The secret sauce that made the fish go so wild was a mixture of oatmeal, chum, seawater, and sand. A single tear came to my eye, so amazed was I that they could sell sand to a fish.

If I see the same set of chicken bones scattered in the same ill-omened pattern next to the entrance to the L three days in a row, am I really outside?

We got a couple winks and hoots from a table of middle-aged women, so we indulged and made the walk to the bar into a runway. I offered an unsolicited twirl.

One guy rolled a chunk of snow down the slope and divined from the tea leaves of its path that the snow “wasn’t even that sick.” This is a guy worth listening to, I thought.

As I sat in the sun at Caesar's Spanish Steps Bar, I thought about how Rome recently outlawed sitting on its version of the Spanish Steps. Sometimes, maybe the spark notes are even better.

Tuscaloosa still has an obscure law allowing gentlemen wearing tailcoats to drink in public. And so the law students dress in their tails and bring out with them their beers, strutting around town yelling "Roll Tide."

Legend has it that they use extra chemicals for the hot tub, which we opted against entering. The genesis of the “no diapers” rule, or rather the need to explicitly state the rule, remained opaque. Mozart Liquer, for its part, is a 15% abv concoction that’s never seen Austria.

Those familiar with road trip lore might expect that Emmett and I conversed long enough to develop our own language and to articulate the purest truths of life. Had this been the case, we would not share this wisdom. However, such is not the case, because we listened to two books on tape.

I descended from the plane in Venice in deep confusion after 23 hours of travel from Kunming. The airport signs appeared in Italian, English, and Mandarin, exacerbating the airport’s liminality. How forward-looking, I thought, of Venice to acknowledge the growing importance of Mandarin-speaking tourists to the European economy. The