Off the Digital Wagon

Dearest Rachel –

A couple of days ago, I started in on a letter to you about a recent discovery about myself and my reactions to those around me. I’ve gotten maybe a third of the way into it, and every time I re-read what I’ve written, I’m less and less sure if I can – or even should – finish it and post it to you. It doesn’t name names, of course, but since I know who I’m talking about, I can’t help but assume that you – and, by extension, anyone else reading over your shoulder – is going to know who I’m talking about. Daniel would call it a case of projection on my part (and really, I get that it makes no sense to assume that others can read my mind like that), but that’s how my mental processes work. So with that being said, I figure I need to step away – if not walk away entirely – from the topic for now, and write to you about something else, something a little more anodyne, for the moment. And just to give you an idea of how concerning this abandoned topic is to me, the replacement topic is going to delve into the political realm.

Granted, it’s not going to be going in-depth on my opinions of this or that thing that’s happening in the world – that would be really dangerous material to be working with. But after a week and a half of limited access to the outside world – or, in the case of the past weekend, plenty of stuff in my immediate area to distract me from what’s going on in the wider world – there’s a lot going on for me to catch up on. To be sure, just like I’m not going to venture my opinion on it all (because I’m still catching up with it all in the first place), I don’t see any reason to fill you in on the specifics; it’s no longer of any concern to you, after all. It’s just that… there’s so much of it, and I need to vent about that in and of itself.

I’ll be honest, I was a little proud of myself that, for all that I still had to get over to the general store for internet access on a daily basis, I made a point of limiting the amount of time I was spending looking up the news of the day while on the island. Most of the time I was over there to connect to their Wi-Fi, it was just long enough to upload this or that video (and fill out YouTube’s questionnaire about its contents) and link it as needed to my latest letter which I was also uploading at the time. And, of course, on Sunday, we were taking in the church service. But throughout all of this, I wasn’t spending much time (if any) at the various news sites that I tend to frequent while on the mainland.

But now that I am home and have full, 24-hour access to everything, that week spent weaning myself off of the news feed has basically gone by the boards. I can look up everything that’s been happening throughout the world… and so I do. I can’t afford to be sanctimonious about supposedly being able to walk away from the news after all, because it turns out that I actually can’t. I spend my mornings scrolling through article after article as I wait for my body to catch up with my mind and wake up to the point where I can drag myself over to the gym to put it through its paces. Once I’m back home and cleaned up, I perch my phone next to my place at the dining room table as I eat breakfast, and continue to page through one story after another.

And I can do this for hours on end, because there’s no end of news going on, both here and around the world. To be sure, things slow down during the overnight hours – I discovered that particularly during last year’s travel, when the writers of the sites I frequent wouldn’t be putting out much in the way of content during daylight hours while I was over there – but come morning, the fire hose is turned on yet again, and for whatever reason, I’m compelled to be out there, holding my teacup out for a drink from it. It’s a wonder the darn thing doesn’t break from the force of it all.

Then again, unlike some people, I don’t consider the flow (or more precisely, the contents thereof) to be all that bad. Very little of it is worth raging over, to be honest; the worst of it tends to be stuff I have no control over in any event, and thus can’t afford to get wrought about in the first place. Meanwhile, there does seem to be a lot of it that suggests things are actually starting to look up for a change – even if, like with the bad stuff, it has nothing to do with anything I’ve done, and nothing I can do will stop it from its current trajectory – which admittedly compels one to get back to the feed, if only for the fact that what’s being served up is addictively tasty.

And while I’m forced to acknowledge that I am, in fact, a news junkie (although ironically, I’ve discovered that at least one major outlet would consider me a “low-information” individual because I’m not getting my news from what it considers to be the “right” places), and I can’t say that I’m particularly proud of having fallen right back off the digital wagon, I can at least take comfort in the fact that I can, if pressed, get back on it and ride it around for a while. I just choose not to, unless I have no other choice – like when I’m on the island. Which, now that I think about it, might be a selling point for the place for some folks; just not me.

In any event, for now, I’ve got to get back to other stuff I need to tend to out here in cyberspace, so I will take my leave for the moment. Until next time, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.