I tell Peggy I’m drinking the hell out of pu’erh these days. It connects me to the earth. And Tang Dynasty sages. I imagine living as a hermit 1000 years ago in some remote cave somewhere, uninhibited by tech workers, Virtual Reality sycophants, people on the bulletproof coffee bandwagon, or any of the usual bullshit in Silicon Valley.

At the table, I opt for pasta as the slim-suited waiter takes my order. Not because I want pasta. Not because it's the only item on the menu I can identify. But, rather, so I can claim that I ate Italian food in a French restaurant in a German train station in Switzerland.

Here in Geneva, everything started to click. I could almost imagine the opposite halves of myself beginning to alchemically fuse. The counterculture piece of myself no longer felt incongruous with the business traveler part of myself.

I was drinking on a Saturday night, in a Québec City bar called Jules et Jim. Dark, smoky and its subterranean walls adorned with old movie photos befitting a place named after the classic François Truffaut film...