Mostly True

I had a good life in Pennsylvania.

When I was 25, I quit my cushy job in Philadelphia.

Strangely, it never occurred to me, after losing my leg, to feel "Why me?"

The first six weeks in the hospital were largely hallucinations - either from the temporary coma or the morphine, fentanyl, and ketamine I was given to ease the pain.

So… thanks to the kindness of friends and strangers, I raised enough to buy myself a wheelchair.

Remembering New Mexico My last band in the US was a five-piece group called Canteen.

There I was, the house exploding behind me, as I held the family dog to comfort it as it cowered in the blasts.

When I'm holding my ukulele, I forget about the wheelchair.

Julie and were about to board the train for Lausanne - the first time on a train in my new electric wheelchair.

This is a new story, a continuing story, because I’m still figuring out how to write about it.

One of my best friends in my earlier years had a rule: If either of us feels something is off, the other person should immediately trust them and ask questions later.

There are many ways to wake up in a Parisian hospital: birds chirping, medical equipment coughing, and nurses rolling their carts down the hallway.

For the longest time, since I was a child, I loved tinkering with computers — taking them apart and rebuilding them, then using childish fantasies to make MS-DOS answer me if I asked specific questions.

You'll often hear that you need an international driver's license to rent a scooter in Taiwan, but this is manifestly untrue, at least as not observed at small scooter-rental stores.

Back in my New Mexico home, many friends — fair-haired friends especially — had told me stories about China.

I was 8.

Itaewon, a district of Seoul, is where you can see the foreigners.

I've always had "bad" habits with insects and snakes.

This particular evening, somewhere around 2014 perhaps, we were at the Upslope Brewery, relaxing after long hours of earning some extra cash, when we got the call about the chickens.

It was 2010, and we were somewhere in Western China trying to get to a small town on the Tibetan border.

Qoui de neuf, people of earth?