I'M NOT A SELF-DRAMATIZER.

For instance, I rarely imagine myself as the protagonist of classic novels. I have never walked a lonely road to Yarmouth, like David Copperfield. Nor have I had a cage of rats strapped to my face, like Winston Smith in 1984. And I have never once driven around France in a sports car with a mind toward seducing the locals, like Phillip Dean in A Sport and a Pastime.

OK, sometimes it is tempting.

In fact, my recent New Year's Eve jaunt into the remote, snowy, lonely, spooky, dark mountains of Colorado did have obvious similarities to Stephen King's The Shining.

VINCENT VAN GOGH GOT AROUND. According to a sign I saw on a wall somewhere in France (I might need to check that), the painter lived in thirty-nine places during his thirty-eight years, and that was before the Eurail Pass was invented…

IS THERE EVER a more wretched feeling that lying sweatily on the tile floor of a strange bathroom in a strange city, and awaiting the next wave of nausea to splash into Lake Toilet?

My buddy Vincent (Van Gogh) said it all, during his own walking-eyeball moment in Provence: “I’ll pick up my pencil that I put down in my great discouragement and I’ll get back to drawing, and from then on, it seems to me, everything has changed for me, everything has changed for me, and now I’m on my way and my pencil has become somewhat obedient and seems to become more so by the day.”

I randomly landed a walk-on part in Chekov’s The Three Sisters. My only responsibility was to stand on stage holding a samovar and looking repressed, so I had plenty of time to listen to the real actor’s dialogue.

How the legendary diarist Samuel Pepys invented hands-free masturbation, and I avoided getting crushed between protesters and cops on the Rue du Four in Paris.

A few years back I joined a college program in Nice, France, as a visiting professor from the real world, to train students in modern journalism practices. But they were more interested in getting drunk and sleeping on the beach, and I can’t blame them…

In part because of your support on this platform, I’ve just begun a gig as a columnist/cartoonist for the Colorado Sun…

LIKE GOLDMUND, POST-SEDUCTION, I was soon off to explore Europe. (Link to that story, here. It involves literary sex, as imagined by Herman Hesse, so you might want to give it a read.)

Tom Brady took a couple of weeks off during his NFL training camp, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Which you can do if you’ve won seven Super Bowls, and been hailed as the NFL’s G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time).

On my way back to our cabin, I kept a keen eye on the rear-view mirror. We’re not the only ones who like to start the day with something fried and chocolate covered.

A charm of hummingbirds, of course. That’s what you call hummers when they gather in groups. And the more of those charms, the better. These jewel-like birds are pollinators, they keep the chickadees in line, and they beat their wings 53 times per second, on average.

Herman Hesse (and an attractive Dutchwoman) tried to teach me about love. Naturally, I wasn’t listening.

Here are the the six (stupid) main (stupid) reasons (stupid) people are squandering one of their main benefits, and thereby allowing employers to further stuff their corporate pockets, to the tune of unprecedented 13% profit margins this year.

My three older brothers frequently pointed out what a puny dope I was. It hurt to hear that, especially because I was puny and dopey.

The editor of parade magazine (circulation 33 million) popped up in my email a couple of months ago, asking The Question of our Age: “Do play pickleball?”

I has announced my intention to quit Paris to my journal, but I still had five days left there, including my birthday — a grand occasion to dramatize myself and the Quest of My Life.

My golden age as a baseball fan was the late 1980s, when I lived a mile from Wrigley Field, and the Cubs were fielding — surprise! — decent teams. I was an editor at Playboy magazine at the time, but one afternoon I ditched the grind of interviewing Playmates and editing John Updike to occupy row seven behind the Cubs’ dugout, as the North Siders faced Cincinnati.

The summer before I left for Paris, my dad fished an antiquated map of Europe from his shoebox of National Geographic treasures, and vouchsafed it to his wandering son.

Get to know your new, heavily armored neighbors before they give you the skin-wasting disease formerly known as leprosy.