Confessions of a Junkie...

Increasingly my favorite days don’t match up with anyone else’s.

And I’m not sure what that means but what else might you expect
from someone who thinks that Scrooge was really a nice guy…and
that snakes and bugs are fun.

I have always favored rough weather and living in the path of squalls or major storms.
I have been through hurricanes on the islands—a few set a record or two, typhoons in China, water spouts in Coastal Florida, mind-boggling ice storms in Tennessee, earthquakes in California, and blinding snowstorms in the mountains.

Now, I live in the path of nor’easters and I love them.

Is this guy nuts?

No, and I’ll tell you why: rough weather knocks the power out most of the time.

So?....

Being a news junky, it is very hard to break away sometimes so you need an act of Nature to do it for you….

And if you’ve personally never experienced a kind of pervasive blanket of quiet, you are in for a treat.

Because we live on a peninsula, we get our share of power outages; only they don’t last long enough. In the mountains, where I used to live, when the power failed, it failed. And it was serious business, because if the power stayed out you could bust a pipe in very short order.

Also, in the mountains there is a kind of darkness that most of us who don’t know total darkness may find that they can’t cope with. This is darkness where you can literally see nothing; not even when you stick your hand in front of your face.

Like I say, as long as I had my dogs with me, I was okay.

At times like that, I could start a fire in one of my fireplaces and fuel up a little lantern which would give me enough light to read by. There were no phone calls. No television. (We couldn’t get the signals where we were anyway). My fax didn’t work. My computer could not reach out to the World. For some, I’m sure, on the receiving end, it was reason to celebrate. And there was absolutely no way that anyone could pester me except driving up two miles with bottomless drops and no lights from the main road.

Like I say, I’m a news junky but that doesn’t mean I like to listen to what the news readers have to say. The worst thing that could have happened to the news was Fox and its progeny who don’t care what they say as long as it generates ratings.
It has cheapened the whole business. And spread like wild-fire.

But what is worse than cheapening the business, is that it has allowed the wrong impressions to stand; it is dishonest and being exploited as a form of entertainment.

When I listen to the news, I don’t want entertainment, I want to edified, educated, informed;not spoken to as if I were an idiot incapable of differentiating fact from fiction.

This gives me reason to comment on what was once a good news source. CBS has been in a furor lately cause their ratings are sinking.

And well they should considering the crap that they pass off as serious news.

If you were to take notes, I doubt whether you would find more than two and a half minutes a night devoted to what’s happening in the rest of the world.

And if that doesn’t just isolate us, what does?

So thank you Nature for the occasional break—a time when my blood pressure comes down and I can wipe the gathering foam from my lips. I know I’m not missing anything.

Who knows, maybe Nature doesn’t like the news either.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon