I read the news today, oh boy

As of right now, I am convinced that to feel better and live a more productive life, one must stop reading the news. It has taken me years to arrive at this truth, feeling in the past that one must stay current, keep up, be in the know, etc. Now I think it's all poppycock, hooey, and garbage.

The low quality of today's news stems from several factors. First, people are simply getting crazier, wackier, and more desperate, thus exacerbating the downward slide of humanity into the primordial ooze from whence it sprang. And even though I have no idea what primordial ooze ever was or if there is any left today, it seems right somehow, having something to do with people behaving badly. Consider the random shootings, the rampant killings, the taking and keeping of hostages, the collapsing of factories, the bombings, the slashings, the exploding of body parts, the rapes and the rioting, the fires in the streets and in the hills of California. Not good.

And when the facts themselves are not bad enough, there are the newscasters intent on making them sound even worse. The journalists, the media--those leeches who want so much to keep us informed while selling us sleeping pills and insurance and walk-in bathtubs by shoving microphones into the faces of the grieving widows and the crying parents and the crazed mothers of the twisted terrorists, asking them, "How does it feel? How sad are you, how sick to death, how torn up inside? Please tell us, our viewers back home in their living rooms eating chips and guacamole right this very moment want to know." The blonde bimbos in their low-cut satin dresses and Jimmy Choos and the handsome men embalmed with pancake makeup sit smugly reading the reports of death and destruction straight into the camera--look Ma, I'm on TV!--try to seem caring, but really they're thinking about lunch with the boss at one of those just-minted restaurants where a salad of mixed, local greens with a raspberry reduction and an artful sprinkling of organic goat cheese and toasted baby walnuts costs more than many people earn in a week.