What's on my iPod? Just what you'd expect -- weird stuff.

One night shortly after we were married my wife and I were watching a musical performance on TV with my mother-in-law, a music teacher. “That’s not music,” she sneered, as the performer – someone my Sinatra-loving MIL considered outlandish like Elton John or Lionel Ritchie – did his thing. My bride and I exchanged amused glances.

Fast forward 40 years. I’d be hard pressed to name a song recorded this millennia other than that God-awful “Hello” by Adele that played constantly around the pool of the Mexican resort we stayed at earlier this month. It made me want to dive in and slash my wrists every time I heard it.

So what, you ask, is on my iPod?

Good question. I probably have one of the weirdest collections of songs of anyone, anywhere. Here are ten that came up randomly when I hit “shuffle” yesterday. Naturally, there’s a story attached to each and it’s the memories these songs evoke rather than the music itself that gives me the most pleasure.

Song by a Nobel Laureate

Blowin’ in the Wind, by Peter Paul & Mary: Bob Dylan wrote and recorded it, but c’mon folks, we all know he can’t carry a tune. But Peter, Paul and, especially, Mary can. Make that could. Mary Travers, my favorite singer who possessed a voice so singular, so pure, that no one will ever come close, is gone – she died in 2009 after a struggle with leukemia. As a kid, I spent hours mooning over Mary’s photo on the cover of PP&M’s first album my hippie sister played endlessly, thinking she had to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Years later, Mary lived one town over from us in Connecticut and I kept hoping to run into her at the supermarket or hardware store but never did. A friend did, however, and said she was just as sweet in person as she appeared to be on stage. “Blowin’s” message is timeless and somewhere, some good-hearted soul will be singing it in some Greenwich Village rathskeller when the bomb goes off that ends it all.

Evocative Song

A Moment Like This by Kelly Clarkson: Like most Americans, I was hooked on the first season of American Idol. Who would win -- fresh-faced waitress Kelly Clarkson or Brillo-haired Justin Guarini? For the finale, Kelly and Justin each performed this song. To my surprise, I heard Kelly's (winning) version a week later in a bar overlooking a perfectly smooth ice-blue glacial lake snuggled against the Andes in Puerto Varas, Chile. It was a sublime moment, a moment I’ll never forget that comes back to me in a rush whenever I hear it.

Christmas Song

Hark the Herald Angles Sing by Amy Grant: Euclid, the father of geometry (damn him), would have loved it but, alas, the above title is a typo. It’s actually “Angels” but it said “Angles” on the promotional CD entitled “Happy Holidays, Vol. 28” I purchased for $1 at my local True Value store 25 or so years ago and digitally transferred into my iTunes collection. I was always on the lookout for Christmas music back then because we needed lots of it. When I was growing up, my family spent, tops, 15 minutes opening gifts Christmas morning. My wife’s family spent most of the day, a tradition she insisted we follow, for which we naturally needed lots of background music. This rendition of “Angles,” also featured on Grant’s Christmas Collection album where it is spelled correctly, starts off, as Tina Turner says at the beginning of Proud Mary, nice and easy, but finishes as an orchestral extravaganza featuring an amazing string performance. 

Romantic Song

Country Roads by John Denver: Little matter that I’ve spent, at most, 20 minutes in West Virginia and that I don’t particularly like country music or even John Denver, this is the song I’ll forever associate with my wife. We sang along to it one night shortly after we started dating when it came on the radio of my orange Pinto and we both harmonized in the same spot (“The radio reminds me of my home far away”) and I looked over at her and thought, “I like this girl. A lot. In fact, I think I more than like her.” Still do.

Energetic Song 

I’m So Excited, The Pointer Sisters: We saw the sisters when they played a limited engagement on Broadway in the early 1980s – might have been the late 1970s –and this is my favorite song of theirs not only for the incredible energy but for the astonishing Scott Joplin-esque piano solo by John Barnes. It’s my go-to song whenever I need a shot of adrenaline.

