As a child, I enjoyed the David Bowie song, Fang. When it was on the radio I sang along: Faaa-ang! What you bite you have to swallow, Faaa-ang!

These memes pitting fast-food workers against veterans are bizarre.

"Upholstered furniture salespeople speak English; the same language you do. But sometimes you may get the idea that they don't."
— New England Institute of Restoration and Cleaning

There are many things to enjoy on the drive from Tucson to Rocky Point on a sunny afternoon. There are picturesque water towers and windmills, busloads of community college basketball players hovering above the roller foods at gas stations, the Buenos Aires National Forest, prehistoric volcanoes, and there are little towns with names that by nature have you asking yourself, “Why?” These are just a few. Please also do not forget that the time it takes to make the trip works out such that you can pretty much listen to all of David Bowie’s singles from 1969 to 1993 back-to-back.

How effortlessly we forget the Spanish word for pratfall.

I have something to offer here at the end of 2015. I was on Mexican buses for six or so hours just about every Saturday or Sunday this year. That gave me at least five hours, fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds each weekend to jot down all the videos selected from hard disks full of video files the Mexican government has authorized its bus drivers to choose from. Or Sony or Warner Brothers.

You have probably seen all of these films, but I still actually have to work my way through them as some sort of make-up assignment. For some reason at the time it seemed more important to catch up on podcasts and reading, the latter also being known by its Sonoran colloquialism motion sickness.

But if those things aren’t important to you anymore and you are ready to spend a few hours living life as if you were in a hermetically sealed movie theater with air thickened by a strange cinnamon air freshener or if you just want to start 2016 as if you were rolling down a dangerously cratered highway with stunning views of cardons and the Sea of Cortes at exactly 90 kilometers per hour while migrating plastic Coca Cola bottles peck at your feet, I hope this playlist will help you to be the best passenger bus cinema club curator you can be.

If you are disappointed with the results of your eye exam, Hiram can take a photo of you with a mythical beast and remind you it could be worse.

How did you manage to forget how loudly that one uncle sucks his teeth? No, really. How?

Perhaps because I had mentioned how much I enjoyed Padre Jesus’ no-nonsense masses in the past, my mother-in-law this year took us to his 7:00 O’clock mass at San Esteban, the Goldilocks chapel—not too rich, not too poor. We arrived early enough to get seats in the middle of the room. The sermon in a nutshell: So much trouble is caused by people trying to be powerful. People say they want peace on earth and then they try to get it by being powerful and that never works. When everyone is trying to be powerful, there isn’t much peace. If you want peace, as God wants, it’s easy. Be humble and do your job. “The sheperds of the Christmas story weren’t trying to be powerful, they were tending their sheep. They were doing their job.”

Ho hum. It turned into “Do as you are told.” so quickly. Last year’s cold cow spit communion was easier to swallow. But there was singing and hand clapping (welcome because it muffles those bratty tambourines) and there was a nun in the pews, styled like a nun in an old movie or on a bottle of Mexican egg nog. We both looked a little out of place in this crowd of dark-haired and dressed-up worshippers. I was a tall gringo wearing a cheap blue sweater. She was the kind-faced older woman in a habit and a worn brown robe. I wanted to ask her for a photo, but I talked myself out of it, which I have been doing more often than not this year. Ho hum.

Pepitoria for dinner. Bistro Tufeeesa.

Do not let the holidays make you crazy. That is why we have marimbas.

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