Rain delay

Rains have made our bicycles a prisoner of the porch and have caused nearly every
single pine needle in this place to fall to the ground.

PINETOP-LAKESIDE, Ariz.—A good friend of mine once told me that I need to learn how to relax. I guess he's right.

The rains have come to our little hideaway, banishing us from the trails for the past day. It's forced us inside, where the inescapable siren's song of television finally lured us away from the easy jabber amongst ourselves that we had been enjoying on this vacation.

If I've learned two things on this trip, it's this:

1.) Riding bikes is always much better than not riding bikes; and

2.) television sucks no matter where you are.

Here in Arizona, the political races are underway hot and heavy, and the airwaves are fetid with vicious political advertising made possible by faceless corporate-sponsored political action committees. Thanks to the stooges on the supreme court and the Citizens United ruling, anyone with money can now say pretty much anything they want about pretty much any political candidate. The result is a stinking haze of lies and innuendo plastered all over the airwaves in an attempt to support candidates who will gleefully serve their Corporate Overlords, and defeat any candidates who still have a shred of integrity.

Arizona political advertising in this neck of the woods has boiled down to a never-ending video character assassination of democrat Richard Carmona, who apparently could tip the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. Another ad for some candidate around here accuses the other candidate of beating his wife in front of the other candidate's child. Or something like that. People make fun of the "Have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife" routine, but this is the first time I've actually seen it used. It screams of desperation.

The tiresome 24-hour parade of crap-vertising has prompted me to subconsciously tune out all political advertisements and substitute them in my own head with hilarious parodies of political advertising that go something like this:

"Baby-eating space alien Barack Obama is a presidential impostor who has a smelly butt that hides a business-destroying socialist agenda—This ad paid for by the Secret Handshake Club for Grotesquely Wealthy Fat Cats who Live Off of Corporate Welfare and Pretty Much Hate Anyone Else Who Doesn't Earn an Annual Income of More Than $16 Million."

But there was one upside about watching television because of the rain: We caught the Joe Biden/Paul Ryan debate last night. I guess that's good. I guess...

But now that we've grown sick of the never-ending squeal of the Glowing Box of Idiocy, and we are forced to remain indoors on this gray rainy day. We sit here inside our little hideaway, which is alive with the smell of bacon, hunched over our computers, waiting for the sun to dry out the ground so we can get another ride in.

I'm learning to deal with these circumstances, but I don't exactly call it relaxation.

See you on down the road.