1 Years later a former editor in chief of Rolling Stone would treat me to a dissection of the sublime logic of the primary lyric from this stoner masterwork: “‘Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town.’ A jailbreak? Somewhere in town? Like maybe at the fucking jail?”

2 It’s worth noting that the Ernesto of my memory emerges as a much more sympathetic character than the one he played in real life. For all the cocktail-party mileage I’ve gotten out of that story, I prefer in the quiet hours of the night to imagine Clint from Hussong’s wandering around Ensenada looking for a little chub, and a chance encounter with Ernesto leading to a tragic boating accident involving the untimely demise of them both.

3 Bet-winning Nash Bridges trivia: the show’s pilot was written by Hunter S. Thompson.

4 Two guys not just from the same state but the same fucking neighborhood running on the same presidential ticket being as unconstitutional as Jim Crow, and why nobody else sees this shit is beyond me.

5 It’s impossible for me to be civil about Anchorage given the fact that those scheming oil whores have been trying to steal the capital from Juneau ever since I was a kid.

6 One of the best things about leaving the United States is being addressed like an adult. Once overseas, the haughty demeanor, simpleton instructions, nursery-school tenor, and scripted happy talk that exemplify the American travel industry’s idea of “service”—the chirpy banter from flight attendants on Southwest Airlines being the pinnacle of infantilism—are replaced by straightforward, competent voices delivering information in a crisp, capable manner. I love England because it’s like a grown-up America, a fact I’m reminded of as soon as I get on a British Airways flight or hop into a London cab and people stop treating me as though I’d just learned to finger paint.

7 “Mine was primarily a prison story and maximum-security cells tend to look rather alike,” he wrote me after he’d escaped. “The Penal Colony of Soong Schill Christian University, like Devil’s Island, was not totally secure, but once out of the compound there was nowhere to go—unless you took particular pleasure in watching old women selling peppers on street corners or felt a sudden need to buy a fishdog on a stick. Interestingly, the locals seemed to feel they were living in the Paris of the East and delighted in asking foreigners how they liked Korea, a question I was never able to answer to their complete satisfaction.”

8 As a member of the U.S. Army band stationed in Germany, Tom and several buddies were in Berlin, high on hash, when the wall came down: “There were hammers and chisels laying all around, and I got to knock out two pieces of rock from the actual Berlin Wall! I still have them in storage with all my other stuff,” he later wrote me.

9 If you count his duets with Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson as separate from his solo work, Paul McCartney can also technically make this claim.

10 Bone up on the twentieth-century history between Korea and Japan and you can kind of see the Koreans’ point.