I said I’d return someday, and now I’m making good.

I boarded my early-evening flight with a whiff of excitement harkening back to boyhood, when sleepless, eager nights preceded overseas journeys. Even the debut of my round-the-world adventure, two years ago, mired as it was in melodrama and angst, could not equal my feelings as I tromped aboard this stately, lumbering 747–400 onto my first eastbound overseas flight from San Francisco, my adopted hometown.

I knew that any follow-on overseas journey to my grand world tour would — at least if I wanted to do it anytime in the near-ish future — involve a shorter jaunt. So I made a pledge: I’d confine big, expansive journeys to utterly new locales – the Mediterranean, sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil. Shorter trips overseas would, by contrast, mirror my domestic trips in one way: I’d use them as an opportunity to visit friends, to revisit favorite locales, and maybe – just maybe – see a smattering of new spots I may have missed on the last go-round.

A silky-smooth arrival into Heathrow boded well for this visit:  a reasonably quick trip through Customs (albeit with an immigration officer as gruff as any in the States), effortless “baggage reclaim,” then off to the Way Out and onto the Heathrow Express. Clean, speedy, and festooned with TV monitors pleasantly delivering a mix of information and events — I learned the origins of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament in my fifteen-minute ride.

Arriving in Paddington Station, I felt it: I’m back, baby! The cavernous arched canopy of the trainshed covering the sleek conveyances may be a banality to the crowds hurrying to and fro… but for me it was a spectacle worthy of reverance. Ditto the cute statue of a childhood pleasure, the eponymous Paddington Bear.

Fatigue and jetlag notwithstanding, I was determined to give this town’s legendary nightlife a nod. Hopping back on the Tube across town to Notting Hill, I met Renaissance Man — my London pal and host both this visit and last — and a couple of his mates at an outdoor pub table. I’d wandered through this area in my last visit to the city, but strolling the tranquil streets of whitewashed townhomes this time truly made me gasp: London’s sprawling hodgepodge of districts makes for a less perfectly-wrought a city than, say, Paris, but the backstreets of Notting Hill are, in my estimation, as majestic as anything on the rives of the Seine. And at least as pricey: “freehold” townhomes list for three-and-a-half million pounds according to the neatly-framed listings in a realtor’s shop window off the high street.

At our comfy, narrow outdoor bar table, Renaissance Man embraced me warmly as he recounted to his chums the circumstances of our meeting: Calling himself a “male fag-hag,” he told of how he’d gotten up the gumption to talk to an attractive young lady out with her gay pals some years back at (of all places) a gay nightspot in Soho some years back. The lady in question was my sister, who in her sisterly way made sure to link me up with this fellow with the crazy name and an equally crazy background living in London’s trendy Ground Zero.

New York may bill itself as the city that never sleeps, but for my money the once-staid British capital has it (and practically everywhere else in the U.S.) beat by a country mile. On every commercial street of any size, at all hours of the day or night, I saw hordes enjoying the evening (the weather was gloriously warm, as Europe’s been enjoying a magnificent spring); while I’d already remarked on my last visit how Londoners are able to tipple outdoors, I was doubly bowled over, this time around, by the sheer volume of late-night places: it was past midnight when I arrived to a carnival atmosphere on the medieval-wide amble of gay Soho. I didn’t stay out too late as fatigue overtook me, but the crowds and vibe were intoxication enough for one night.

Ten more hours of sleep later, I again met up with Renaissance Man and some friends in Regent’s Park for “a bit of spliff and mellow hanging out,” at a European-themed folk festival. Alighting from the Tube at bustling, over-touristed Piccadilly Circus, I strolled up curvy Regent Street, festooned with shops and endless hordes and classical buildings wrapping around the curve of the street like life-size parentheses. Then, as the park approached, the crowds vanished, to be replaced by quiet, townhome-dense structures bearing colleges and embassies.

We parked ourselves under a broad shade tree a bit of a distance from the small festival, taking place just outside the park’s historic carousel. With jugglers, kids, teenage folk-dancing troupes, and all manner of euro quick-serve fare (fries – ahem, “chips” – with mayonnaise… blech), the place looked like a near-cartoon version of a Saturday in a park, something Renoir might have painted more than a century ago.

