Have you ever experienced the terror that comes with freefall from a cliff at night knowing a rocky stream bed is far below; or hiked while carrying dynamite; or swum with dolphins in Hawaii, jellyfish in Japan, and sharks on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; or been teargassed on two separate continents; or traveled to more than eighty countries spanning all seven continents; or starred in a live television series and a movie; or performed on stage in Harlem, the Caribbean, and Hawaii; or explored a huge cave in Borneo with a half million bats flying overhead; or trekked in the Himalayas and the Amazon jungle; or lived in a yurt in the Gobi Desert; or seen real shrunken heads; or observed a nude, dead body; or broken bones; or had surgery with a cloth soaked in ether as the anesthesia; or received a subpoena to appear before Congress in Washington, DC; or flown at twice the speed of sound on the Concorde multiple times; or taken three months’ paid corporate leave and traveled around the world? If not, welcome to my world.

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Have you ever taken your spouse to Vietnam for vacation during the war; or hunted vampires in Transylvania; or smelled the sweet, pungent aroma of an opium den; or kissed the Blarney Stone; or shaken the hands of billionaires; or determined that you prefer eating scorpion to sea horse; or dined on dog; or drank warm blood straight from a cow in Africa; or spent Christmas Eve being entertained by belly dancers in Istanbul; or taken an eleven-and-a-half-hour local bus ride from Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Bangkok; or crawled through the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam; or climbed Mount Fuji three times; or had a top-secret security clearance and carried a federal badge; or explored a cave ninety feet underwater in the Bahamas; or had dinner at the State Department in Washington, DC; or taken hot air balloon rides over the Masai Mara and the Serengeti jungles; or loaded the barrel of a tank with live ammunition; or delivered a briefing in Japanese to American and Japanese generals? If not, welcome to my world.

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Have you ever been a courier for the president of the United States; or been in a car where the driver ran over someone and kept on going; or been mugged on a street in Madrid; or bribed someone; or flown an airplane; or been inside more than one prison; or walked through a former minefield; or lived through a military coup; or packed up and left the country and your job with no notice; or seen how M&Ms are made; or testified before a state House Finance Committee; or driven slowly over thousands of crabs migrating across the road at night; or lived for fourteen years on the other side of the world; or paddled a rickety dugout canoe in a jungle river infested with crocodiles; or been attacked by flesh-eating fish; or hiked across an active volcano; or been tortured; or won a Caribbean cruise for the best costume at a party of 250 people in Cancún, Mexico; or called the Pentagon and asked to be excused from the Vietnam War; or been interviewed by spies; If not, welcome to my world.