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8481fd9
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Paradise was always over there, a day's sail away. But it's a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.
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travel
happiness
escapism
paradise
wanderlust
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J. Maarten Troost |
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9b44073
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Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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03e086a
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Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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0594437
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Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.
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skills
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J. Maarten Troost |
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62d9ebf
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No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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3a04236
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Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish." "Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish."
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J. Maarten Troost |
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2b0ab87
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It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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0eb15aa
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It is an unfortunate reality for innate idlers that our modern world requires one to hold a job to maintain a sustainable existence. Idling, I find, if immensely underrated, even vilified by some who see inactivity as the gateway for the Evil One.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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ba20b5d
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for what is life, a good life, but the accumulation of small pleasures?
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J. Maarten Troost |
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47ac49a
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It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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1231ad1
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Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria's finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California.
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meth
sacramento
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J. Maarten Troost |
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dfd973d
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I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I'd done before.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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b86e75b
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Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I understood, might not always be a really, really bad thing to do. If you were a good Catholic, you had some every Sunday.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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09cd643
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I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don't play for money in America. It's true. The big payout is incidental to most gamblers. It's the numbness they're after. Not so in China. No one had that look of glazed stupor often found in American casinos.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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ef84a64
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i'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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9a770df
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I made arrangements with Bitaki, a teammate on the soccer team I played with, to go fishing with his brothers, who typically worked the waters off Maiana, the nearest island south of Tarawa. When I mentioned to Sylvia that I was going, she said: "No, you're not." "And what do you mean by 'No, you're not'?" I determined right then that I would go out fishing every week. No, every day. I would become a professional fisherman. I would become s..
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J. Maarten Troost |
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1e9d917
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Fortunately, due to a terrible misunderstanding, I soon found myself working as a consultant to the World Bank. I am not exactly sure what it was that led the World Bank to believe I had any expertise in infrastructure finance. I had never even balanced a checkbook. I hadn't even tried. There is not much reason to balance a checkbook when your checking account rarely tops the three-figure mark. And so, to the Third World countries who had t..
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J. Maarten Troost |
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3d4b2d4
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Look for a wave shaped like an A. . Hmm. I saw and and . I saw the alphabet and the alphabet. I saw . I saw no . Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor move. There is a moment, shortly after one accepts the imminence of one's demise, when it occurs that you could be elsewhere: that if you simply left the house a little later, or lingered over a Mai Tai, you would not be h..
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J. Maarten Troost |
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5325ff3
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The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swept away in a lagoonside maneaba rumbling to the frenzied singing and dancing of hundreds of rapturous islanders. And there are the crushing lows, when you succumb to a listless depression, brought about by the unyielding heat, sporadic sickness,..
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J. Maarten Troost |
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75eb4b6
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Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks "because it makes other people less boring."
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J. Maarten Troost |
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2ce4ca0
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There will be no fucking sunsets in the pages that follow.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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918ae34
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1989 played out a little differently in China, of course. When thousands of students converged upon Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand a little democracy--Hey hey, hey ho, Maosim has got to go--they were greeted with a decidedly old school response. Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking gnome with the twinkling eyes who then ruled China, simply reached for his totalitarian rulebook, flipped toward the index--Democracy protesters, suitable res..
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J. Maarten Troost |
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895666f
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the thunder and bombast of what passes for news programming today--Motto: All terror, all the time
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J. Maarten Troost |
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29a4450
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the television news paused for a commercial--Coming up next: Are we all going to die Tomorrow?
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J. Maarten Troost |
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498d957
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remembering that human beings cannot produce 20,000 unique sounds, even if you were to include belching and hawking great globs of phlegm (which I think counts in Chinese), the linguistic powers that be--whoever they are--threw in tones, possibly to ensure that no foreigner over the ages of thirty would have any chance whatsoever of understanding that Chinese language.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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a2b9209
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There is one faction that believes George Bush is a simpleton with the brain capacity of plankton, and that is why we are in the mess we're in. Then there's another faction that believes George Bush is not only smarter than plankton, but that he is a diabolical mastermind, possibly even the spawn of Satan himself, and that is why we are in the mess we're in.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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87df2d0
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I too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be the subject of graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations. The book would join the Canon of Literature. Students would speak reverentially of the text, my text, in hushed, wondrous tones. Magazine profiles would begin with The reclusive lite..
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J. Maarten Troost |
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6ed22e4
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I treated the wound with antibiotic cream and let it close before doing any serious snorkeling--and incidentally, I do very much like the phrase serious snorkeling. If I could somehow figure out a way to incorporate the sentence I'm a serious snorkeler, bitchezz without it seeming like a gratuitous aside, I would. And I guess I just did. It's magic, really.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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287b8a9
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Seriously. There were three of them, all roughly in their thirties, and they spent their time traveling the world, putting together documentaries about the earth's wonders. The on-screen talent, I learned, did indeed write his own scripts, and came off as the Boss Man for the trio. He was the one with all the responsibilities--deciding on shots, dealing with the Home Office, periodically having to shave, etc. The camera guy did all the heav..
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J. Maarten Troost |
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a41e2f6
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I had read the book 1421--The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies and become intrigued by his perspective on the era. Menzies, of course,
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J. Maarten Troost |
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59da96c
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Technically speaking, there are people in Nebraska. live been there. l met both of them.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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08896e2
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In Kiribati, the unimane and unaine (old women) are considered the guardians of the culture, a state of affairs that sets it apart from the United States, where the final arbiter for all things cultural is the adolescent male, which explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of the World Wrestling Federation, gangsta rap, and Pamela Anderson.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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28975eb
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If there is one indelible image from the Battle of Tarawa, it is a photo of dozens of dead Marines bobbing in the shallows just off what was called Red Beach II. I often launched my windsurfer from Red Beach II. Just twenty yards from the beach lies a rusting amtrac. At reef's edge are the brown ribs of a ship long ago grounded, where Japanese snipers once picked off Marines wading and swimming and floating toward a beach that offered nothi..
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J. Maarten Troost |
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c2ffa48
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They say that you can never go home again. You look for everything to be the same and when you find that things have changed, you are left reeling, crestfallen and dazed.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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79344b8
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if you're looking to see what the government of Kiribati finally decides to do, when do they wave the flag and say the last good-bye, I'm afraid I can't help you. But look around, follow the news, Google it, bear witness. The very least we could do for the canary is acknowledge its demise.
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J. Maarten Troost |
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6840c0c
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On Washington's Red Line, which may as well be called the White Line as it rumbles below the city's palest quadrant, the atmosphere is discernibly different. It is all rustling of newspapers and ruffling of reports. It is sighing and harrumphing, little nonverbal gestures that say, all things being equal, they rather wish the entire world would fuck off. Washingtonians, it occurred to me, were not flip-flop people. I wondered how different ..
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J. Maarten Troost |