“New candidates for the Ministry of Silly Walks,” said another of Renaissance Man’s friends, motioning to two guys on the nearby walking trail doing lunges with Pythonesque absurdity.

After all this we headed out of the park toward the Baker Street tube station. The Sherlock Holmes Museum, at the not-really-but-who’s counting 221B Baker Street, offers up the usual touristy kitsch; we skip it and instead – thanks to one of Renaissance Man’s friends being a photographer – snap some creative poses in front of the London Underground’s Lost & Found office. Some truly remarkable specimens in the window, including mobile phones from the late-1980s that were anything but mobile. Inside the tube station, we continue the fun, as I played dead on a bench like a Holmesian character.

Next day, Sunday, was Lightmans day. This now-sprawling clan of de facto family inhabiting various parts of London’s northwest had graciously scheduled in for a full day of meals and catching up: I began the morning at Joy and Bertie’s, my hosts for part of my last visit. Their adorable daughter Bella, now five-and-a-HALF (as she told me, emphasis on the fraction), played with stickers and such while Joy, Bertie and I catch up on events in both our lives; as an interracial couple they’ve got lots to say about the U.S. presidential situation. Closer to home, Bertie’s had some surgery on both his legs, prompting much discussion of the health care situation on either side of the Atlantic. Happily, he’s doing well.

But first, off to see more of the family: David & Kate and their three kids, ranging in age from 20-year-old Nathan to tween-aged Noa. She at first forgot who I was from last visit, when she posed endlessly for my camera, but a quick chat about America and Justin Bieber (“he’s from Canada, you know!” she says breathlessly) and all is remembered.

After that it was off to eldest sibling Susan and her husband Richard, a soft-spoken fellow also in the technology business. I spent a glorious afternoon in their back garden with some fellow friends of their from Susan’s days at the London School of Economics, and here I felt right at home: smart, savvy academic types doing interesting work in a range of sectors.

As the day wore on, family patriarch Sidney — 87 and still sharp as a tack — comes to get me for a dinner of more Indian food. His wife Ray, in more up-and-down health, remains sharper than I’d expected but as a heavyset diabetic, mobility is necessarily an issue. Still, she’s of reasonably good cheer about it all, and her devoted husband’s caring for her borders on the heroic.

The following day, my last full one in the city, saw me meet another fellow certain to become another pal in my ever-growing roster of friends in the city: Rob’s a techie who lived in San Francisco for nearly ten years before his series of visas ran out and he was forced to return home (he hails from England’s northeast). A former co-worker of a current colleague of mine (also named Rob), this Rob and I compared notes on the IT scene in both cities.

“You’re either in the financial sector, or not in the financial sector,” was how he summed it up. Yep, as I suspected, London’s much like New York or Chicago in that way: there are a scattering of startups and such, but a lot of the work is in the money business, and his friends and colleagues in it report some of the same mixed experiences that I had in that business. And salaries in pricey London aren’t quite as good as in San Fran. He’d only planned to stay here a year before returning to the States, but three years have gone by and he’s still here and for the most part enjoying it.

Heading off the next morning, I mused why I love visiting this town: London, for me as a visitor offers people whose company I adore, coupled with a pulsating, vibrant scene that seems unmatched in the American scheme of things. Although I’m once more settled in San Francisco, the nagging “would I live here?” question always bubbles up in my mind. Not at the moment, I’d say, but if the right opportunity arose, I’d do it in a New York – nay, a London – minute.

The book tour is done. Wander the Rainbow is selling steadily (your support is always appreciated!)… and now it’s time for only one thing:

Generate some more travel experiences to write about!

The scale this time is smaller, but the spirit is the same: An eleven-day journey to Europe, to revisit some old destinations and friends, and pay a visit to one place that I didn’t manage to hit last time around.

Specifically, London, Copenhagen, and (the new spot) Budapest.

I’ll be blogging about my experiences, and, if what happens is as fascinating and merit-worthy as my previous travels, it might make it into a revised edition of Wander the Rainbow, perhaps as an epilogue.

