Skiing? No thanks! I'm trying to quit!

The way I see it, (which is generally in a moderately "blurry" way on any given Sunday morning), summer's coming on, and it's only a matter of time before I'll be expected to make a series of "guest appearances" at Cedar Bluffs lake, sitting on my son Cuyler's pontoon boat drinking beers and pestering grandchildren, which is basically the same activities I do on my own front porch, but minus the water and the fish. One thing that I'm really happy about is that generally all we do at the lake is drink beer and fish, and so far nobody in my family has shown any real desire to attempt "water-skiing", which is a sport that, if I ever get published in any major newspaper, I intend to write numerous columns about the dangers of. Oh sure, I know that many of you, what with your extremely high levels of coordination and manual dexterity probably wish you could be skiing right now, but not me. I remember when I was a much younger man trying to learn how to water ski under the careful tutoring of my friend Randy Chapin, who was apparently secretly trying to kill me at the time, judging by the way he would drag me along the bottom of the lake until I finally obtained the mental capacity to "let go of the rope", which is in quotation marks only for the reason that that's exactly what he told me I should do if I found myself going "under" the water rather than gliding along rapidly "on top of the water", where, as it turns out, was where everybody else tended to ski. I don't really know why I could never get the hang of it, but I know I never did! Randy would take off in the boat at speeds rivaling that of a space shuttle re-entering the earths atmosphere, and I would immediately sink to the bottom of the lake and drag along it until my mouth was full of mud and moss, and only then remember to "let go of the rope", floating to the surface dazed and confused and swimming in circles, like a catfish with a severe disorder of the central nervous system attempting to spawn in waters near a nuclear facility with obvious radioactive waste violations. Thankfully, I was young and extremely "bull-headed" back then (unlike today, wherein I'm "old" and "bull-headed"), and I would try this same skiing technique again and again, and always with the exact same results. This makes me think of Albert Einstein, but for reasons that I'm unsure of. It's just crazy. Someday, when I die and my grandson Caleb demands that an "autopsy" be preformed on my carcass to preserve his "innocence" in the case, it will probably show that the reason for my death was as simple as that most of my major organs were chock-full of mud, moss, and lost fishing lures. I would even go so far as to guess that a large percentage of these fishing lures were endorsed by Budweiser, but that's just me. In any case, now that I've grown older, I've also resolved to treat all "skiers", whether it be on water or snow, as "real" human beings. Also, the opinions expressed by this "writer" may not reflect accurately on the opinions that this "writer" is REALLY thinking! Have a great week Friends, and remember that I appreciate everybody who actually reads this blog, rather than doing something "constructive" with their time. GOD LOVES YOU, and so does Rany!