I was gonna write about how I was writing standing up like Hemingway at some bar in Key West, but instead I ended up nearly lying down, like some Roman eating grapes, and I’m not scrawling with a pen. I’m typing.

Why the standing up, Ernest? Was it to gauge how difficult it was to keep good posture? Was it to better measure how drunk you were getting?

He would have boxed me for those asking those questions, or maybe he’d just slam a few shots.

All of us Northeasterners enjoy getting drunk somewhere tropical. I never have a choice in the matter. Whether it’s Florida, South Carolina, or the South Caribbean (I've never left the Western Hemisphere), all I really like down there is beaches and seawater. Everything else gives deep cringes. Those other tourists, so annoying just to look at. Flip flops, whole families, and the god awful shops they keep open. You go to a place good for a beach, green hills, seawater, and fruit, and you want to buy diamonds? C’mon. I wish you’d want these islands to be like national parks; nature over here and cities over there. But the tourists enjoy fake grass huts that try really hard to sell them junk.

So who’s to blame for the sellers perpetuating petty sales and mediocre values? Is it the islanders that make a profit, or the buyers that want the wares? Or is there a third party guaranteeing that the buyers and sellers alike are propagandized to expect the less than fine things in life? Are the salespeople actually working the shops, the ones really getting rich from the sale?