues the trip with tuk-tuks, a cooking class, and dangerously cheap Beer Chang.
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Into Australia's red center, where Uluru looks suspiciously like a giant nipple, the flies are relentless, and Alice Springs out-nowheres Needles, California.
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I enter an Australian pole-dancing contest for $500 and still only take third. Beaten, I maintain, by two words: fake boobs.
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I throw myself off a 440-foot bungy (and scream like a little girl) and draft my presidential platform: the Speedo Bill.
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A milestone I mark on the road from New Zealand, between the adrenaline and the next ferry.
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Whitewater sledging, which I'd define as sledding plus drowning plus slamming into rocks. After the first rapid I didn't cheer... I wept uncontrollably.
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New Zealand turns on the monsoon, so I make the best of it: glowworms (technically glow-maggots), getting rolled down a hill in a giant ball, and Roto-Vegas minus the casinos.
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A week in Fiji with bathwater seas, terrifyingly friendly locals, and a kava ceremony that left my tongue numb.
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Europe, by my own summary: a lot of old shit, and not everybody speaks English.
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