Flirting With Disaster

As I write this, there's a tropical depression somewhere in the Caribbean that all the spaghetti models -- those maps that show where storms are headed, based on various standards -- show as likely to hang a right turn, become a hurricane, and hit South Florida in the middle of the week, which happens to be when we were planning to go away for some sorely needed vacation.

Needless to say, we're not going after all.

I will be off work anyway, because even if I'm not going to be heading to Undisclosed Location, USA as planned, I need the break, and not just from work. I'm also vowing to stay away from social media, away from the news, away from everything that causes stress, other than hurricanes. If it raises blood pressure, I'm not going to engage with it.

Yeah, that's gonna happen.

I know myself, and I know I'll be checking Twitter all the time, ostensibly to track the storm but really to be on top of the latest outrage. I'll try to stay away from Facebook but I'll every once in a while just happen to hit the logo on my phone and see if there's a red badge on the bell icon. And if the storm does hit us, the weather reports will be setting off phone alerts all day and night.

And I'll listen to the radio, because it's one of the things I do and because when a hurricane is on the way, you listen to local radio. You hope that they'll do a good job of covering it, and the last time I was in the way of a Florida hurricane (Katrina, when it flattened a lot of trees in Broward County on the way to the Gulf and infamy), there were some stations in Miami and West Palm that were on top of things. We'll see how they do this time; the battery-powered and hand-cranked radios are all prepared and ready for action.

But otherwise, I do plan to disengage with as much of the usual media stressers as I can. We all need to do that, even when we're not on vacation, even when we think we can't. At least, there's value in limiting it. Take weekends off. Set a time -- after dinner, maybe -- after which you don't look at Twitter or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram. Turn your phone off, or at least put it away. Life's way too short to spend all of your time getting angered by the FirstNameBunchofnumbers trolls or your high school friend who's developed a particularly disturbing set of opinions on everything.

All of this is to say, no columns for the next two weeks. You'll be disengaging from my bloviation until October 14th.

See? I'm doing my part for your well being.

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I WILL be working until (checks calendar) next Wednesday, though, so you WILL get more fresh material at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page until then, and I'll start that back up on, I think, October 10th, assuming we don't lose power or that FPL gets things working by then if we DO lose power. Get there by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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I'm gonna go prepare now: gas for the generator, plenty of bottled water, flashlights and radios and food at the ready. After almost 30 years fearing earthquakes and wildfires in California, it's interesting to live in "at least we can see them coming" territory. Ideally, we'd have moved to "no natural disasters and warm winters but not the desert, please" territory, but we couldn't find that.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon