Based on nearly 40 hours of interviews, Escaping from Reality Without Really Trying is the memoir of a 61-year-old, life-long merchant seaman re-counting his fantastic, hilarious, and politically incorrect exploits. He's a sailor-scholar and an individualist anarchist; he's read Voltaire and The Egyptian Book of the Dead. He admits to working at his hobby, sailing, to keep up his real occupation, drinking. He's lived 40 years of adventures around the world, including an incursion into Cambodia during the Vietnam War; a prison break from a Ceylon jail; a dockside fistfight in the Philippines in 1977; a 2-week stowaway run on a British merchant ship sailing around South Africa; meeting Omar Sharif in Aqaba, Jordan; an around-the-world trip (with Greg Cousins, the third mate on the Exxon Valdez, and we learn what really happened ) that ends in Alang, India and the beaching of the ship to be cut up for scrap metal; seeing the rise and fall of communism and capitalism in Africa and the newly independent states after the Soviet Union's collapse and division; and an ammunition delivery to Kuwait on the eve of the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq.