Up My Own Ass

I’d like to know what Einstein came up with the idea of tubing through the Arizona desert in the middle of August. I mean, who says, “Hey! It’s 124 degrees outside, we have no trees so we have no shade…I know! Let’s go get some black rubber inner tubes, dehydrate our bodies further with as much of the cheapest canned beer we can shove into this cooler, and spend 5 hours floating on TOP of the water!!”

After hiding out in the black cave of my thrice-curtained, double-armored, multi-screened, air-conditioned house (with misters) for the past 15 years of my tenure in the great “But it’s a DRY heat!” <yuck, yuck> state, I finally caved to the curiosity and had to see what tubing the Salt River is all about.

Maybe for some it begins with a nice, relaxing, smooth gathering of friends and loved ones (like Pabst, Bud, and Miller) and making the comfortable procession from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car -don’t forget the oven mitts for the steering wheel, no joke- to tube rental, shuttle bus, and happy drunken oblivion.

This, however, was not my experience. After rallying the troops from all corners of the state, it looked a little different for us. The gathering part went fine, actually (probably because I was in charge). Everyone assembled where they were supposed to in central Phoenix, when they were due to arrive. Then my boyfriend took over and, well, a picture says a thousand words. That’s right, an impossible-to-unstick apartment key:

Two hours, a can of WD-40 and a broken key, a useless $55 locksmith, case of beer from the nearby gas station for consolation, and an emergency Saturday-morning ($$$) facilities call to the apartment management later we were finally ready to stop drinking cheap beer and leave the 112 degree heat to…go drink cheap beer and sit in the 112 degree heat.

Hey, no one said desert dwellers made sense. Our brains melted sometime back in June… but we finally made it to the river.