I love inappropriately grunty utes. I loved owning a 1997 Land Rover Discovery with a lift but I love the Land Rover Defender series of utility vehicles even more. The crème de la crème of the lot, however, is the Mercedes-Benz Geländewagen, known as the G-Wagen or G-Class. Now, according to Luxist, 30 Years and Counting: Mercedes Celebrates With Special G-Class, Mercedes is coming out with an offroad-focused specialty vehicle known as the new EDITION30.PUR, which is cool, “a rugged off-roader to satisfy the serious trekkers that have embraced the G-Wagen for the past three decades. It’s all bare bones, with a hose-down interior and diesel engine and a heavy-duty hood you can actually stand on.” Now, that’s the one I want.

Mercedes-Benz has a variety of sport-utilities and crossovers in its line-up today, but long before luxury sport-utility vehicles turned mainstream, the German automaker was building a truck called the Geländewagen. Known as the G-Wagen or G-Class for short, the truck started production in 1979 as a tender for the Shah of Iran, and has been in production ever since. This year Mercedes is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the G-Wagen with a pair of special editions.

The first, called the EDITION30.PUR, is a rugged off-roader to satisfy the serious trekkers that have embraced the G-Wagen for the past three decades. It’s all bare bones, with a hose-down interior and diesel engine and a heavy-duty hood you can actually stand on. The EDITION30, however, is based on the luxurious, go-anywhere G500 and features unique Platinum Black paint and special leather and wood interior. Available now for order overseas, 60k Euros will get you the bare-bones EDITION30.PUR, while the luxuriously appointed EDITION30 edges closer to the 100k Euro mark.

Gallery: Mercedes-Benz G-Class EDITION30

According to an online quiz on Details, “Are Your That Guy,” I am totally that guy: a total douchebag, apparently.

1 You initiate fist bumps.
Yes
No

Someone told me that high-fives are passe so I have replaced them with bumps and regular, manly, handshakes.

2 You order foreign dishes in an accent.
Yes
No

I ask for foreign dishes, yes, properly. If the dish is French then I order it in French and if it is Mexican, I pronounce it in Spanish. And in Germany, I sort of need to order it in German. If you do it right, you don’t really draw much attention to yourself.

3 You shave your head at the first sign of balding.
Yes
No

I would totally either shave my head or crop it close if I started balding.

4 You use any word Stephen Colbert invented.
Yes
No

I use as many words as I can remember if they were coined by Stephen Colbert.

5 You have an elaborate bedtime ritual on planes—with neck pillow, sleep mask, and noise-canceling headphones.
Yes
No

People with sleeping rituals of any kind need to lose their guy card immediately.

6 You have a downloaded ring tone.
Yes
No

I am quite amused with classic, normal, default ringtones; however, I really enjoyed sporting the “bring out your dead” skit from Monty Python.

7 You wave someone along even though they have the right of way.
Yes
No

I think I have forgotten who actually does have right-of-way at 4-way intersections, so if I feel like I arrived a millisecond later than another, I will wave and wave.

8 You say the name of the town where your Ivy League alma mater is located instead of the name of the school.
Yes
No

If I had actually gone to an Ivy League school, I would totally say New Haven or Boston or wherever.

9 You own a Manchester United jersey.
Yes
No

No, I am afraid not. I almost bought a Norwich Canaries jersey but decided not to.

10 You quote Borat, Zoolander, or Anchorman, or reference “TPS reports” and “pieces of flair.”
Yes
No

I don’t have the best memory for these things but I made a Zoolander reference just the other day — a Blue Steel reference.

11 You put your BlackBerry on the table when you sit down at a restaurant.
Yes
No

Yes.  In fact, all of my friends deBerry and dePhone the moment we sit down for food — not to show off but because I always have too much shit in my pockets.

12 You talk baby talk to your girlfriend on your office phone.
Yes
No

I don’t have a girlfriend presently but all indicators point to “yes.”

13 You offer to buy a cigarette from people outside bars.
Yes
No

No, I have too much of a problem with entitlement — I would never offer to buy.

14 You order “off-menu.”
Yes
No

Food isn’t really my bag and restaurant-going isn’t my bag, and I am pretty much omnivorous, so, like a diesel, I can run on anything.

