I’ve not made it a secret that I am currently in Mexico. In and of itself, this action goes against all kinds of rules I’ve set to keep my own paranoia in check. There are dozens of reasons that exist in my head as to why revealing your current location is a bad idea. Here are just a few: 1) It let’s people know you aren’t home, and if anyone in your social network is actually a closeted cat-burglar, or even worse, someone on the take for full-time cat-burglars, then pretty much you are letting them in on the most delicious piece of information they can obtain – an empty home, the contents of which they might already know about if they have had the pleasure of visiting your abode. 2) Perhaps someone will get jealous that you are on vacation and they are not. Maybe this will lead to nothing more than a lit sack of poop on your doorstep one night, or maybe it will fester deep inside them and the next time you just happen to be strolling along the edge of a cliff with them on one of your many cliff excursions, they’ll push you off, just because you had the nerve to boast about having seen yet another lizard, but referred to it as a ‘lagarto,’ because you are a smug user of local languages. 3) You are putting it out there to the entities that control the big life puzzle – I’m not sure who they are, but Matt Damon’s last movie made a compelling case that there could be men in trenchcoats assigned to making sure your life goes as planned – and maybe they had been previously buried in piles of paperwork, too busy to notice that you had slipped off your preordained grid to get a few rays in sunny Mexico – but I digress… What was the title of this post? Oh right.

We hadn’t been in Mexico, on our own in Mexico, more than a few moments when my wife told me that if you are kidnapped, America’s leading kidnapping insurance provider suggested you immediately ask for a bible. All good. I know how to say enough in Spanish to do that, and I get why it might work – we’d more likely be seen as human beings, our captors – despicable as they may be – are probably a religious lot, and the very mention of the Bible might give them just enough of a push to be a tad more decent with us as they bound, gagged, and threw us into a dark cell somewhere. That they would be in fear of God at all given their decision to abduct people and hold them for randsom might strike you as odd already, but I have a bigger concern. If my wife saw this little tidbit on Gawker or CNN, why wouldn’t they have too? I mean, they’ve got money right? They kidnap people for huge sums. It stands to reason in my mind that they would use some of that money to buy computers and pay a monthly subscription for internet access like the rest of us – probably makes some things easier for them. At the very least, they need to entertain themselves while waiting for phone calls from distressed loved ones back in the states. And if they have those things, aren’t they running a few google searches themselves like, “What might someone say when I kidnap them that isn’t true?” Am I just to assume that because they are considering hauling me away due to the fact that they mistakenly believe my family has donut money, like in that Kurt Russell film, that they don’t have the smarts to research what kinds of tricks captors might play on them?

Perhaps I give a little more credit to the dwellers of all things underworld than America’s leading kidnapping insurance provider. Or perhaps, I’ve got heat stroke. Let’s call it fifty/fifty.