I was watching the TV series “Call The Midwife” tonight with my gorgeous ex-fiancée. It takes place back in 1964. Two of the characters were old gay men, very much in love in a society where it was still “the love that can’t be named”, the love that at the time was still very illegal…

My old friend Patrick Purcell is a wonderful man with a lovely Solomon Islands wife … … a bunch of children and grandchildren, and even more friends. I’ve known him for thirty years and more. I last saw him when I was in the Solomons a couple years ago. We caught up on old times,…

Here, in order from the top, is the story of my wandering into the world of LSD-assisted psychotherapy … a strange tale indeed, and kids, don’t try this at home … Best to all, w. Another Tale of Derring-Don’t Well, now that Justice Kavanaugh has endured the attempted suspension of the presumption of innocence, and…

I had breakfast today with an old friend of mine I hadn’t crossed paths with in a while. And by an “old friend”, I mean a guy like me in his seventies. We spoke of many things, including the evanescent quality of life, which reminded me of my dear friend and father-in-law, Billy. So I…

I said a bit ago that I’d be offline for a couple of weeks because I was going to the Nevada desert. As some folks correctly surmised, I was headed for that bizarre congregation of extremophiles called “Burning Man”. And what is Burning Man? It is an eight-day festival of the impossible. It is a…

Here, one by one, are the twelve posts that tell the story of my most unusual voyage to the Gulf of Siam and back … read them from the top one down, come and join me on an aquatic adventure. w. I Am Invited Overseas Back in 1976, when I was about 30, a wealthy…

I have just one rule about writing. I only write when I can’t stand not writing, when the ideas roiling around in my head cry out to be put down on paper. And this is that point, where I stop thinking and start writing about how as I described in my last post, after 142…

From where Roy and I sat in the cockpit of the 50-foot (15 m) sailboat, we looked across a couple hundred yards (meters) of rough offshore ocean at the fishing boat we’d met up with. We’d been going up and down the California coast since our almost-successful offload of ten thousand pounds more than three weeks…

At the end of the most recent episode in this sorry tale, the boat’s captain Roy and I were sitting on a 50-foot sailboat, watching the first light of dawn strengthen. Overnight, we had just finished successfully offloading ten thousand pounds (4,500 kg) of foil-wrapped compressed one-kilo bricks of Thailand’s finest herb. Block by block,…

It was late afternoon. After three and a half months at sea from Manila to California, we were due to offload twelve thousand pounds of Thailand herbal matter on the coast a ways north of San Francisco that very night. We were running a little behind time because the wind had died off a bit…