15 You own a reptile.
Yes
No

Spike, God rest your little soul

16 You say “My bad.”
Yes
No

I hate that I say this. My bad.

17 You describe your relationship status by saying “It’s complicated.”
Yes
No

With me, it always is.

18 You say “We’re pregnant.”
Yes
No

I would love to say this — I will totally be that guy, if that guy says, “we’re pregnant.”

19 You have destination-related car stickers like MV, NTK, PVT, HMP, or NPT.
Yes
No

I might actually get myself a vanity plate. I never have, yet, but I aspire to.

20 You make a show out of tasting wine.
Yes
No

I tried to make a point of being fussy over coffee and cheese, but what’s the use.

21 You preface statements with “spoiler alert.”
Yes
No

I am Mr. Online and have been beaten down by spoiling, so I have learned my lesson.

22 You don’t wash last night’s admission stamp off your hand.
Yes
No

I am not likely to scrub off the thing.  Does that mean I am preserve it or am I just dirty?

23 You use abbreviations like TBD, ASAP, and BFD in conversation and sign off e-mails with “thx” or “cheers.”
Yes
No

I have been signing emails with “Cheers, Chris” forever.

24 You wear flip-flops, Croakies, Crocs, or board shorts in the city.
Yes
No

My only excuse here is that I grew up in Hawaii and I never used to wear flip-flops (rubber slippers) in the city until it because ubiquitous.

25 You have a nighttime wardrobe that includes a going-out shirt, concert merchandise, or limited-edition sneakers you bought in Tokyo.
Yes
No

I pretty much wear a uniform, no matter what the situation. I have “dressed up” and “dressed down” and “dressed up with jacked.”

26 You say “I need my Starbucks.”
Yes
No

It might sound a little prissy until I tell you that most of the coffee you drink, especially from Dunkin’ Donuts, is really a lot lot worse than Starbucks. You may think Starbuck’s coffee is “burnt” but the truth is, you just have poor taste in coffee. You’re decidedly “truck stop” class.

27 You refer to the woman you’re casually hooking up with as a “friend with benefits.”
Yes
No

28 You pretend not to know who Spencer Pratt is.
Yes
No

I actually don’t know who Spencer Pratt. How do I answer? Yes or no?

29 You offer advice to women on their “form” at the gym.
Yes
No

30 You call friends and colleagues by their last names.
Yes
No

I call David Gelles “Gelles” — but one is enough. I should start colling Andrew Curry, “Curry,” but I don’t.

31 You refer to a date/girlfriend’s having done some “print work.”
Yes
No

I am not much of a modelizer.

32 You describe anything good as “sick.”
Yes
No

I have referred to things as “sweet,” — where does that fall?

33 You refer to your wife as “the ol’ ball and chain” and say “I’ll take the request to management.”
Yes
No

I might never refer to my wife as my wife.  She is “Stephanie” or “Michelle.”

34 You refer to a trip to the gym as a “legs day.”
Yes
No

35 You go to a show to see the opening band.
Yes
No

If I like the opening band, I go to a show for the opening band.

36 You think Hayden Panettiere is hot.
Yes
No

As a huge Heroes fan, who in the hell wouldn’t think that  Hayden Panettiere is hot?

37 You put your kid in a Che Guevara T-shirt.
Yes
No

I love Che.

38 You include the names of your kids and pets in your home outgoing message.
Yes
No

I would, the moment I can find a woman who might be willing to breed with me.

39 You refer to money as “Benjamins,” “dead presidents,” “ducats,” or “coin.”
Yes
No

I like to be as colloquial as possible when it comes to coin.

40 You bitch about your contractor at parties.
Yes
No

I totally bitch about my contractors, who are actually employees!  Not a lot of bitch about these days — they’re a well-oiled machine, yo.

41 You talk about a record “dropping.”
Yes
No

I am actually old enough to remember when you would stack records on a record player and they would drop down, get played, and then another would drop, and it would be played, too.  The “record” version of a multi-CD player.

42 You half-tuck your shirt.
Yes
No

I think the half-tucked shirts look cool but I am not cool enough to pull it off.