Obscure Irish Ballad

Summer in Dublin by Bagatelle: The summer of 1980 my wife and I drove around Ireland in a rented Russian Lada that was, literally, falling apart – the rear-view and both outside mirrors kept falling off along with the driver door handle. The radio worked, however, and this song, by an Irish group, about a guy who couldn’t make a commitment, kept playing constantly. Its austere, at times cruel, lyrics contrasted with the sensitively orchestrated piano and violin arrangements and it should, by most standards, have been a huge international hit. We kept waiting for it to arrive on the charts here in the states but it never did. It did make it, barely, to the U.K. charts and, nearly 40 years later, is recognized by rock historians for what it is – an undiscovered gem. If you’re gonna click on any of the youtube videos in this post, click here. You’ll be blown away. (And you can download the song on iTunes.)

Classical Song

Pachalbel’s Canon in D Major: As you would expect from a person with some fucking class, I have a fair amount of classical music on my iPod – Beethoven, Sibelius and Saint-Saens. I don’t pretend to understand it all but it will make me look intelligent if I’m ever run over by a bus and whoever finds me gives my iPod to my doctor who goes through it trying to find out what kind of person I am so he’ll realize he needs to do his best to save me because I’m so high-brow I might question and/or sue him if I wake up in less than perfect condition but I digress. My fave classical song, hands-down, is Pachalbel’s Canon in D Major. Like the very best things in life, it’s so, so simple – a basic melody, played as a round, then as a counter round, over and over. Some say it’s the basis of all rock music. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I just know I never tire of it. Robert Redford used it as the theme for my favorite movie, Ordinary People. Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Judd Hirsch got cheated out of acting Oscars but, again, I digress.

Lullaby

Teddy Bears’ Picnic by Val Rosing: I downloaded this song the day my grandson Teddy was born in March, 2014, thinking I might need a lullaby someday. I listened to lots of versions by everyone from Rosemary Clooney to Jerry Garcia and finally settled on one from 1930s British crooner Val Rosing. The few times I played it to soothe Teddy it didn’t work, but it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy whenever it pops on unexpectedly when I’m at the gym. Teddy’s brother, born two years and one day later, is named Isaac. The only song I can find about someone named Isaac is by Leonard Cohen, and is based on the Biblical story of Abraham whom God ordered to sacrifice his son Isaac as an offering. Abe had just laid Isaac at the altar and was about to plunge a dagger into his throat when God said, “Just joshin!” I’m not about to play that for the kid – he’d be screwed up forever. Maybe I ought to write my own song for Isaac.

First Record I Ever Bought

I Know I’ll Never Find Another You By The Seekers: In the summer of 1965 when I was 13, I took the Northeast Missouri Transit bus from my hometown of Auxvasse to Mexico, Mo. There I proceeded to the record store to purchase my first 45, a song by an Aussie group that was #1 on KAAY (Tune 1090, Little Rock), the station I listened to every night while holed up in my room. I was never one for the Beatles or Rolling Stones but was, and am still, a Seekers fan. Maybe that’s because I was and am still seeking something. One thing I was seeking back then was revenge on my sister who was away at college. She had forbidden me from using her stereo, warning me that playing 45s would ruin it. I played that Seekers record until I wore it out (the record, not the stereo), payback for her telling me I was adopted, a tale I had believed until recently. Maybe I was seeking my real family. I was stunned when my mother showed me my birth certificate to learn I was actually related to those people.

Dumb Song But Hey, It Was Free 

Atlantis, by Donovan: I downloaded this idiotic song about the mythical continent where the “beautiful sailors” journeyed from a web site that offered five free songs. I couldn’t find a fifth one I wanted so I chose this one, which was a worldwide hit my senior year of high school, for yuk value. Donovan had to be stoned out of his mind not only when he wrote it but performed it. Reminds me of how silly the sixties were every time it plays and that’s not a bad thing in these wound-up tense times, which, come to think of it, the sixties were too.

There are 435 other songs on my iPod but, in the interest of preserving bandwidth, I'll spare you the details. 

Dog crazy

A black Mercedes S-class sedan with Ontario plates was parked in front of the entrance to the kennel and spa when I arrived this morning to pick up Bonnie and Billy Ray, our elderly dachshunds who had been boarded overnight.

