I've apologized in advance to my long-suffering copy editor for the typos that will no doubt riddle this column and require her kind attentions. You see, we had a lovely Sunday afternoon here in North Carolina, and my sons beat me up in the front yard.

Loyal and alert readers will recall that my sons are ages 5 and 3, and no doubt be mildly puzzled at how they pulled off such a feat. It's simple: I picked a fight with them. I sat on the berm at the edge of our front yard and invited them to leap on me, fly headlong into me and otherwise attempt to depose me from my perch. This task they took to with impressive abandon, not to mention quite a few sharp knees and elbows.

Why did I do this? Well, for one thing, it's good exercise. Since a real-live brush with death a few months ago, I've rediscovered the joy of being healthy, and I'm doing my best to drop some weight and otherwise make sure I'm alive when the boys graduate from high school. Bench pressing a wriggling 3-year-old who's at the peak end of his height-weight scale will get your heart rate up and work the upper body. Lifting your legs to unseat a 5-year-old who's similarly well-grown will work the abs and various other muscle groups that are even now greedily sucking ibuprofen from my bloodstream. And watching the two boys nearly concuss each other diving onto my prone form from opposite directions will get the old heart pumping merrily along, as well.

Need another reason? Well, it's also the perfect antidote to election season. Living here near the border between the Carolinas, I get the unalloyed joy of seeing the attack ads from races in both states on my local TV stations. Whether they're stating that Sen. Richard Burr has a secret baby-punting habit or that U.S. Rep. John Spratt has been seen putting ketchup on his barbecue, they all use the same two or three voice-over artists and all hew to the same pseudo-shocked tone and "He/she isn't like us" message.

Y'know what? I'd rather elect someone who's not like me. I'm loud, hairy, overweight and have the fashion sense of a colorblind toddler. I drink beer, shout at the coaches during televised football games and have been known to scratch myself in mixed company. Perhaps worst of all, I have the irritating habit of saying what I really think, often interspersing my bon mots with profanity of such aggressive creativity that it has brought applause from groups of sailors. If the House of Representatives were full of people like me, you'd need armed guards stationed along the rows and the speaker's gavel would have to double as a Taser. C-Span would be the highest-rated network on TV, but there would also be pools of blood on the House floor.

And while I'm ranting, I'm also fed up with the third-party ads. If you want to support a candidate, fine. Give him or her the amount of money the law allows, then get the hell out of the way and let it be a fair fight. My rule? When I see a candidate supported by one of these "Americans For The American Way In America For Americans" groups that are just thinly veiled corporate funding machines that big business uses to buy elections to keep themselves fat and happy, I vote for the other guy. I don't care if the other guy is a tattooed freak machine who bites the heads off meerkats at campaign rallies and slaps on a tinfoil hat every time someone points a microphone at him. As long as he's not suckling at the teat of corporate political funding or, even scarier, pledging allegiance to single-issue PACs bent on twisting the Constitution to their will, he gets my vote.

Whew. See how wound up I get? The boys are in bed now, or I'd hustle them out to the yard and let them jump on my skull. I can promise you that for a blissful hour this afternoon, I hadn't a single thought of political parties, polls, margins of victory or anything else election-related. It's completely impossible to concentrate on a party platform when a 5-year-old's knee is homing in on your tender bits while his brother's elbow is staving in your right ear.

I hope the weather stays nice, because something tells me I'm going to be spending a lot of time out in the yard with the boys over the next three weeks or so.

Got a question? Comment? Rant? Phone number for a book publisher who's generous with advances? Drop me a line, anytime!