43 You have a goatee.
Yes
No

I am either clean-shaven or I have a beard — sometimes, just scruff.  Never a goatee. Back in the day, though, my girlfriend Michelle demanded her beoyfriends have goatees (what’s up with that) and I complied.

44 You refer to anything as “small-batch” or “artisanal.”
Yes
No

Like I mentioned before, I was well into cheeses and into hams and into other foodie things and I was very much into getting as many whole milk cheeses as possible. And, when you want to get whole milk goat cheese of and elite quality, you need to go “artisanal.”

45 You refer to any last-stop bar as “the 19th hole.”
Yes
No

I refer to as many things as possible as “the 19th hole.”

46 You’re a Caucasian with a tattoo in Asian lettering.
Yes
No

Tatoos appal me.

47 You Evite.
Yes
No

I have Evited people for years and year by now. I love it.

48 You own a wine Rabbit.
Yes
No

I am a huge fan of the very basic “Waiter’s Friend” or the Laguiole knife/wine opener.

49 You proselytize about carbon footprints.
Yes
No

I am very anti-climate change hypocrisy.

50 You name your kid after a character in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Yes
No

My son or daughter will surely be named after some character or actor. I am a huge film-lover and also have a degree in American Literature with a minor in creative writing. It is bound to happen.

51 You use the phrase flyover states.
Yes
No

52 You use the word bicoastal.
Yes
No

Yes, but when I use the term bicoastal, I mean American and Europe; Washington, DC, and Berlin, Germany.  Bicontinental, I guess.

53 You pretend to like country music.
Yes
No

I actually do love country music, especially bluegrass.

54 You wear DJ headphones.
Yes
No

Nope. Just simple buds.

55 You use a Bluetooth headset.
Yes
No

I drive in Washington, DC, and do most of my conference calls enroute. I own two bluetooth headsets: a Motorola and a Jawbone.

56 You call muscle groups by shortened versions of their technical names, like “lats,” “traps,” and “pecs.”
Yes
No

I used to be a wrestler and also a college rower, so you sort of just do call them traps, quads, lats, pec, etc.

According to this morning’s NPR segment, Deep-Fried Fuel: A Biodiesel Kitchen Vision, Willie Nelson, Shooter Jennings, Leon Russell, Kinky Friedman, and Texas truckers are in love with biodiesel. (Listen via Real or Windows)

Willie Nelson has gone apeshit enough to brand a commercial version as “BioWillie” (very phallic) and collecting fry oil from fast food grease traps, filtering it, activating it, and running his truck on Maui on it.

I want to do that, too! I want to run out today and get myself an old diesel Land Cruiser or Land Rover (both rare) and start running on grease. I would feel smug and cool on so many levels: recycling, resourcefulness, treehugging, eco, sustainability, bragging rights, innovation, and because I would be a better American because I wouldn’t be putting money in the pockets of Middle Eastern kings, princes, and despots, right?

What is biodiesel? According to Wikipedia, “Biodiesel refers to a diesel-equivalent, processed fuel derived from biological sources. Though derived from biological sources, it’s a processed fuel that can be readily used in diesel-engined vehicles, which distinguishes biodiesel from the straight vegetable oils (SVO) or waste vegetable oils (WVO) used as fuels in some modified diesel vehicles.”

The pros of pure biodiesel are many: burns clean, smells good, is a renewable resource, helps farmers, bypasses the Middle East, can be cheap, and if you reclaim and filter fast food fry grease, it can be free. Even better, biodiesel can put the bounce back in the step up America’s farmers. The premium on growing for fuel is much higher than growing for people. All those moldering mountains of nuts and seed these farmers can’t sell will sell very well indeed.

I mean, feeding people is amazingly unprofitable! Firstly, beans, nuts, and seed have become completely commoditized and are as cheap as dirt. Invest in agribusiness now, Wall Street, organics are for the birds! F-150s and 18-wheelers don’t care about pesticides! Besides, the margins of organics will be nothing compared to the margins on biodiesel! And processing won’t need to be for human consumption.

And people have always been willing to pay more money to clothe and feed their automobiles than they ever have been willing to feed their fellow man, right?