Standing in front of the check-in desk, cradling a fluffy white dog with a pink bow atop its head, was the owner of this magnificent feat of German engineering, a woman who looked remarkably like Sarah Palin, down to the rimless glasses. She – the woman, not the dog – was wearing a tennis outfit, diamond earrings in a cross-cross pattern and, on her left hand, a solitaire roughly the size of a robin’s egg. A Nordstrom's shopping bag was atop the check-in counter.

“Here’s her water dish,” she said, reaching into the bag and handing the dish to the clerk, a frizzy-haired woman about my age. The bowl was engraved with the dog’s name. Evelyn.

“And here’s her water,” she said, removing a bottle of Nestle Pure Life. “Please make sure your people don’t give her tap water by mistake. This is all she drinks and she needs to stay hydrated, especially now that we’re back in Florida.”

“Okay,” the attendant said, nodding her head.

“And here’s her food dish and food,” Evelyn’s mother announced, pulling from the bag a tiny ceramic bowl and two plastic containers. “She gets the chicken for lunch – she eats around noon, just before she goes down for her nap – and the turkey snack around 4:30. You’ll need to keep it refrigerated, of course.”

“Of course,” the attendant replied.

“Do you have a microwave?”

“Yes, in the break room,” the attendant said.

“Well, she won’t eat cold food so you’ll need to nuke it, but just for three or four seconds. It needs to be at room temperature or even a tiny bit warmer, but not hot. Please, please make sure the bowl isn’t hot to the touch before you give it to her.”

“All right,” the attendant said.

“And she gets one of these vitamins with her lunch,” the woman said, handing the attendant a bottle. “You’ll have to open the capsule and mix it in with her food.”

“One vitamin at lunch, break open capsule and mix with food,” the attendant repeated, typing into her computer.

“She was just groomed yesterday,” the woman said. “I tried to remove the bow but it’s clipped on so tight with a rubber band, and I’m afraid she’ll lose it. It’s adorable, don’t you think?”

“If she loses it, we’ll put another one on her,” the attendant said, ignoring the question. “We’re a full service grooming salon.”

“If you have to do that, make sure it’s pink. Evie likes pink, don’t you?” she asked the dog. I half expected Evelyn to reply. 

“Oh my God!” the woman shrieked, as if she had been goosed. “I forgot her bed! How could I have done that? I'll run out to the car and get it.” She turned and, clutching Evelyn like a running back clutches a football, exited.

She returned a moment later with a tiny doggy bed in a leopard skin print. “Here you go,” she said, handing it to the attendant. “What time is nap time?”

“From noon to two,” the attendant told her. “That’s perfect – exactly her schedule, isn’t it Evie?” the woman asked Evelyn, who yawned.

Is there anything else?” the attendant asked solicitously.

“I can’t think of it but if I remember something I’ll call you,” the woman replied, kissing Evelyn repeatedly, as if she were going off to war, and handing her over the counter into the attendant’s arms.

The attendant rang a bell and spoke into a loudspeaker. “We have a check-in.”

A sullen-looking tattooed girl with a nose ring appeared from the back room and took the dog from the clerk.

“Isn’t she the sweetest thing you ever saw?” the woman asked, watching Evelyn disappear into the back room from which, when the door opened, the already shrill sound of dogs barking became almost deafening, but she wasn’t addressing the attendant or me. She was talking to herself, as if she were watching Jesus walk on water.

“What time are you picking her up?” the attendant asked.

“I’m going to try to be here by five-thirty but it may be closer to six if there’s traffic.”

“OK, we’ll see you then.”

The woman turned, went out the door, and got into her Mercedes.

“You're here for Bonnie and Billy Ray, right?" the attendant asked me.

"Yes," I said. "And I hope you’ll remember in the future that they prefer Fiji Water, not plain old Nestle. That was absolutely amazing."

“I could write a book about these people,” the clerk replied with a weary smile.

“I bet you could,” I told her, as Bonnie and Billy led the tattooed girl out of the back room, straining their leashes to get out of that place so they could return to their lives and try to forget that, for 24 hours, someone may have actually considered them to be – horrors – animals.

“What took you so long?” my wife said when I returned with the dogs who, having no idea whether they had been boarded for one day or one year, started yelping with joy when they saw her, just like the dogs in those youtube videos when their soldier masters return from overseas. 

