Falling off the wagon

Sitting in the emergency room at Cedars Sinai Hospital yesterday I was reminded why I don’t watch the local news on TV anymore (my good friend’s husband is sick, and having Emphysema, a bad chest cold can turn ugly fast so we were waiting to hear the prognosis in the waiting area. He is better today thankfully).

The room had a few TV’s hanging from the ceiling and I consciously resisted looking at them for quite a while. But eventually boredom and a serious need for distraction took over, and yep, I gave in. I let the morbid reality of the local nightly news slowly creep into my brain.

A few years ago I liked watching TV news all the time (CNN that is). I never really liked the local news because it did a serious job on my head, like, really depressed me. Scared me more actually. CNN seemed to have less of that effect probably because it felt more abstract. It was harder to ignore news like, “there was a killing around the corner from your house” kind of thing, so CNN became my obsession.

Then about a year ago I went cold turkey. I turned off the TV and turned on my Ipod because when I looked in the mirror all I saw was a walking news zombie and hated it. I decided I would rather have a song stuck in my head than the latest news about how bad everything was in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I don’t care about the state of the world. I do. I just needed to filter the flow of news into my brain. I was in serious news overload.

But now sitting in the hospital while voluntarily watching the news, I found myself breaking my year long sabbatical. There was a shooting and someone, some bad guy, was shot. No one knew if he was dead or alive. Seemed it was a gang shooting. Ugly. I could see the news reporter standing on the street with yellow tape behind her. Staring at the TV gave me some serious chills.

While I sat like a zombie watching this latest train wreck on TV, a burst of people ran through the emergency room. Cops were flying by me with guns at their sides, doctors yelled and everyone was pushed out of the way. They were pulling through someone bleeding. He looked bad, scary bad. Oh my God, this is the guy! This is the one they are talking about on TV! He is right here, right now! Geez this is too real. I’m done. Done watching the news. Local news that is. Where is my Ipod?