Well, they had better care more about their vehicles more than people, because of the con, according to Mark Harrison in Biodiesel is Food Not Fuel, “Worldwide, we are consuming around 85 million barrels of petroleum every day – that’s 13.5 billion liters per day. The entire human population only eats around 328 million liters of food oil a day. So, let’s compare: 13,500 million liters of fuel oil consumed every day vs. 328 million liters of food oil consumed every day. That’s 41 times more fuel oil than food oil consumed.”

Biodiesel is not a solution. It is politics, it is spin, it is agribusiness profits, it is a hobby.
By Mark Harrison

“Soy and canola and oil palm are food, they are not fuel. Do you really want humans to be competing with cars for their food source?

A human consumes on average 20 liters of edible oil a year. 20 liters – around five and a quarter gallons. Per year. How long does it take your car to consume five gallons of fuel? Half a day?

Worldwide, we are consuming around 85 million barrels of petroleum every day – that’s 13.5 billion liters per day. The entire human population only eats around 328 million liters of food oil a day. So, let’s compare: 13,500 million liters of fuel oil consumed every day vs. 328 million liters of food oil consumed every day. That’s 41 times more fuel oil than food oil consumed.

What makes biodiesel proponents think that biodiesel is an alternative to petroleum? How could we possibly increase food oil production by 41 times? Cut down the rest of the mangrove swamps for oil palm plantations? Raze the rest of the rain forest for soy bean fields? Just to run the world on B10 (10% biodiesel, 90% petroleum diesel – hardly an end to petroleum dependency) we’d have to increase plant oil production by a factor of four. That alone would require destroying the rest of our suffering ecosystem, and that type of food oil consumption would likely raise food prices to the point where the majority of the world’s population living on just a few dollars a day would starve to death – the world’s poor simply can’t compete with our cars.

So, the world running on 10% biodiesel = ecological disaster and mass starvation. Not an optimal solution. We’re still dependent on petroleum, but manage to bury the ecosystem and starve billions of people.

No, biodiesel is not a solution. It’s something for a small group of hobbyists. It is something for politicians to make hay off of. It is something for fools and people who can’t do simple math to fall for.

What is the solution – solar? Wind? Nukes? I can’t say, but it is certainly not dreaming that we can farm our way out of this, and the solution is certainly not in wasting our time and resources pursuing this dead end.”

I have a petrol-burning performance sedan I love. My second car will have a biodiesel conversion. Either a rare standard diesel Toyota Land Cruiser or Diesel Land Rover Discovery.

Mark sent this essay to me from the African bush, “Biodiesel is not a solution. It is politics, it is spin, it is agribusiness profits, it is a hobby.”

Biodiesel is not a solution. It is politics, it is spin, it is agribusiness profits, it is a hobby.
By Mark Harrison

Soy and canola and oil palm are food, they are not fuel. Do you really want humans to be competing with cars for their food source?

A human consumes on average 20 liters of edible oil a year. 20 liters – around five and a quarter gallons. Per year. How long does it take your car to consume five gallons of fuel? Half a day?

Worldwide, we are consuming around 85 million barrels of petroleum every day – that’s 13.5 billion liters per day. The entire human population only eats around 328 million liters of food oil a day. So, let’s compare: 13,500 million liters of fuel oil consumed every day vs. 328 million liters of food oil consumed every day. That’s 41 times more fuel oil than food oil consumed.

What makes biodiesel proponents think that biodiesel is an alternative to petroleum? How could we possibly increase food oil production by 41 times? Cut down the rest of the mangrove swamps for oil palm plantations? Raze the rest of the rain forest for soy bean fields? Just to run the world on B10 (10% biodiesel, 90% petroleum diesel – hardly an end to petroleum dependency) we’d have to increase plant oil production by a factor of four. That alone would require destroying the rest of our suffering ecosystem, and that type of food oil consumption would likely raise food prices to the point where the majority of the world’s population living on just a few dollars a day would starve to death – the world’s poor simply can’t compete with our cars.

So, the world running on 10% biodiesel = ecological disaster and mass starvation. Not an optimal solution. We’re still dependent on petroleum, but manage to bury the ecosystem and starve billions of people.

No, biodiesel is not a solution. It’s something for a small group of hobbyists. It is something for politicians to make hay off of. It is something for fools and people who can’t do simple math to fall for.

