It's been about a week without alcohol of any kind. I'm enjoying my new, clean-living lifestyle.

I'm not going to get off the pony as long as they let me ride it.

I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."

One of my few virtues - I don't have a lot of them - would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don't speak the language and haven't been before - that's really satisfying to me. I like that.

I'd love to play bass with Parliament Funkadelic, but I can't play bass, so I don't think that's going to happen.