See you on the road!

This weekend marked a new milestone in Wander the Rainbow history: the last stop on a book tour that’s spanned eight months and as many cities.

The locale this time was the Los Angeles area, America’s second-largest metro area — though the event in particular was held, perhaps appropriately for a travel book, at a store in Old Town Pasadena, one of the region’s oldest districts, dating back to the 1880s (practically Paleozoic for the American Southwest).

Only a couple of weeks separated this event from my last one in America’s largest city, New York, and the contrast between these two urban behemoths on opposite coasts could not be greater: in New York I braved snow and cold, while in SoCal I strolled with one of my friends (and her adorable pug, Hans) on a beach in Malibu this past Sunday. The sun was resplendent, the sea a sparkling blue, and the weather an L.A.-perfect 70something degrees.

For me, however, L.A. holds different significance than New York; I know the place a lot better, having lived there myself a number of years back. Still, its rep as a not-so-literary movie company town made me almost as nervous about this event as I was about my last one in publishing’s imperial capital. Once again, that nagging fear: would anyone show up?

Answer: yes! Distant Lands, the travel bookstore-cum-outfitter, has a crowd of regulars who file in for their biweekly Monday lectures. The place is done up with classic living room furniture and old maps. Guidebooks and travel works pepper the shelves, while the rest of the store contains items that make the travel-obsessed salivate: packing cubes, backpacks, bug repellent… if you’re going overseas and live in Southern California, this place is a definite must-visit.

To further enhance the event, I demoed some of their wares as part of my presentation: from wheeled backpacks to — arguably the most useful item I took with me on my travels — lightweight, easy-wash, quick-drying underwear. Yes, it is possible to traverse the globe on three pairs of undies if these are the ones in your luggage.

With this pleasant finale event out of the way, Wander the Rainbow is headed in new directions: we’ll continue to book speaking engagements for groups, associations, travel meetups, and the like. Check our events page to see where we’re going next.

However, for you prospective, on-the-fence e-book buyers, we have something even better in store to celebrate eight months in print and the conclusion of our official tour:

All Wander the Rainbow e-books for Amazon Kindle, Apple iBookstore, and Barnes & Noble NOOK are now priced at $2.99!

Now you can travel around the world for the price of a cappuccino back home.

For all of you who attended our events, a hearty thanks; we hope to continue to build our base of fans… and I for one hope to start working on my next book for you to enjoy.

Watching the images on the news these past few days, it’s hard to believe it’s been barely two years since I strolled down Cairo’s gargantuan main city plaza, Midan Tahrir. Back then, it was the middle of Eid-al-Adha, a Muslim holiday akin to our Thanksgiving or Christmas. The streets were alive with revelers, as were brightly-lit party boats cruising the Nile. But still, touring the city and its historic sights for a few days, I couldn’t help but notice the frustration that lay beneath:

I stare out at the monstrous city, a liquid expanse of lights stretching to the horizon, and ponder the paradox: on the one hand, the cafes, street life, and urban chemistry make it one of the most exciting places on Earth — in many respects, it could be London, Paris or New York with a cultural and climatic twist. And yet… it’s hobbled, a great beast weakened by time and circumstance. Economically the country has been stagnant for decades, with many residents complaining that resurgent religious extremism threatens to de-cosmopolitanize the city. I hope not. It feels as if Cairo is just lying in wait for Egypt to rise again, so it may once more take its place as one of the great centers of the world.

New York scares the bejeezus out of me.

Well, okay, not quite… but America’s biggest city has long filled me with a mixture of awe and terror. Its massiveness, its bustle, its traffic… on the one hand, for an urbanite like me Manhattan is perhaps the ultimate expression of a city (though now that I’m world-travel-enhanced, Tokyo, Paris, Bangkok and Buenos Aires have been added to the roster.)

Urbanity aside, though, the town’s perceived attitude, its history of crime — on a trip here in high school, a friend and I were scammed out of $40 on arrival at the pre-Guiliani-era Port Authority bus terminal — its status as the center of so many industries — finance, publishing, the arts — has effectively guaranteed intimidation on my part.