What is the solution – solar? Wind? Nukes? I can’t say, but it is certainly not dreaming that we can farm our way out of this, and the solution is certainly not in wasting our time and resources pursuing this dead end.

A reflection on a two-month sailing trip from Acapulco to Los Angeles on a 42-foot Jeanneau catamaran. Almost two-years-ago now.

My spiritual experience of sailing during Lent during my Jesus year birthday of 33 and all the important lessons and experience I have been lucky to have as a result. Although I am a member of the Vestry of Saint James’ and its currently both the most exciting time and my favorite time on the Church calendar, Lent, I responded to the call of my best friend Mark when he asked me to come to Mexico to help him complete his sail from Charleston, SC, to Los Angeles, CA.

I joined the sail on March 1, spent my birthday on the boat, and find myself stuck in Cabo San Lucas over a month later.

What I have realized is that sailing allows one to better understand the nature of God’s grace in my life. Little did I know that it would be as much help to me as it has been to him.

I had never sailed with Mark, even though he lives and works from the deck and cabin of a gorgeous yacht catamaran named Kinship II. I have never been much of a sailor and so much of my sailing enjoyment has been vicarious. It just never interested me and Mark never really pressed the issue.

A little over a month ago, Mark called me and told me that the crew of six he started with in South Carolina had started abandoning the vessel beginning at the first stop after a grueling trek from the Keys all the way to Central America, through the Panama Canal, and back up the Pacific coast of Mexico. The faithful remnant left in Acapulco because their money had run out and the time schedule had slipped and slipped and slipped, as sailing schedules are wont to do.

So, when Mark suggested that he would pay for me to fly to Acapulco to join the crew — him — I took this as one of those veiled manly calls for help which never really show either fear or desperation.

When you spend time with men’s men, you have to read between the lines. I was in Acapulco within five days. I might have hurt a relation with a client and leaned on my lovely friend Sarah a little too much, to say nothing of the strain on my new and wondrous relationship with Wendy, but it was Mark! The brother I never had.

We burnt two weeks moored off of the Club de Yates de Acapulco as most of the beatings that Kinship II had suffered on the long passage through the Gulf, along Central America, through the Panama Canal, and up along the Pacific coast were being healed by our angel, Gabriel, who took the time and the pride to get us up to ship shape.

I have been officially sailing the Pacific sea since the first day of Lent, 5 March. An equal time has been spent stuck in port and harbor as it has been sailing miles offshore; some of it has been gentle and awe-inspiring while other parts have been punishing and trying.

Although I have not officially given up anything for Lent save my job, I have been able to use the time to become more essential.

Things have been very difficult for me over the last year or so, at least since 9-11, but including the technology crash. Technology and the Internet is the basket I had been placing all of my eggs and I had been compensated very well for it.

During the last six months, thought, I have be grasping at straws, asking myself what I want to do with the rest of my life. Become a lawyer? Go to business school? Pursue a PhD?

I was stuck in a myopic infinite loop. My priorities, my goals, my desires, and my true wants and needs were befuddled and unclear. Sadly, I have unintentionally hurt people as they were caught in my personal panic as I desperately searched for my equilibrium while not giving myself either the time or the slack with which to find it.

On 8 March, in addition to everything else, I became 33, which to everyone I have spoken to at Saint James’ and elsewhere is my “Jesus year.” Allegedly, the age Jesus the Christ died for our sins. Lord knows this was renting space in my mind as the date approached. Lord knows that there was no way I could even remotely find the time or the money to be able to take this time to both help my friend and save myself. But there it was, and I am still sailing with a lot of help from my friends.

Sailing takes time, and it takes its own time which has nothing to do with either my desire or the requirements of society. The moment one becomes willful enough to disrespect the nature of the sea is the day something breaks. Its as simple as that and is kind of spooky at first. Easy as she goes. Cliche sentiment seem to reverberate on the sea. The 96-hour passages blur one into the other into one long day, and when the limits of my tolerance were reached I was rewarded with a pod of a hundred dolphins dancing in and out of my wake. Or a field of basking green sea turtles in the middle of the sea. Or a dense morning fog clearing to a double rainbow.