“I thought nobody could possibly be crazier about their dogs than we are," I told her between yelps. “But I was wrong."

WTF happened to Hillary? 12 reasons she lost.

As a political agnostic, I’m not wed to any candidate, party or ideology. My beliefs are based on what my gut tells me is right. I generally agree with the Democrats on social issues. I tend to prefer Republican economic policy.

Like many Americans, I detested the candidates both political parties put up this year.  Unlike most, who held their noses and voted for the one they disliked the least, I voted for a third party candidate to send a message to both parties not to nominate candidates like Hillary or Trump in the future. I’m not proud of that, by the way.

That said, I’m fascinated by how many Clinton supporters – especially those in the media but many of my friends as well – claim they genuinely can’t understand why Trump won because I can and it should be obvious to anyone who followed the election closely. In no particular order, here are a dozen reasons why.

1. The smugness of social media users:  Conservative Facebook and Twitter users posted countless memes and stories attacking Hillary. Bad enough. But liberal users sunk even lower, posting memes and stories attacking Trump supporters, questioning their intelligence. Despicable. You can disagree with someone’s choices but never, ever, call that person stupid. In a democracy, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion and vote. Earlier this year, I was still considering both Trump and Hillary. The vile posts of Hillary supporters implying the stupidity of those who supported Trump would have, if there hadn’t been a third-party choice, helped drive me to Trump. I happen to think those kind of messages drove hundreds of thousands of voters away from Hillary.

2. She ignored something her husband got right: During Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, James Carville, his campaign manager, posted a sign, “It’s the economy, stupid!” to remind him, every day, of the one thing most important to voters. Hillary essentially ignored that message – political suicide in a country where the average wage has remained flat for a decade. Many Americans, particularly millennials, can’t get economic traction and are understandably upset about it. Clinton’s convoluted economic plan promised basically more of the SOS that has given us an economy that isn’t growing. Trump’s economic plan was understandable – cut taxes and end the trade deals that took away jobs and sent them to other countries.

3. She over-relied on women: Hillary understandably wanted to make history by becoming the first woman president – I felt sorry for her during her concession speech when she was talking about the glass ceiling some other woman will someday break – and, by God, she almost made it, but she assumed women would vote for her for that reason alone. Bad decision. If any other well-qualified Democratic woman, and there are many, had run against a candidate as flawed as Trump, we’d almost surely have our first female president-elect. Americans have twice elected an African-American president, they wouldn’t have thought twice about voting for any woman other than Hillary. But she came loaded with too much baggage and a long record of questionable decisions that would have hurt any male, female or transgender candidate.

4. Americans are tired of Clintons and Bushes: For 28 of the last 35 years, a Bush or Clinton has either occupied the Oval Office or the office right down the hall. George H.W. Bush was VP from 1981 to 1989, and president from then until 1993. Bill Clinton was president from 1993 until 2001, followed by Bush II until 2009. In 1776, America declared itself free of its royal masters. Nobody is entitled to the presidency or to any office because they are related to political royalty. If Hillary would have won two terms, a person born in 1981 would have lived under a Bush or Clinton presidency or vice-presidency for 36 of his or her 44 years by the time she left office. Enough already. Note to George Bush III and Chelsea: Don’t even think about it.

5. Wikileaks made a splash: Though the mainstream media did a good job of burying them, leaked emails proving that Hillary’s campaign schemed to marginalize Bernie Sanders and, especially, recent emails revealing how CNN commentator and current DNC Chair Donna Brazile forwarded debate questions to Hillary, cost her votes. Did Hillary get those messages from Brazile? She never denied it, one more nail in the coffin of a candidate who was already distrusted.  

6. The public saw through manufactured mass hysteria about Trump: I saw a Facebook comment under an online news story today declaring Trump a “lying, fascist, racist, xeonophonic (sic) sexual predator.” Over the last few months I’ve seen hundreds – thousands – of similar comments. Many of them, it turns out, were written by trolls paid by a Super Pac to discredit anything Trump-related. The sheer volume of these clearly orchestrated, hysterical-sounding comments became annoying after a while. Let’s examine these claims one by one.