So you can imagine my trepidation at holding a book event here.

Touching down at a greatly-remodeled JFK airport after a red-eye flight, I grabbed my bags and proceeded to a blessedly orderly taxi line. No scams this time around, though a few unofficial cab drivers still saw fit to call out “taxi! taxi!” to the waiting crowd. Some things never change. After dodging morning traffic on the Van Wyck and Long Island Expressways, we headed across Manhattan to a friend’s apartment in the now-trendified Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood made famous by the musical West Side Story. Like so much of Manhattan’s once-gritty neighborhoods, formerly-rundown brownstone tenements now boast upscale condos, and check-cashing places have been replaced by cafes and sushi restaurants.

But none of that for me: after a nap and a catch-up with a friend who lives in the area, I hopped on the subway downtown to McNally Jackson Books, unsure what awaited me in a city with lots of options for the literary-minded. That nagging fear every author feels reasserted itself: what if nobody shows up?

The bookstore, located in the SoHo/NoLita area, is arguably one of the more fab spots to hold an event: a gorgeously done-up cafe with a ceiling festooned with old books hanging, lamp-like, accompanying wallpaper that’s made up of old book pages. The place was bustling — always a good sign for an indie bookstore in these times.

Best part: in the center of the store sat the Espresso Book Machine, planned as a showpiece for the event. This new device just might be a lynchpin in the revolution now sweeping the publishing business: Printing books on demand is becoming more established — Wander the Rainbow is printed that way, and many backlist titles from traditional publishers are as well. But this device takes it a step further: about the size of a washer/dryer, it’s designed for retail outlets; it can print a perfect-bound paperback book in about five minutes. When I learned that McNally Jackson was going to be one of the first customers for this gizmo — and the first retail bookstore in New York City — I made the necessary arrangements to work a demo of this device into the event. In the publishing world’s mothership, this made perfect sense.

Chatting with the amiable bookstore staff and the folks from EBM manufacturer On Demand Books put me at ease; so too did the clusters of people filtering in as event time drew near. Yes! All my efforts at breaking through New Yorkers’ legendary intransigence seems to have paid off. As I continued my speech and excerpt-reading, some random bookstore patrons even sat themselves down and listened intently. I not only read my usual three excerpts, but by popular request read a fourth and responded to some questions by a noticeably enthused audience.

After the event, I had the unique experience of signing copies still warm from the EBM printer — literally hot off the press! Needless to say, I was plied with questions about indie-publishing and print-on-demand processes from some New York writers. And from some published authors as well: Lost Girls Jen and Amanda, inspiration for my journeys some three years back, were in attendence.

With this warm NYC welcome, it was time for me to get more fully reacquainted with this town, having been absent from it for almost seven years.

After a celebratory post-event dinner where we were served by a totally-cute, uber-friendly waiter at trendy gay eatery Elmo, I rose bright and not-too-early for a Midtown meander. A few New York set pieces were on show, from the bustle of Bloomingdales to the deco grandeur of the Chrysler Building (I actually went into the lobby for the first time) to the bustle of Grand Central Station.

Now scrubbed and polished and restored to its prewar grandeur, Grand Central can proudly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its European or Japanese rail-station counterparts. En route I had to suppress a chuckle when, cruising down the street, I passed a fellow in mid-convo on his cellphone: he delivered the line, without a shred of irony, “are you fuckin’ kidding me!?”

New York set-piece indeed.

Turning west, I paid my respects to that ultimate temple of literacy, the main branch of the New York Public Library, its stone lions clad in a thin coating of snow from the night before. I’d never been inside this building before either and was suitably agape at the cavernous main reading room.

And yes, really playing the tourist, I buzzed through Times Square. The place has been so thoroughly prettified and glitz-ified that its seedy past — which I remember from a long-ago first trip to New York as a kid in the 1980s — is hard to imagine. Though I can see why some New Yorkers remain intransigent: writer Jimmy Breslin, interviewed some ten years back on the removal of sex shops and hookers and its replacement by Toys R Us and Disney stores, remarked, “Disney? I’ll take the hookers!”

