Incommunicado

Tomorrow my brother flies in and the next day we begin our epic journey. Okay, perhaps not epic but fun, anyway. We will be trolling through the Olympic Peninsula and thence down the Pacific coasts of Washington, Oregon and northern California. We will hike and stare at stuff and visit at least one each of museum, rainforest and waterfall.

I can’t wait to spend this time with him and particularly because as much as is possible, we will conduct our journey in a news vacuum.

The first two nights, the places we are staying have no TVs and no WiFi and no cell phone coverage. And even as we work our way down the coast, the radio will remain off, cell phone likewise and newspapers unperused. We will avoid discussions with strangers that threaten to bring us up to date on happenings in the outside world.

Don’t know if we can pull it off but the plan is to try to get through election day without knowledge of how it is going. We’ve both voted and for the rest of the cycle we would just as soon not hear, see or otherwise acquire knowledge of the insanity that passes for an election in the year 2016.

Regarding the presidential decision, neither likely outcome is one I can in good conscience embrace, although I readily admit one outcome would be horrifying while the other would be merely disgusting. I hope the party that presented the horrifying choice will be soundly defeated up and down the ticket because a) a public and humiliating spanking is the only thing likely to finally get their attention, and b) I don’t want them to continue to block judicial appointments, etc.

So I’m not uninterested in the outcome, even though an outcome I find uplifting became impossible when the two major parties chose their candidates. I am indeed interested in the outcome, very much so. What does not interest me is the ongoing wrangling and name-calling, lying and buffoonery that has characterized the last one hundred or more news cycles.

Pat and I sincerely hope to spend a nice several days largely alone together, looking at things we’ve never seen and that can only be seen where we’ll be. Oh, and getting rained on.

Kindly refrain from killing each other while we’re gone.