One thing I have learned in my painful career as a gambler is that bragging when you get lucky and win a few games will plunge you into gloom and unacceptable beatings very soon. It happens every time.

Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

"Drugs" are not necessarily narcotics. The narcotic is one type of drug and coffee is a drug... booze is a drug... many drugs.... They're all around us.

I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds.

Reality itself is too twisted.