Still, the place offers amazement: in addition to its bright-light insanity (rivaled only in my travels by Tokyo districts Shibuya and Shinjuku), a glance southward where Broadway and Seventh Avenues diverge reveals an incredible, dense panoply of high-rises old and new. It may have its detractors, but the district’s pulsating adrenaline rush in many respects embodies the city as a whole.

After a tasty dinner of legendary New York thin-crust pizza, time to re-explore the city’s nightlife. Things have changed a lot since I was here last, at the end of an era of mega-clubs and insanely late nights made possible by an assortment of controlled substances. Twilo, Tunnel and Roxy may be gone, but they do have successors: I managed to get a nice groove on at Rockit Fridays and managed to chat up (and then some) a couple of locals. Bollocks to the cliches: New Yorkers are no less friendly than any other city, and more so than many others I’ve explored.

Having given Midtown its due the day before, I headed downtown the next day to marvel at the cast-iron facades of SoHo, then walked all the way down to the bottom of the island, where streets are as narrow and (sometimes) as cobblestoned as any in the Old World. New York oozes ambition, urbanity, and modernity, so it’s sometimes hard to remember the city is almost four hundred years old.

Nevertheless, the heart of Lower Manhattan boasts the ultimate shrine to the future, and Mecca for me: J&R Music World, one of New York’s several discount electronics superstores that have been around since the likes of Best Buy and Amazon were nary a glimmer. Their pricing is still boss and I found myself lusting after a new TV I absolutely gotta have for my bedroom. Maybe soon.

Another herald of present and past lurked nearby: the mammoth construction site for the new World Trade Center, formerly Ground Zero and the old World Trade Center. Last time I was here it was still a smoking hole in the ground, the wounds fresh and raw. The pace of redevelopment has been slow, but at least it’s moving along: the memorial is set to open later this year on the tenth anniversary of the iconic date, and the signature building (thankfully no longer called the “Freedom Tower”) is rising up amid its skyscraping neighbors. One of my sisters was living in the city when the towers fell, and the memory of that day still resonates.

For my last evening in the city, I reconnected with more friends new and old, and went with some of them to a rather slickly-produced drag show… perhaps appropriate for a town that takes its theater seriously. Sharing a cab home with an old Chicago pal who moved here six years ago, I heard perhaps the best summary of his adopted hometown: “You find attitude in some places, but then go next door and you never know… you may be making out with a Brazilian model.”

Riding out to La Guardia airport across the Queensboro Bridge the next day, my cab passed Silvercup Studios, where the series Sex & the City was filmed — an inspirational and aspirational bit of television for so many of us (well, at least me, who’s memorized practically every episode). After an absence of so many years, the city really shone for me this time around, and I’m pleased to find my Empire State of mind restored.

With the New Year underway — and some of us still digging out from various snow and other weather events — it’s time to get the Wander the Rainbow roadshow back on the road.

The beginning of 2011 sees us heading to America’s biggest cities — New York City and Los Angeles. While in the conventional publishing world these are typically the first spots on a book tour (to say nothing of movie premieres), in the case of a grassroots, indie-publishing effort, the calculus is reversed: we waited for Wander the Rainbow to garner momentum, and now — thanks to social networking, “backdoor” publicity, “guerrilla” marketing… plus some marketing of the more conventional kind — we’re finally ready to hit the big-time.

Well, mostly ready. I’d be remiss if I didn’t confess to some pre-event jitters. As always, we’ll be offering up some unique event goodies — prize giveaways for those of you who best answer our travel questionnaire, and (of course!) complimentary chocolates.

But for New York and L.A. we’re going one further.

In New York, our event — happening this Thursday, January 20 — is at venerated indie bookseller McNally Jackson Books. Located in the heart of historic SoHo/NoLita, this bookstore is looking to the future: they’re one of the first customers for the Espresso Book Machine, a device that prints books on demand right in the store. We’re planning to demo this groundbreaking piece of technology and maybe print off a few copies of Wander the Rainbow on demand before your very eyes. Appropriate for a city that’s often synonymous with book publishing.

