MORE MEXICAN HIJINX WITH A TUPPENNY ASCHENBACH. At night on the byways of the resort where I serve as camera monkey, I see gaggles of drunk children. Well, they may be over 18. They may even be over 21. But they exude a mist of callowness and AXE Body Wash. They're well-behaved, not stumbling or vomiting. I puzzled over this and finally decided: any young people here will be from well-off families. It flashed me back to high school, when I had rich friends who would serve weed and booze in the east wing while the parents were dozing in the west. Flaming Youth -- same habits, worse clothes and music. (Or maybe these "teenagers" are all 30 years old -- like in the original Halloween! -- and I need new contact lenses.)

The Ugly Americans are less ugly than I expected. I had anticipated that the people who would come to such a place would look like old Ralph Steadman caricatures of vacationers at Disneyland -- fat, sullen, and stupefied. But the face of bourgeois privilege has undergone a makeover. Even folks from the fruited plain are going to health clubs now, and many of our new sybarites are toned, or at least can walk more a half-mile without getting winded. In fact, I notice that my own attitude has changed since childhood: once I thought fat, shambling Americans were a disgrace to our country and its Council on Physical Fitness; now I admire them for bucking a tide.

I got briefly to Playa de Carmen and witnessed its reduction of the Mexican national character to drunken frogs and their ancient Mayan sidekicks renting scuba equipment to white people. Hawkers, ugly t-shirts, McDonald's, Ben y Jerry's, and mercenary local characters/photo models: it reminded me St. Mark's Place with better set decoration.

More antes, I mean despues. Caramba.