God can be very remedial in his lessons when you are sailing. He also protects fools and drunks and I am most certainly a fool at the very least. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and Karma is direct, reciprocity is king on the sea. When I am tempted to be willful and push myself past either my abilities or my energy, I always either hurt myself or break something onboard. This is not a joke. It seems gentle — the sea always does — but it is life or death.

The lesson I have learned thus far is that there is a definite rhythm I have been blind to, within which everything works beautifully.

As a striking example, last week we were on route from Manzanillo to Cabo San Lucas and it was to be a milk run. Easily enough diesel to motor from where we were anchored at the Las Hadas Resort to where we were to moor in Cabo San Lucas. First impossibility: we ran out of diesel prematurely because the engine was detuned and was drinking the fuel quickly. So we ran out with just enough to bring us in to port when we finally made it to port, which was still 150 miles away.

That’s okay, we have a sailing catamaran. We sail easily in 5 knot winds. During the second day, the main sail halyard snaps at the block, at the top of the mast. That’s okay, we have a redundant halyard — which snaps four hours later! We string up the Genoa line and limp the rest of the way. Impossible, but normal I guess.

Things like this happen a lot. When we arrived at Cabo San Lucas, we could not find anyone who would climb the mast, until we ran into Sebastian and his family, from Vancouver, BC. He shimmied up the mast for free and we were back on schedule. We ran into many people like Seb along the way and the Cruiser community around the world is amazing generous.

Sartre was wrong, hell is not other people: grace is other people.

Every day of this trip has humbled me; every day has given me confidence. Not once have I felt humiliation and every day has been a celebration. The confidence not to fear what will happen next, to remain present and observant, to remain vigilant but not aggressive.

And I have been thriving and I am strong and worthy of supporting Captain Mark as his only crew and of protecting the delicate fiberglass exoskeleton Kinship II so that she is seaworthy and makes her voyage to Los Angeles on one pristine piece.

On the sea, nothing needs to be forced, nothing needs to be rushed; in fact, there are very few things that can be rushed. I have had to turn on the hourly chime on my wristwatch because I have experienced a couple of these 96-hour days. Time shrinks and expands. Being on watch exacerbates this experience. Time is relative in a practical sense as it can stretch or compress, and some nights I have been on a watch for what feels like an hour starting at 0100 and then the sky lightens and turns pink and the morning comes. Other times, I fight for wakefulness and after making a go of trying, I wake Mark and ask him to take the watch instead so that I can catch some sleep for a little while. This is too much to risk, too much to lose, if I were to try any harder and fall deep into an exhausted sleep leaving no one at all to keep an eye out for cruise ships or super liners.

What’s on the line is the safety of the boat — a quarter-million-dollar investment — and the safety of the crew. There is only one person, usually sleepy and bored, who takes watch and single-handedly keeps the fragile and absurdly delicate vessel going 8 knots out of the way of container ships moving at 25 knots. There is a feeling of trust, the kind of confidence-building experience that can easily undo damage done in the workaday world of corporate America, can rebuild the confidence and self-love that might have blossomed in simpler times. I know they did for me. On the sea, either alone or with a crew, one can renew one’s faith in oneself and others.

Post Enron, dot-com, 9-11, and Clinton, my world changed in significant ways. I am a pretty technologically-savvy fellow and when I graduated from GW in 1993, during a low point in employment and jobs, I became an Internet and web developer in addition to photography and writing. Although a student of literature at University, I didn’t choose graduate school right away but instead became part of the great excitement of the dot-com explosion. I have been using the Internet since a bet version of Mosaic; since I played with MacWeb, when I noodled with lynx. I am pre-Internet and as a teen I was part of the BBS culture. It was natural for me to join the excitement and during the 90s I didn’t explore graduate school or law school, but rather put all my eggs into the Internet economy. And I was rewarded for a time.

Recently, times have become tough and I have lost much of my confidence in my choices, what I have to offer, and in myself. Luckily, I have never lost my Faith.

While on Kinship II, Mark and I went over my life because I needed distance and clarity. I was able to note the five things that are most important to be in my life, and I am proud to say that I have four out of five of them in spades: A partner, my family, my friends, my spiritual life, and money.