For our return to the West Coast, and our debut in tinseltown, we plan an equally showmanlike event. We’ll be at Distant Lands on Monday, February 7, a bookstore-cum-travel-outfitter in the heart of Old Pasadena. Using some of the store’s travel-outfitter wares, we’ll talk about how to pack light, efficient, and fabulous for a long journey. Living out of a backpack for seven months sounds like a hardship for many — but we’ll show that it need not be.

Look forward to seeing you all on either coast!

Just in time for the holidays, Wander the Rainbow has a book trailer up on YouTube:

For those of you unfamiliar with this little bit of marketing magic… since movies have had trailers (or “previews”) around since time immemorial, why not books as well? With the advent of point-and-click video editing software and sites such as YouTube for sharing video, the arrival of video-based promotion for books was inevitable.

Thanks to Steven Booth at GOS Multimedia for his deft compilation and editing — I think you’ll all agree this looks grand.

I have a friend whose travels are a mystery to me.

I don’t mean he’s superspy Jason Bourne or anything like that; but rather, it’s the style of his travel I don’t get: he takes literally dozens of trips a year, including at least six to faraway international destinations. None of the trips are very long: he’s got one planned to London next month for a total of four days (this is out of San Francisco, a ten-hour-plus flight to the U.K.). When he discusses his travels, it’s mostly to highlight the business-class upgrades he’s gotten or the uber-cheap fares he’s paid.

At first this raised my hackles, as I thought, oh great, another one. But he’s not the sort who seeks to impress or to give the illusion of pomposity and wealth; au contraire, this guy’s a down-to-earth fellow with a modest studio apartment in Oakland and a job in the public sector. So what gives?

One clue came when he said, “I care more about getting the best fare and the most miles rather than the destination.” He then pointed me in the direction of FlyerTalk.com, a site I’d stumbled across some years back during my days of grueling, weekly, back-and-forth inter-city commuting that makes up the backdrop to Wander the Rainbow. As you loyal readers will note, this wasn’t exactly the high point of my life, getting on a plane every week… so why, I wondered, would someone do this voluntarily — even if it meant weekly jaunts to holiday destinations?

When I looked on FlyerTalk, I discovered my answer: I’m friends with Frequent Flyer Guy.

This persona is no doubt familiar to those who’ve seen Up in the Air, last year’s Oscar-nominated George Clooney vehicle. Clooney plays a professional “corporate downsizer” who flies around the country for work, rarely setting foot in his home base and relishing the allure of the road. When family members fret that it’s an isolating life, he replies — while walking through a crowded airport concourse, natch — “Isolated? I’m surrounded!”

While Clooney’s character does it for work, there’s a growing subset of travelers for whom fares and miles are their lifeblood: they haunt FlyerTalk and other forums, seeking those oddball last-minute super-saver deals and airline hiccups that will cost them next to nothing and earn them maximum miles (routings such as San Francisco-Honolulu-Los Angeles-Denver are not uncommon). To them, the destination is almost incidental, a mere stop on the merry-go-round of airport lounges, premium frequent-flyer status, and first-class sleeper seats. Many of them can be seen, now at year’s-end when many of us are focused on holiday prep, doing “mileage runs” — brief trips that are deliberately long in distance and low in price, for the express purpose of topping off one’s frequent flyer account (premium status on most frequent flyer programs requires flying a minimum number of miles a year).

If there’s one thing my rather unique style of travel (solo gay “flashpacking” around the world) taught me, it’s to avoid judging the way other people embark on journeys. And yet… there’s something about frequent-flyer junkies that leaves me a bit disconcerted. While I applaud any effort made by harried, overworked Americans to get out there and explore other lands, I can’t help but wonder if something’s being lost here. While I do love my perks (I scored some business class upgrades on my world journey thanks to my own now-depleted stash of frequent flyer miles), for me the transformative nature of long-haul travel is what drew me in — and the experiences and insights I garnered overseas held meaning and significance enough for me to codify them into a memoir. While not every journey can be — or need be — so memorable or monumental, I wonder if these miles junkies wouldn’t be better served by journeys longer and more psychically impactful.

