5 days of writing or a futile attempt at such

It is August and seeing as August is traditionally a good month for me, I am going try to get back into regular writing. So, for better or worse (most likely worse) I am committing to 5 days of writing.

Here we go! (In my mind I imagine Mario saying that last part.)

Saturday I went tubing, not the awesome kind that trails you behind a boat being driven by someone that wants nothing more than to see your body hurdling off said tube into the water with as much prejudice as possible. No, I'm talking about tubing down a river. The far less intense activity of sitting in a tube and floating down a river with friends while everyone consumes copious amounts of alcohol kind of tubing.

I had never actually done this type of tubing before and to be honest it was mainly because I felt it would be dreadfully boring. I'm a man of action and I like to move around and "do" things, not sit in a tube and let a river do all the work. Despite my concerns I decided to give it a shot, people seemed to enjoy it and I'd never heard anything bad about it so the only way to truly know was to try.

I embarked on this journey with my girlfriend, two good friends and five strangers. Now seeing as this type of tubing is a relatively social event, I was already fearing the worst being around strangers. I was the only person that didn't know the five others however and I've learned to trust people's judgement at least a little bit over the last year or so.

After a crowded bus ride where I fabricated a romantic encounter between myself and the older woman sitting across from me that I hadn't actually ever met, (she found it hilarious from what I could tell) we arrived at our tube launch area. It was a crowded disorganized mess but our particular group got things going without a hitch and soon we were all connected in a giant 10 tube mass floating down stream.

The cooler full of assorted adult beverages had its own tube, thus accounting for the tenth tube even though only 9 people were present.

There was some ill-preparedness we soon realized when none of us had remembered to bring enough rope to attach all the tubes together. We had enough for the cooler tube luckily and my friend Matt bravely attached it to himself, but the rest of us had to stay connected using our own strength and body parts.

I stayed with the group for roughly 20 minutes before I had to breakaway and do my own thing. I never strayed too far from the group but I did not spend much time in my tube. I was swimming around and playing in the water, occasionally being bashed against big rocks on the shallow portions. Sometimes having large expanses of deep water where I could not touch the bottom but no matter where I was or what I was doing, one hand remained above the water in an effort to keep my beer safe from spilling. After all, I did not want to risk getting the river drunk.

Now and then I would return and dock with the group to have some conversation, but mainly it was to replenish my beer after I had successfully finished the one before. Sure, I was getting increasingly more inebriated and far more quickly than my companions, but I did not care and was having a simply fantastic time facing the river mostly tubeless and open-beered.

It was exhausting but intensely fun and my efforts to keep the beer from potentially intoxicating what could very well have been an underage river (rivers don't generally carry I.D. and I'm unsure of the legal drinking age for rivers so it is better to be safe) I was rewarded in the most fitting of ways.

About 3/4 of the way through our journey I spotted what I assumed to be someone's cast off beer can littering the river and I shouted to my group that we ought to go collect it because we weren't jerks and littering is not cool. We had no idea where it came from expect somewhere upstream and presumably from some people that did not care they were tossing empty cans into the river.

Upon further examination however, the can was not empty, in fact, it was not even opened! The river had granted me a free beer and I pondered the generosity of it all, three more river beers came a floating by. I by no means was in any state to drink all of them, but I snatched them up and was satisfied by the river's offering. Then so as to not offend it, I drank one of the beers the river so kindly gave to me. It wasn't a particularly good beer but as they say it's the thought that counts.

The rest of the trip was fun and eventful. The strangers became friends, seeing as they were actually pretty cool people and some of us continued to partake in the free beers the river had given us.

From that day I learned two valuable things.

First, keep doing things even if you think they might be awful, because they might actually be fun and you might meet great people. Sure, sometimes things will be awful but I'd wager that won't be the case too often if you have a good attitude.

Second, if you have fun and don't be a jerk to mother nature, you might get free beer.