Communication Glut

As with so many people, I’m suffering from communication glut these days. News is instantaneous and overwhelming with so many varying distractions. Visceral emotions and reactions overwhelm me sometimes. I’ve actually gotten to the point that at times I simply must turn off the television and car radio for days if not weeks at a time.

My children via my “Ex” labeled me a gloom and doom personality long ago. In actuality I’m stoic in my basic nature and cover or try to cover that stoicism with humor.

Almost any humor style or effort at highlighting the humor of a given incident is fair game. That leaves me with occasional accusations of being calloused, insensitive and low born.

I’ve been acknowledged at various times in my life as being extremely brave and willing to walk into just about any situation due to that stoicism and humor.

The humor and stoicism isn’t working any more. My particular sense of reality causes me to see things to my estimation, honestly. I’ve long realized that the stoicism and humor are simply subterfuge in that the silence protects me from seeming an idiot and the humor distracts and diffuses attention. What really is going on is a lack of desire for attention or need for self enhancing, ego stroking.

I don’t need to enumerate the litany of news and emotion evoking reports that we’ve all heard. We are inundated with those constantly, thanks to world-wide instantaneous reporting and headline grabbing, wrenching, mind boggling stories.

I’ve shut down. In my subconscious mind I’m seeking that cave hidden up in the hills that overlooks a small single road or walking path that meanders aimlessly below and past that cave. I see myself setting in the cave, much as the character “Ben Gunn” in the old black and white version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”. Scratching and asking, “Got any cheese?”

The island in our mind allows us to develop illusionary, imaginary places that exclude absolutely everything in the outside world. At least that’s the way it works for me; thus my noted ability to face almost any situation without reaction or seeming discomfort. That same illusionary and imaginary place can lead to many potentialities of psychotic or other negative psychological behavior and attitude.

Isn’t that where we all seem to be in one form or another? Shut down, closed off and cold as stones. When we do attempt to summon words or actions appropriate to the newest atrocity or unacceptable reported situation we are instantaneously met with that tribe of politically correct, sensitivity freaks that are overwhelmingly willing to point up our shortsighted and inappropriate responses while practicing their own mental masturbation.