Lying: Yes, Trump is a liar. So is Hillary. All politicians lie and Americans know it. Fascist: A fascist is an authoritarian who imposes a right wing agenda. Trump has promised to do just that. Does anyone honestly believe that if Hillary had won and had a cooperative Congress, that she wouldn’t have been authoritarian in imposing her left wing agenda, as Obama was during the first two years of his first term? Mussolini was a fascist. A president who starts acting like one, thanks to our system of checks and balances, will be shut down fast. Racist: Yeah, Trump seems to be one. No way around it. Xeonophobic: A xenophobe is scared of people from other countries but let’s put it in context. Most Americans, even those who don’t want to admit it, are scared of people from fundamental Islamic countries, specifically young men from fundamental Islamic countries who overstay their visas and fly first class. If you aren’t, you are naïve. As for his opinion of Mexicans, see what I said about his racism. Sexual predator: All the hilaria about “pussy grabbing” was something to distract Americans from Bill Clinton's sexual escapades Trump was emphasizing at the time. There isn’t a straight man in America who hasn’t said something akin to what Trump told Billy Bush, and everyone knows it. While Trump made remarks about women’s appearances, he owned beauty pageants that are about … women’s appearances. And yes, he said vile things about Rosie O’Donnell but lots of people don’t fault him for that because she is every bit as objectionable to many people as he is. As for his raping a 13-year-old twenty-some years ago, that charge was dropped. It stretches credibility to believe a narcissistic billionaire obsessed with his public persona would rape a child. It may sound good when you’re a PAC-funded think tank looking for ways to stir up anti-Trump hysteria but the charge wasn’t believable to most.

7. Questions about the Clinton Foundation: Last year, before it lost all credibility (see point 13, below), The New York Times revealed how the Clinton Foundation, in return for a large contribution, facilitated the sale of a large percentage of our country’s uranium to Kazakhstan, an Islamic country. Some right wing news sites have claimed TCF collected millions for Haitian earthquake victims but didn’t fully distribute it, which didn’t help the foundation’s claims it is totally above board. Wikileaks earlier this week revealed an email from Bill Clinton’s former BFF Doug Band implying that Chelsea’s wedding and extravagant lifestyle were funded in part by the foundation. Etc. Etc.

The Clintons have become enormously rich – wealthier than might be expected from their hefty book royalties and speaking fees. If you are a politician who says you believe government’s job is to take care of the disadvantaged, what do you need with your own foundation then, if not to enrich and/or promote yourself? While the foundation clearly did and does some good, that was a question in many people’s minds and Trump ran commercials to keep it top-of-mind.

8. The private server controversy: As Bernie Sanders said during a primary debate, let's give that a rest. Everyone has an opinion and nobody knows for sure, other than Hillary and her closest aides (some of whom took the fifth, which didn’t help) whether or not she intentionally violated the law for nefarious purposes. The FBI’s bizarre investigation, including the announcement a few weeks ago that it was back on, certainly cost her votes and may well have done her in once and for all.

9. The Democratic party no longer serves its primary constituency: Democrats, traditionally, have been been known as the party that takes care of working people. They haven’t done a good job lately. Yes, President Obama hasn’t had a cooperative Congress to pass his budget proposals but the party has focused, instead, on issues like transgender bathrooms. If you work on an assembly line and are worried about your job moving to Mexico as a result of NAFTA, a trade deal Hillary’s husband created, you don’t give a damn about picayune stuff like that. The fact that Hillary showcased at her convention mothers of African-Americans shot by cops – some of whom, it has been proven, fired in self-defense – apparently didn’t get her the African-American votes she had counted on and wound up pissing off lots of people, including white cops and their families who voted for her opponent. I could go on and on but, as Hillary herself once said, what difference would it make?

10. Hillary's hypocrisy: Trump said offensive and inappropriate things about women. Saying she knew voters didn’t want their children exposed to messages like that, Hillary spent big time on commercials bringing them into living rooms where millions of impressionable children were watching. Claiming she was against women being considered sex objects and that she wanted girls to know they didn't need to compromise their principles to be successful, Hillary hung with Beyonce, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez prancing half-naked across stages, urging their fans to vote for her. Trump invited some of the women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexually abusing them to sit together at a debate, effectively exposing her claim that she was an advocate for abused women. Asserting repeatedly that she was in the corner of the poor and middle class, Clinton refused to release transcripts of her remarks to Goldman Sachs for which she received $250,000, an incomprehensible sum to voters trying to scrape by, who couldn't help but wonder exactly what she told Wall Street fat cats. If the Goldman folks hadn't thought she was on their side, why would they have invited her in the first place?

