I'd been in India for about six weeks when I learned how to be in India.

That's one of the things you have to understand when you go to a place that exotic you don't

immediately know how to be there, especially if you're coming from Midtown Manhattan and

you arrive in a place as alien as India. It takes a while to figure out how to breathe that air.

And I hadn't figured it out until I got to a place called Pushkar, which is in Rajasthan in the desert

that spreads from India into Pakistan. I met a guy there named Sean who went on to become one of my

best friends, Australian guy, met him there in a guest house that I was staying in.

And Sean really showed me how to be in India. He showed me how to laugh and enjoy the absurdity of

situations that I had found annoying as hell up to that point. And when I saw him relax and

when I saw how relaxed he was and how much he was enjoying the same things that were driving me crazy,

I got some insight into the whole purpose of traveling that I really hadn't had before. Of course,

I understood it intellectually, but I didn't understand it emotionally. How important it is to

be amused by absurdity and difficulty and inefficiency and just the bizarre weirdness of that kind of travel.

I ended up traveling with Sean for quite a while. We traveled from Pushkar to Jaisalmer,

which is out further into the desert. I'll talk about that in the next episode or upcoming episode.

And then we hooked up again in Nepal and then we saw each other in Denmark and traveled through

Eastern Germany when it was still communist, Czechoslovakia, across France, Germany.

Then we saw each other again in San Francisco a few years later in New York City.

And he and his wife came and lived in Barcelona for a while when I was there.

We were both very mobile traveling around the world, so we sort of arranged to run into each other

in various places over, I don't know if it was 10 years or so.

And I haven't seen him in a long time now. And this is one of the sadness of living this kind of

...