Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

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.

for what is life, a good life, but the accumulation of small pleasures?

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.

i'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.

Kava acts as an appetite suppressant. Ideally, for kava to do its wonders, one shouldn’t eat for three or four hours prior to imbibing. After a kava session, there is no desire for food, except, possibly, for a slice of papaya or a banana. Heavy kava users are invariably rail thin. Indeed, the Frenchwomen in Vila were known to use kava as a diet drug.

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 America would be if the capital had been located in Key West. What if the nation’s motto had been Let’s get drunk and screw? Would the world be a better place?