My late brother Bill was a born storyteller with a flair for the exotic. Filled with restless energy, he was instrumental in shaping my earliest impressions of magic and darkness. Throughout childhood, he chafed at the confines of small-town suburbia, and at sixteen he ran away from home to join the Army. He volunteered to become a paratrooper and go to Vietnam, and he spent two years there in the late ‘60s.

Maybe he was searching for adventure and excitement—I don’t know, I never asked. Right out of the starting gate into adult life, we ran in different directions—me to the left and him to the right. It wasn’t until mid-life that we struck up a friendship and found out how similar our world views were. But I think it’s safe to say he got more than he bargained for at the tender age of nineteen.

In 1999, after thirty years of struggling to lead a conventional life down in the LA urban jungle, he decided to cut the shackles binding him to civilized society and set out in search of adventure.

For a few years, he had a wild and exuberant time. But his mood darkened after the war in Iraq started in 2003 and when revelations about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison came to light the following year. He felt that Americans hadn’t learned anything from the whole, horrible Vietnam experience, that nobody cared about what was happening, and that the same hideous debacle would just keep repeating itself over and over as our consumption-oriented society wallowed endlessly in a materialistic, self-referential stupor.

I kept telling him the American public was like a sleeping giant that sooner or later would wake up and realize it had been deceived, give a mighty roar, and set about making things right. I think he wanted to believe me, but he remained a skeptic until the end. He died of a sudden heart attack in March of 1996, three weeks after walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding.

Bill left a treasure trove of email travelogues, pictures of his worldwide adventures, and philosophical ramblings.