If you\u2019re, like me, one of the people who ingests news with your morning coffee (or reads those banner headlines that pop up on your phone a hundred or so times a day), you too\u2014whatever your political persuasion\u2014have likely been making regular visits to medical websites for self-help tips.\u00a0 After each jolt of adrenaline you practice the ten steps, which you by now have memories, that help lower your blood pressure or the eight steps that increase your endorphin production.\u00a0 Which works, until the next headline.<\/p>\n
I finally decided that getting out of Dodge, at least for a couple of days, would calm my nervous system.\u00a0 So I went on a road trip across the desert, a sizable chunk of land with fewer people than my neighborhood.\u00a0 Cut off from the news feed as I drove across the landscape, I marveled at the giant hills, the wide blue skies, and vast stretches of sand which were only sporadically and disconcertingly interrupted by tract-housing development and strip malls that appeared to be transplanted from the midwest circa 1990.\u00a0 And I won\u2019t lie, I positively wept at the billboards advertising houses for the price of a car where I live.<\/p>\n
As I crossed into the next state and my phone\u2019s reception came back on, news banners started pinging like a winning hand on a video poker machine.\u00a0 Headline alerts about this awful political nightmare, linked to opinion pieces railing at both sides.\u00a0 So many of them quoted fear and trepidation about our fellow Americans with whom we disagree.<\/p>\n
I guess this is the coming normal, an era of continuous disruption with little resolution.\u00a0 This country feels chaotic, and hypervigilance is the new normal.\u00a0 It might be some time after things calm down and he is finally out (yes, I was With Her, duh), and we again find harmony.\u00a0 And in the meantime, we will have already paid too heavy a price.\u00a0 At full retail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you\u2019re, like me, one of the people who ingests news with your morning coffee (or reads those banner headlines that pop up on your phone a hundred or so times a day), you too\u2014whatever your political persuasion\u2014have likely been making regular visits to medical websites for self-help tips.\u00a0 After each jolt of adrenaline you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n