I woke up this morning (Thursday), following my morning routine. I changed clothes (it’s my workout day), pet the waiting-at-the-door dog, turned off the house alarm, let the dog out, took the vitamin, let the dog back in, and headed to my study to write. Simple. 

Most days, I begin with my daily devotions, but this day something caught my eye and I put my devotions on pause, allowing my eye to guide me. 

I wish I hadn’t.

I was drawn into a news story, a rather complicated one involving a woman who was the victim of a tax ID swap, an accidental mishap done by Cook County in Illinois. The result was that the woman was going to lose her house because of non-payment of property tax, despite the fact that she never missed a payment. The county found the error but was still going to hold her accountable for the money being applied to the wrong tax ID, causing the loss of her house over their error. Finally, the article disclosed at the end that the problem was solved but not until attorneys were called in, at great expense for this woman. The only one hurt in this instance, despite the fact she kept her house was the poor woman, on the hook for significant attorney’s fees (of course).

 Then, as though there were magnets on the page, my curious eye caught another story, this one about the NCAA and NIL money (Name, Image, and Likeness). College athletes are getting paid millions nowadays, unlike the old days where they still got paid but the money arrived in a duffel bag stuffed in a locker or something like that, stories today that are fun to listen to despite the obvious cheating; cloak and dagger is much more fun than the obvious and blatant.

Anyway, that article led me to another one, this one about how a professional basketball player in the WNBA wore a hooded sweatshirt that had something printed on it that was derogatory towards the current president. She’s known as being “outspoken,” as it seems that the only way these days to create a brand is by being outspoken, outrageous, and downright disrespectful to anyone or anything. Not liking a president is nothing new, almost trite at this point, but the insatiable desire by so many to be outrageous to build a brand seems to be getting out of hand. Then, again, I’m older so that might have something to do with my views.

Sadly, that led me to scrolling a bit about the other topics, most of them little more than attention-grabbing headlines designed for clicks about inane filler topics, as though there are too many publications, too many voices in the hallways, and pages, electronic or otherwise, that need filling so they fill them up with silliness, clickbait nothingness, or downright negativity. 

Anyone in politics makes a move the other side doesn’t like and it’s turned into a controversy fueled by half-truths, left out snippets, and partial information simply to make the other side look bad. It could be anything. There was even a controversy created about the clothing someone wore to a White House news conference. This while never mentioning what Senator John Fetterman, one of the more interesting and open-minded of anyone in Congress, wears. He looks like he just walked out of a gym after a workout. 

I decided to look further, scrolling and reading and taking stock of what the articles were about, and, sadly, most of them were nothing but negativity in the extreme. It was either inane filler garbage by so-called journalists, little more than tabloid filler pieces about celebrity feuds (when will this garbage go away? Do people really care if someone cheated on someone else or if this celebrity said this about another celebrity? It’s like children arguing in a playground) or negativity about everyone in politics, no matter the political leanings, this time weighted heavily against the current administration, which, apparently, can do nothing right (and, to be fair, neither could the last one…get the point?).

That’s how I started my day. An unsullied beginning marred and slapped with red paint all over the place, the kind that won’t wash out until I go to bed so sleep can scrub it off, only to be inundated the next day, splashed with more red paint.

There is a solution, one that presents itself every day. Stop reading it. Stop reading all of it. Extricate yourself from it all, preferring to live, read, and survive in the world of books, of endeavors that pull the toxicity out of your life in every way imaginable. In the modern world, that’s hard to do, but not impossible. Refuse to know what’s going on at any level. Head in the sand is the way to go if you want to live like that, at least that’s how it seems.

Of course, you might run the risk of becoming ignorant of the happenings of the day, but at least the noise would be turned off, the red paint splatters minimized (Red just popped into my head, don’t read anything into it for goodness’ sake. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar), and there would be a modicum of peace in my active little head. 

I could read Walden, relaxing with Thoreau as we paddle our way in the wilderness, or sit in silence listening to the chickadees tweedle and chirp as the grass begins to awaken, spring approaching, or I can simply walk my dog through the river park, admiring the leafless mountains as he sniffs and sniffs, an entire world on the ground I’ll never know. 

Of course, I won’t know about the stock market, the latest in the world of sports, or the screaming partisans of both sides bickering about anything you can dream up while we spend ourselves into oblivion, the public hardly caring about that at all, railing against any cost-saving measure in the slightest, the car of this nation driving straight toward the financial cliff.

Maybe I’ll just bury myself in history, traveling back in time when it was simpler, but not really, just different with peasants barely able to make it because of poor farming methods or bad seasons while the royals fought with the nobility, and those in the middle did what those in the middle always do…survive. 

Writing my books takes me away too, to a world created by my own mind. The characters, the setting, the drama— all of my own making. When I’m writing like that, I am there, wherever they are, seeing what they see, and it’s fun. I could spend more time there.

Or, I could chuck the whole thing. Keep producing books, hope someone finds my work fun, enlightening, or at least entertaining and buys them enough so that I can enjoy a fine meal once a month, leaving all of the other stuff behind, paying no mind to the children in the playground of Washington D.C. screaming at each other, calling each other names, and predicting the end of just about everything so as to scare the populace when even they know it’s all hyperbole. 

Sometimes, I see them in the quiet of the congressional hallways, laughing at what they can get us to think. I feel the same about the “journalists,” sharing coffee in the writing room, wondering what they can write today that will “get them all upset,” as though it’s a game, we, the unwilling or willing playthings, not quite smart enough to figure it out. 

I hate being laughed at.

I’ll keep writing what comes to mind, I’ll keep trying to figure out my next book as I’m finishing the one I’m working on. I’ll keep my family close, my friends close, and good whiskey on hand. 

But, I’m not sure about the other stuff.

Time for my devotions.