But don’t let me be the final word: I’d be interested to hear what you (miles hounds included) have to say. If you’re reading this in an e-mail, please feel free to go to the blog site; if you’re already there, click on the “Comments” just below this entry to have your say.

Last weekend marked the first Thanksgiving I shared with my youngest sister Miri, my only sibling in the U.S. and on the West Coast; interesting that we’ve both lived in this country for around a decade but have never celebrated this iconic Yankee holiday together. It’s also her first Thanksgiving as a U.S. permanent resident, further amplifying the day’s significance.

Garnering a foothold in this country was a challenge for both of us, fraught with many hits and misses as we fought our way through the gaping maw of U.S. immigration. People are often astonished to hear this — “but you’re Canadian!” — but the system is no less complex or inscrutable for we America-lookalikes as it is for the innumerable Patels and Gomezes that arrive on these shores. Though the cultural similarity no doubt helps in many subtle ways.

After a weekend of highly successful turkey gorging (picture-perfect plate at left), I ended it off with a reunion with an old Chicago friend, now living in New York and heading up a successful technology consultancy. This fellow was always a go-getter and something of a prodigy: the son of a prosperous Midwestern businessman, he graduated high school at fifteen, college at eighteen, worked on political campaigns in his youth, bought a co-op in an up-and-coming part of New York, and now heads up the building’s co-op board. Through it all he’s segued from a conservative Young Republican to a progressive Jew — a transition I could relate to, having made a similar conversion (politically at least) at the same period in my life.

Not everyone starts out a liberal at twenty only to turn establishment by thirty.

But one thing this friend let slip, now that he’s about to turn twenty-nine, haunted me: he finds birthdays depressing. And not due the usual “oh fuck, I’m turning thirty — my life is over!” melodrama that haunts so many of us gay men (myself included at that age). No, his anxiety takes a different form.

He feels he’s accomplished too little in his life.

Yes, really!

In my early days in this country some fourteen years ago, angst-ridden by career uncertainty (a movie career that was going nowhere), financial uncertainty, immigration uncertainty, and coming-out uncertainty (a situation exacerbated by some decidedly douche-y L.A. queers), I scribbled something in a journal about what I termed “the American Nightmare,” the dark corollary to the American Dream: that one’s accomplishments are never “enough” in a country where it’s drummed into us every day that “the sky’s the limit,” and “you can be everything you want to be.”

While I revere and applaud this country’s relative openness toward creative business endeavors and new technologies, I worry that it imposes commensurately grueling expectations toward its young: in a land where anyone, conceivably, could be Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg or Barack Obama, there’s always the nagging feeling that it’s one’s fault if one hasn’t achieved the commanding heights by a certain age and stage.

I think this is part of the reason career-break-style travel is so important: it allows for a personal inventory, a stock-taking of one’s life and one’s goals… and hopefully, at the end of it, a greater understanding of oneself through exposure to the world’s multitudes. This is, of course, a central theme in Wander the Rainbow. It also made up the focus of a discussion I had at a recent meeting of the San Francisco Book Club & Lecture Series, where I’ll be speaking sometime early next year.

Judging by the healthy attendance of this meetup, I’d say many of us are feeling the same vibe… and I can only hope more of us find the balance between ambition and satisfaction that often seems so elusive in these crazy times.

Well, it was bound to happen sometime.

Wander the Rainbow got its first bit of fallout from a character in the book angry about how he was represented — and it wasn’t from one of the major players in the story.

It all went down this week in a series of text messages:

My efforts at apology and explanation fell on deaf ears, and I haven’t heard from the guy since this exchange.

It’s interesting that this comes in the face of a guest blog I wrote on gay.com about this very subject; the friend in question has a partying past — but has obviously renounced it, Dr. Laura-style. While I certainly don’t judge those who make a choice to lead a more, shall we say, traditional existence, I still find it amazing (and sometimes a bit disturbing) how so many gays have run in the Betty Crocker direction in recent years. Having led a cloistered, closeted existence in my own youth, I celebrate the openness in urban gayland to live an unconventional romantic and sexual life. I felt I’d depicted this friend in the same light… but obviously that’s not how it was taken.