The Value of Some News Blackout

I just spent a few days in a most bourgeois indulgence down in a remote part of Arizona. How remote, you ask? Well, the town of Winkelman, Arizona, is the nearest post office. At Aravaipa Farms the indulgences are substantial and ought to be, given the cost, which makes my hair stand on end, but all work and no play, yadda yadda. Even a leftie deserves a little break--that's why I rarely eat out or indulge in $5 vanilla lattes (as much as I have an embarassing weakness for them). Thrift begets these brief but intense luxuries.

But the point of this was that it was a total news and communications blackout for three days: no telephone, no Internet, no radio, no television. A small group of us hiked up and back in Aravaipa Canyon, then spent the other hours staring into the Sonoran Desert landscape, drinking good booze and eating lovingly prepared gourmet meals. The net effect: total mellowosity (yes, I'm making a new coinage) this morning now that I'm back in my mountain redoubt.

We've been visited heavily by Evening Grosbeaks in the clusters that are typical of the species, but whose appearance is erratic in this part of the country, and watching them in the yard while I was drinking coffee this A.M. helped draw out the calmness that not even thirty minutes of NPR could upset. I turned the radio off finally, because it was like sand in the lube during great sex. The sun as pouring through the budding aspens, my neighbors were coming out to pick up their newspapers or put out their trash or walk their kids to the bus stop, and life was flowing as it always does, but for once I was just letting it take me, instead of standing in the stream shaking my fist and screaming outrage.

Of course, mellow is not my fundamental nature. In America, as an American, outrage should be as normal as breathing, given the assault on church-state separation, attacks on social security, illegal wars for private profit, chickenhawk warmongers, institutionalized torture, antigay campaigns, and so on and on. So much to rage about, so little time on earth, alas.

But you know what? Taking a few days to completely ignore this shit really does do a body and soul good. Now as I page through Buzzflash, I am able to do it with a sense of calm consideration, without acid gnawing my breakfast out of my gut, with a perspective that the struggle is endless, yes, but that it is right and worthwhile so long as we can retain a connection to the mundane, the everyday, the tiny transcendent moments that make it so good to be alive, like watching a seasonal bird crack a sunflower seed under newly-leafed trees on a mountainside on a clear May morning. Even the Bushits can't take that away.