Adopting Lazy as a Life Theme

I've avoided writing about any of my adventures of the past month partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I've been having difficulty knowing where to start from.  So we're gonna tell these stories in reverse, Memento style.  Today's installment:  Saturday tubing on the Shenandoah river.

The genesis of this trip came mostly from my guilty conscience.  As a nice treat for Memorial Day the week before tubing, I decided to hang my married friends out to dry.  I had planned to take a 3-day road trip of unknown destination with Dirty Harry and his wife, but the Wednesday night before our departure, I decided to scrap our plans to join the rest of Eastern Single Mormondom in the annual spawning run to Carolina's Outer Banks.  I knew I would need some decompression from that trip, not to mention some redemption.  So in hopes of cushioning the flakiness, I floated the tubing idea to Dirty Harry before I left.

Now, do you remember last summer's retreat to the Shenandoahs for the waterfalls?  The need to get out of the city and commune with nature.  Sometimes the need for Mother Nature is brought on by too much work and the humming vevuzela that is the city.  Other times, the need is brought on by too much vacation or a schedule packed too tightly with fun.  I can't be the only one to need a vacation from my vacation.  That's what this tubing trip was about.

So I invited a handful of folks, who in turn invited a few more.  We ended up with a pretty good group of about 14 to head out to Front Royal, VA.  There, we would float a three-mile stretch of the laziest river you've ever seen.  If Jeff Lebowski were a river, he'd be the Shenandoah.  It takes three-plus hours to float the three miles.  In that time, you relax.  You jabber about things that don't matter with people that do.  You forget your cares, your stress, your name, your nationality.  Your swimsuit, if you're into that.  You drink in the sunshine and any tasty beverages you may have tied to your tube.  Turning over on your tube without falling in is the only concern, and if you do fall in, the water's warm and inviting.  It's the perfect amount of time to relax without getting bored.  And afterward, you catch a great barbeque joint on the way out of town.

I made one poor decision on the day, and that was in my choice of dessert.  But I feel comfortable in knowing that it was a choice that I couldn't have avoided under any circumstance.  Even knowing then what I know now, the universe would have warped space-time to bring us together anyway.  So, in keeping with the lazy day, I laid back and rode the slow, easy current of fate as it carried me into the arms of a sundae called The Fat Elvis. When debating between a simple rasberry softserve dipped cone and a sundae called The Fat Elvis, there really was no debate, right?  Right.  That sundae really tied the day together, man.

Reality Check

Sometimes the constant blaring of celebrity gossip shows and cable "news" punditry can whip us into frenzies over a whole range of issues that just don't matter.  And then a single article can slice through the din like a razor.  Such was the effect of this New York Times article about North Korea.  I strongly recommend you read the article in its entirety.  It affected me powerfully.  I like studying political systems, but I'm not even interested in the academic comparison of Socialism to Capitalism after reading this.  All I want to do is gather my family around me and thank God for them, and that we're free to argue over whether to grill bratwurst or hamburgers this summer (Answer:  both).   

Political Discourse of the Lunatic Fringe: Detestable and...Hilarious?

Politico published a sorta disturbing little article this week claiming that threats made on the lives of members of Congress have increased 300% so far this year.  Sigh.  My first reaction is to question what would lead someone to think it's okay to threaten a politician and/or their family like that.  I can sympathize with disagreeing with a politician's views or votes or whatever.  But what went wrong in your head that made you think that killing them would be an answer?  I don't know for a fact, but I feel safe in assuming that the vast majority of people of all political stripes are repulsed by such actions.  Who are these creeps?  Well, according to the article, they veer from the comically bungling Black Widow biker gang-types, to the significantly more psychotic Max Cady-types.   First, from the article, the bunglers:

FBI agents tracked the calls to a 54-year-old Texas man who lived alone — and who at one time had owned a 20-gun arsenal of handguns, shotguns and rifles. According to the documents, he told officers that he was “really, really drunk” when he made the calls. He said he was just “venting” — taking out his frustrations after hearing a discussion of the Fairness Doctrine and becoming concerned that the government would attempt to abolish the radio shows of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Damn that Fairness Doctrine!  I'mma kill me some politicians fer that crap!  Guvmint ain't gonna take my Rush.  He's just speakin' too much truth, man.  Fightin' socializm and stuff.  Where's my Pabst?  Guvmint sucks y'all.  Hey, doesn't SSI come today?  I'mma get paid and buy me some ammunition 'fore Hussein Obama takes it.  Communizm sucks too, don't it?  Yeah.

That may be true, communism does suck, but at least under communism you'd have a job, inefficient though it may be.

Then there are the true psychopaths who are unsafe to anybody:

"I voted for you,” the caller said in a voice mail to Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler’s district office. “If you vote for that stimulus package, I’m gonna kill you. Simple as that.”

The FBI says the caller was a 70-year-old resident of Shuler’s North Carolina district with a history of mental illness and a cache of guns. In the weeks before calling Shuler’s office, the FBI says, the caller beat and choked his wife. She told the FBI that she’d tried to clear her home of guns — and that she went to bed at night with a can of mace tucked under her pillow.

When agents showed up at the man’s door, they asked him why he’d threatened to kill Shuler.

“I was trying to work the political scene,” he said.

At some point in a person's development, it must become evident that s/he is dealing with a dome full of bad brains.  Couldn't we try to catch these folks early, before they procreate, and get them out of the gene pool?  I'm not advocating euthanizing them or anything like that.  More like, since they seem to  prefer acting like animals, we could strip them naked and drop them in the middle of the serengeti.  Or we could put them to work doing something useful.  We'd let them keep their tinfoil hats, but we could strap solar panels to their backs and set them loose in the Nevada wild.  Give them AM radios and beam Rush's program to them through a drone that flies circles overhead so they have to just walk in circles to hear His Corpulence bloviate all day.  And then we could set up wind turbines in Rush's studio.  Between those two alternative energy sources, we could power the western United States for the first six months of the year.