It's healthy to avoid doomscrolling -- less healthy to avoid realityJeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, doing tai chi with White Russian in hand

Editor’s Note: Have a question about when this Iran-War goat rodeo will end? Don’t ask Matt. He’s off getting testosterone injections in case the draft is reinstated and fiftysomething essayists with unregistered lethal weapons for hands need called up to set the Strait of Hormuz straight and/or to beat trans swimmers at their next community pool swim meet, in accordance with Secretary Of War Hegseth’s Pentagon priorities. Any less martial questions? Ask them at askmattlabash@gmail.com.

Matt,
I haven’t watched network news this century. I never watch cable news and very rarely local news, and assuredly never the weather. The impact? Huge benefits and the sun still rises in the east and each day I continue to look for pieces of the sky on the ground, finding none. I’ve exchanged that nonsense for something helpful: reading more and sauna/cold plunges.

I believe one can find what you are looking for. Kindness and empathy, or divisiveness and anger. Why pay attention to the latter?
Thanks,
Matthew

O, look at you, Zen Master Matthew. I’ve been there. I feel you. Even if I’m more of a steam-room-over-saunas guy. And cold plunges make no sense to me whatsoever. Anyone who’d willingly shrink their own testes clearly has no experience in prison showers.

At times, of course, I can sound pretty zen, too. I’ve passed myself off as such many times in these pixels, doing my best impression of The Dude in The Big Lebowski — though I prefer bourbon to White Russians. I even used to wear a “The Dude Abides” t-shirt, until it got a little snug due to the aforementioned testosterone injections. (Also, from the stress carb-loading.)

But what I’m actually hearing from you— in your news-and-weather blackout — is that you’re a poorly-informed citizen who gets rained on a lot. I grant you that maybe you’re happier than many by ignoring reality. But one must allow the possibility that it’s a false kind of happiness, predicated on fictions, or at least selective truth. The same way a man cherishes his happy marriage, even if his otherwise-affectionate wife is sneaking out at night to meet up with the Pagans motorcycle gang in order to get ridden like the town teeter-totter.

The Book of Ecclesiastes (perhaps my favorite in the Old Testament), says “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

So just because you ignore reality doesn’t mean it’s not still cheating on you behind your back. It exists independently of you. It’s up to you how willing you are to face it, and yes, to occasionally even risk being saddened by it.

Personally, I try to take a fair amount of happiness pills every day as an antidote to the incessant negativity that surrounds us. So I regularly and gluttonously partake of all the things that are joy layups: fishing, dogs, bluebirds, woods, sun, rivers, words (reading them and writing them), music, etc. But while I turn a kind eye to those things, I still turn a wary eye to that which menaces us. (And there’s been an excessive amount of menacing the last several years.) Which might explain why my Inner Man, if pinned down by a sketch artist, would look something like Marty Feldman:

Marty Feldman/my soul’s all-seeing eyes (Credit: YouTube)

Take the news generated by our be-cankled Emperor, for instance. (Which is what I assume you’re talking about anyway, since he has plagued us in nearly every news cycle for the last decade solid.) I have tried to escape his ubiquity, to no avail. Because ubiquity, by it’s very nature, tends to be ubiquitous.

And so even when my attention span drifts out of the news’n’politics sphere, and heads to say, sports, he’s still there, too. Wreaking havoc, dirtying everything he touches with his orange vulgarian stubs. Mind you, I’m no longer much of a sports fan, having once been an avid one. But this past weekend, I wanted to sit down to watch the World Cup final. I haven’t paid much attention to fútbol…..football…(the hell with it) soccer since my playing days back in the go-go eighties, when we still called positions “fullback/halfback/forward.” (Which makes me feel older, even, than the parachute pants I am presently wearing.)

But I was rooting for Argentina in the final, solely because of Lionel Messi, the Michael Jordan of soccer, now a grandfatherly 39-years-old. (Increasingly, I don’t root for teams. But for players who should be retired by most biological clocks, who are proving that middle-aged guys can still keep up/thrive. Which is why I only liked Tom Brady after he turned 40 and lost his wife to her jiu-jitsu instructor.) And yet, even as I watched Spain beat Argentina like the family mule, I extracted some joy out of it.

Forget the fact that while I was watching, I was bank-shot reminded of Trump yet again, while making my family the Roman spaghetti dish, Pasta alla Gricia. One of which’s key ingredients is Pecorino Romano cheese, which has nearly doubled in price since Trump slapped tariffs on Italy. At least I wasn’t watching Trump on CNN, right? Him littering yet another cycle with news of his garish redecorating projects, or naming things after himself, or getting his ugly mug turned into a gold coin, or ripping off crypto investors, or profiting off his business dealings with dicey foreign interests, or trying to fix the midterm elections, or ginning up prosecutions of imaginary crimes of his enemies, or trashing our economy with his tariffs and dumb-ass war, or hiking the costs of everything while showing no regard for the Taters and HoneyBooBoos in Joe-30-Pack-America, who are getting strangled by his faux-populist policies, or lack of them. (Remember when he was going to replace our failing healthcare system with something better? Yeah, neither does he.)

But never one to stay in his lane, of course, Trump had to intrude on my innocent afternoon, yet again. I wasn’t even looking for him. But there he was, sitting with FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who looks like a cueball-headed movie villain, and whose name, as a friend of mine says, “is Italian for ‘garbage.’” (After much Trump bellyaching about losing out on the Nobel, Infantino awarded Trump FIFA’s first and only fake peace prize last year.) And there Trump was after the World Cup, insisting that America needed to host it again. On his watch! Even though hosting rights for the next two have already been assigned elsewhere. And even though it’s a quadrennial event, and he only has two years left in office. Meaning he’s as bad at math as he is at international relations. Unless he plans on being President-for-life, which, with an anti-democracy knuckle-dragger like him, is always a possibility. (And if Infantino does cave, as usual, and grants Trump his wish, rest assured that Trump’s grifter kids will find a way to muscle in on FIFA’s beer-and-sweatshirt concession to help offset the costs of the gold statues of the Tate Brothers that their dad will inevitably erect in the Rose Garden.)

But then, even with all that bad news came good news: Spanish fans — who hate Trump with their whole heart after he has slagged their country on repeated occasions — booed him lustily as he was introduced. A Spanish player mimicked Trumps spaz-dance-moves as Trump presented their gold medals. (Even as Trump was likely tempted to seize and melt down their medals to back a new My-Pillow-Guy stablecoin.) And then, to add insult, Spain cropped Trump out of their trophy photo on Instagram. Much as Trump has cropped the American People out of his vision of “Making America Great Again.”

So all’s well that ends well. Even bad news can become good news when the wheel of karma rolls over on the former.

And so yes, you’re right, Matthew. We don’t have to accentuate the negative all the time. And probably shouldn’t. But hold out the possibility that we do have to cross swords with it now and then, in order to turn it into a positive. That’s how justice gets served. And there might be no sweeter word in the English language (or the Spanish one), than justice/justicia. Which usually requires some kind of collective reality-acknowledgment. James Baldwin had it right when he wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

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Bonus Track: Here’s a Townes Van Zandt cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers,” which was on The Big Lebowski soundtrack. And there are some nice visuals of Jeff Bridges performing tai chi without spilling his White Russian, as all the old shifus do.