A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head and called it a night.

College is the best thing that can ever happen to you," my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking.

... [I] recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this. Call me naïve, but I seemed to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until your eyes cross.

I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.

This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.

But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.

They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.