11. She embraced Obamacare: My wife and I this year paid $25,800 for a silver Blue Cross/Blue Shield health care plan that came with a deductible of $13,500. Had we needed to, we would have had to lay out $39,300 before insurance paid a penny of our health costs. At 64, our rates are among the very highest in the nation, but millions of other Americans of all ages are getting socked with health costs they can’t afford as a result of the badly-named and ill-conceived Affordable Care Act. Trump was very clear that he plans to repeal it and replace it with something better (though he has been vague about specifics). Hillary said she would keep it and implied he was threatening to leave Americans without health care they can’t afford anyway, so they voted for the candidate who promised to fix it. 

12. She preached inclusion but practiced exclusion: In every debate and every appearance, Hillary promised that she would be a president for women, LGBTs, African-Americans, and Latinos. But there’s one significant constituency she excluded: White men. I am so, so embarrassed to admit this but I am one. I didn't ask to be born this way, I honest-to-God didn't, and I blame my father for that. He was one, too. So are all four of my descendants. (OK, two of them are in diapers but they’ll be men someday.) The fact of the matter is, there are millions of hard-working, dedicated, white male Americans who have never spray-painted hate graffiti or intentionally oppressed anybody. If you’re not one of us, try, if you can, to put yourself in our place. You’re listening to a politician who specifically promises to represent everybody … but you. Would you be happy to vote for that politician knowing how she feels about you and your ilk? Not very likely. How hard would it have been to add, “And to you men out there in the audience, I’m pulling for you, too. Everyone’s going to have equal opportunities to succeed when I’m president.” But she pointedly didn’t. And who does she have to blame for that? Herself.

These are a dozen of the reasons Hillary lost the election. And here is a bonus, one more reason that, in my considered opinion, is the most important of all.

13. God-awful journalism: Virtually every newspaper, network, magazine and web site went out of its way to make Trump look bad as their way of making Hillary look good. Amazingly, they thought nobody would pick up on it because, of course, they would never report it themselves. For instance, the Hillary-shilling New York Times wouldn’t run a story about anti-Trump bias at, say, CNN or the Washington Post. Would it? No, and it pissed Americans off big-time so they voted against the media’s anointed candidate. Voters didn’t need to read Breitbart or Drudge to see how the deck was stacked – the reporting was that bad. Americans love an underdog and the media was so biased in Hillary’s favor that they actually created votes for her opponent.

If, after reading this far, you still can’t understand why anyone voted for Trump, try to remember that you and the media will have four years to hold his feet to the fire, to insist that he consider your point of view, and, especially, to demand that he live up to the standards we Americans expect from our presidents.

I’m not holding my breath and you shouldn’t either but we should all hope for the best. 

Home again

Sunset over the Pacific in Mazatlan.

My wife and I arrived home at 2 a.m. this morning (thanks American Airlines!) from Mazatlan, Mexico, where we spent the last week pre-celebrating joint milestone birthdays.

Of course you can ask. We’re going to be fifty – me next week and she in mid-December. 

We had a swell time. We always do whenever we travel and we’ve visited something like forty countries. Mazatlan is – make that was – the third destination we’ve visited in Mexico, which ranks in the top three of all the countries we’ve visited. 

What, you ask, did we do in Mexico? Visit ruins? Go deep-sea fishing? Check out the museums? Take Spanish lessons? None of the above. We hung out around the largest of the three massive swimming pools of our resort. Granted, we have a pool in our own backyard but … it doesn’t have a swim-up bar, we can't summon a waiter named Jesus to bring us shrimp cocktails or club sandwiches whenever we’re hungry, and there are no attendants handing out fluffy towels, adjusting our pool umbrella or asking if we’d like to sign up for massages in the spa. (Yes, thank you. Swedish for her, deep-tissue for me.)

