L.A. KID

In the final line of Voltaire's "Candide," after our eponymous hero has been around the world and suffered all manner of hardship, catastrophe and reversal of fortune, he conclusively asserts: "il faut cultiver notre jardin." We must cultivate our garden. In other words, stay home and confine your travels to those of the imagination by reading books like "Candide" which do the traveling for you and are much less arduous and time-consuming, not to mention cheaper. In an age of mass tourism where it seems everyone just loves to travel, I myself have a well-cultivated aversion to travel. In fact my many trips over the years now come back to me as a string of disasters. But what may have been unpleasant for me personally can make for quite pleasant reading. For instance, no one wants to hear about your luxury Caribbean cruise with all the amenities, instead they want to hear about that voyage across the stormy North Atlantic on a container ship, you the sole passenger, and late one night opening your cabin door to find the captain's lifeless body lying at your feet. This nightmare and other horror trips are recounted at length in TALES OF AN INADVERTENT TRAVELER, inviting you to enjoy a vicarious shudder from the comfort of your own garden and safely bounded by that white picket fence.