Dear Reader (Including those of you who secretly hoped I’d get at least slightly mauled by bears so my wife could say “I told you so”),

I know I’ve been gone a long time. But in my defense, I had an opportunity to get out of Washington, D.C., in August to do really cool stuff with friends and family. Virtually any opportunity—road kill sweeper in Mexico, proctologist at a leper colony in Burma, etc.—is worth taking if it gets you out of the nation’s capital in August. So it was kind of a no-brainer. (Still, I’m a little out of practice, so if my prose seems a bit rusty, like something that gets rusty when it’s, uh, rusty, I apologize.)

I talked for a while about my trips on the latest Remnant podcast, so I’ll keep the travelogue to a minimum (just to be clear: I mean, “I discussed my recent travels on the Remnant podcast,” not “I dropped acid while recording a podcast.” Shut up, naked Indian.)  But my rafting trip on the Snake River in Idaho was A) awesome, and B) the most time I’ve spent completely cut off from media in my adult life. Even on my honeymoon, I turned on the TV or read my email from time to time. Even during my brief stint in an Argentinian prison, I could unfold and read the newspapers that my radiator-cooked mouse meat empanadas came in.

The cool thing about being so cut off is that you could imagine coming back to the world and finding it completely different. Will intelligent apes on horseback capture me with a cargo net and shoot me with a firehose? Will the border collies have finally made their move, herding us into huge flocks to work in their kibble factories? Perhaps the zombie virus will be well underway, vindicating years of conversations with my wife about how we need to be prepared. Or maybe we’ll encounter Powers Booth who will explain to us that “600 million screaming Chinamen”  are on our side.