OK, you caught me. We’ll be fifty-five. Yes, both of us – our birthdays are twenty-nine days apart. It’s kind of nice being married to someone who is almost exactly my age because we remember the same songs, the same TV shows, the same events. For example, we had both just completed second grade the summer Neil Armstrong took his one giant step for mankind.

I brought three books but finished them all by the end of the third day. Stupidly, I left my Kindle at home so I couldn’t download any. I suppose I could have downloaded a book to my cell phone but my 55-year-old eyes can’t read type that small. Besides, I’m embarrassed to take out my phone in public. It’s an iPhone 3 which identifies me as a dinosaur. It’s five years old, refuses to die and, by God, I’m not going to get a new one until it does. It was fascinating and disturbing to see young couples by the pool or in restaurants who were so busy interacting with their cell phones they didn't even look at each other. 

The gift shop was out of books in English except for “The Martian” which I read on my last trip to Mexico. Luckily there was a wicker basket atop the counter of one of the swim-up bars where guests can leave paperbacks they don't want to carry home for other guests to read. The day we arrived, I saw a Larry McMurtry cowboy novel.

I’m not generally fond of novels  – I’m a non-fiction kind of guy – but, sometimes, they’re ok, especially on vacation. But the McMurtry book, when I went to retrieve it, was gone. The basket contained nothing but some novel (I assume it was a novel) in a language that, for all I knew, was Bulgarian, along with half a dozen Harlequin and Silhouette romance novels which, I learned because I read two of them in four hours, taking care to fold the covers over so nobody could see what I was reading, are written for women with the IQs of deer ticks. Both the romances I read were about women in powerful jobs, one a world-famous designer, the other a country music superstar. Both, it turned out, secretly hated their glamorous jobs and yearned for nothing more than the simple, honest men they had left behind when they struck out for fame and fortune.  Once reunited with the turgid members -- a term used in both books that made me laugh out loud -- of the men they had been yearning for all along, they ditched their careers and settled into domesticity. Every woman’s dream.

By the time I finished those books, someone had deposited a Tom Clancy novel in the basket but, unfortunately, he didn’t write it. It was based on an idea he had and he licensed the writing to someone who, apparently, didn’t work with an editor. For example, a character in Africa calls someone in California. The Californian announces that it’s 7 p.m. and he is just about to leave the office. The African caller says it’s 10 a.m. where he is. What’s wrong with that picture? 

All right, dammit. We’re going to be sixty. Are you happy now?

More entertaining than the books was the time we spent observing our fellow guests – almost all of them American. It is amazing how badly people behave when they are on vacation, how much they drink and what they wear. Trump proposed a wall to keep Mexicans out. If I were the president of Mexico, I’d put up a wall to keep over-served Americans wearing tank tops out of my beautiful country.

The only other thing of note I did was to eat good food and lots of it. The scales informed me this morning I gained five pounds in one week. I’m surprised that’s all. Our resort offered an all-inclusive package, all the food and drink we could consume for a mere $120 per person per day. I had no intention of buying the all-inclusive package but, as our arrival date approached, the hotel started sending emails and calling every other day and the price kept dropping. By the time it fell to $61 per person (the senior rate, same as the child’s rate), I decided it was too good a deal to pass up.

I should have.  Not only did I feel compelled to eat and drink everything in sight because it was “free,” I could have done so for a lot less than $61 because the dollar is at all-time high against the peso. An enormous buffet breakfast including a chef making made-to-order omelets is $15. A club sandwich, fries and Pacifco beer brought to your lounge chair by a uniformed waiter is $12. A steak with a salad, dessert and a couple of glasses of wine is $25.

Whatever, we’re back home now. My wife is still in bed. I’m sitting by the pool drinking coffee I had to -- horrors -- make myself. In a few minutes the kennel will open so I can go pick up Bonnie and Billy Ray, our elderly dachshunds who, together, are almost half our age. 

Look, asshole, it’s none of your f-----g business, OK? Do I go around asking your personal information? No, I don’t. I have better manners than that. I’d think you would too.

Home again and tonight we’ll have a new president-elect half the country will despise.

I wanna go back to Mexico. Maybe for the next four years.