I am told that there are so many rich Americans who suffer from a true lack in their lives. So many Americans who might have money and a partner, but lack friends, family, and spirit. Or have money and nothing else. I am reminded every day that in a conscious, present, spiritual life, money is the easiest to secure for many of us as it is the most valued. Surely, it can feel that way. There are days when I lose sight of all the things in my life for which I am amazingly grateful and focus on only the things I lack, in this case money. And then it is often a downward spiral, where lack begets lack and before I knew it, I find myself feeling not only like a loser but like the worse kind: the fellow who failed to live up to his potential. In these times, I lose sight that I have had money before and that I will have money again. Its easy when one lives in a small world — or a world, shrunk — to find oneself skewed: both in perspective and proportion.

But on the sea, its different. As a geek, I liken it to rebooting my desktop computer. Rebooting the PC is the secret we techies have for fixing most of the problems wrong with most desktop PCs. Most of the time, these slowdowns occur because there are too many things going on on the PC that the user is no longer aware of: memory leaks, infinite loops, crashed software. These things cannot fix themselves and most users cannot truly sense this chaos in any way short of system slowdown. Not all problems result in the blue screen of death, some just send the computer into a morass. A skilled technician can fix some of the problems from the keyboard or by using a piece of software as an elixir, but the simplest thing one can do to set everything right is to turn the machine off, wait a minute and then turn it back on. Reboot.

So as I sit in an Internet cafe in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, Mexico, wondering if I am spending Lent the way I should. Mexico is a traditionally catholic country, truly religious. I have not given up coffee, chocolate, or even beer; I am not attending church and I am three thousand miles away from my pew in my parish, Saint James’ Episcopal Church, Capitol Hill.

Yes, I am spending Lent better than I could have ever imagined, in my opinion. For all the fears, stresses, and anxieties I have been suffering under, I have had my head truly buzzing so that I couldn’t hear myself think clearly, to say nothing of the soft voice of my Faith.

On the boat, I have had time to think. At first, way too much time! I felt guilt and boredom; I felt like I needed to do something, needed to get back to the office to make sure everything was all right. After two weeks — yes, I buzzed for a fortnight — I started to relax. I felt my heart, my face, by body, and then my mind become more tranquil. On the boat, I have been getting a good lesson in Faith, in trust, and in moving with the flow as opposed to opposing it, striking against it. To force it makes it break; to avoid it doesn’t make it go away; to fear it doesn’t help. Whatever it is. To be completely honest, I have not felt so good about myself and what I have to offer in ten years. I feel like a tiger!

So I have done the most irresponsible thing imaginable in dropping everything and flying three thousand miles to help a friend by replacing his crew and becoming a sailor for what will be over six weeks. It would never have happened had the request come in any other form than what I perceived as a mayday, an SOS. But it did and I am here and I am changed. Does this mean that I will be doing this irresponsible thing again and again? Will I need to do this again in the same way, taking an unscheduled, selfish, and fool hardy escape again? Probably not I have learned so many things and the next time I become overwhelmed or lose faith in myself or my life experience and am myopic and suffused with fear, all I need to do is remember; or, be reminded. Quite possibly this very writing will be enough; if not, then Mark, my friends, my parish family, or you.

Instead of being changed into a bum, a drop out, or a vagabond, am becoming more clear that I want the life I have, that I can handle the life choices I make, that I make fine life choices. I have had an amazing growing up, brilliant parents, a world-class education, and have many friends, and a fine girlfriend. When I make a life choice there is a good chance that my decision is a result of a very fine coming up and I should not worry too much. My choices will probably — based on a thirty-three year track record — be moral and kind.

I have been spending the last three years attending Saint James’ Holy Week religiously. Saint James’ offers one of the most spiritually rich Holy Week and Easter I could ever have imagined. From Maundy Thursday through Easter Eve, the Spirit is palpable and the presence of God is undeniable; similarly, I have a profound personal and spiritual experience while sailing. As arcane and transcendent and as undeniable as what I experienced in Church. To be sure, I am grateful to have had spent a truly blessed experience.

The next time I wish someone Godspeed, in my mind and heart that will forever be between 2.9 and 8 knots.