so...hi. how's life? good... good...glad to hear it. the kids? all right, nice, nice...business good? right, of course...so...ummm...how about the Tigers, yeah? the Tigers...good stuff those Tigers.

pish tosh. i cannot hold a conversation for the life of me, unless it's about food, lighting campfires, or the many strange and wonderful things that happen on the trail and are only comprehensible to those truly strange people who drive three hours in order to climb out of the van, eat bad food, carry thirty or forty pounds of said food and gear on their backs for forty miles in a big circle to climb into a waiting van and drive right back to the beginning of the trail in order to run three stinking miles. for the sheer pleasure of it. to quote "Dad" from the immortal "Calvin and Hobbes," after a long bike ride through hail, rain, smog, potholes and dangerous roads for no suitable, practical or even emergency purpose:

"I love the sheer hedonism of the weekends."

And now it is off to more hedonism. Today we prepped gear and planned routes (hiking, canoeing, and emergency evac). Tomorrow...we prep even more. Sunday is go-day: we abscond with our seven young, impressionable incoming freshmen back to the only place i feel comfortable anymore: the woods. soon every stroke of my paddle and every mile under my forty-five pound backpack with take me farther from all those strange-smelling people living in boxes and always changing their clothes and hiding from the sun all day.

it will be good to go back even if only because i own no deoderant and am very sensitive to my armpit reek when the people around me have covered their God-given pheromones with chemicals.

school afterwards? oh boy...i think i might stay in the woods...