The 24-Hour News Cyclone

There once was a man who found himself entwined in the 24-hour news cycle. More than entwined--entangled, tripped up, trapped momentarily.

He was on his way to the city from a cottage on a pond where he had been spending his days reading Greek mythology and fishing from a wooden row boat given to him by his father.

He's not certain how it happened exactly, but at some point he took a left where he had meant to take a right, came over a steep hill, wound up on a round-about and exited into a minefield of information, the likes of which he had never encountered before. He didn't know it at first, but he had just entered the 24-hour news cycle.

 He had read about such a thing once, overheard talk of it in a coffee shop, but had never stepped directly into the vortex.

 Caught in its spiraling  force, he was cart-wheeled  through countless interviews, drowned in a sea of data, analyzed, advertised, dissected and described in a swift series of short sound-bite segments before being violently thrown down a conveyor belt to be prepped for follow-up stories and presented to the public for citizen reaction, all the while demanding to be allowed to go on his way to a marine store where he had planned to purchase a replacement ore lock for his boat.

 To get a sense of what it feels like to blindly enter the 24 hour news cycle, the man told those in his vicinity to imagine themselves walking blind-folded off a Kansas farm into the waiting arms of an F4 twister. Imagine being spun mercilessly for what seems like an eternity but, in reality, is a relatively short period of time, then being ejected into a hay bale, left to contemplate what had just occurred, hearing from friends and family that they had been aware of your plight and had, for a brief time, noticed the whole country tuning in as well.

 He was 18 hours deep into that news cycle when it spit him out--dangerously close to over staying his welcome.  Once released, the man was yesterday's news instantly, his name forgotten by all but his next of kin. 

He eventually completed his trek to the marine store, returned to the country with his ore lock and spent the next few days sitting on the edge of his pond watching the astonishingly slow pace of the natural world. He was transfixed by the contrast, the sense that time here was imported from some alternate universe. The cattails went through their routine, but it was a routine stretched over a season, stretched over the cycle of seasons. Watching them was like staring at the small hand of a clock. So it was with the willow and the white pine. So it was with the moon and the breeze and the soil.

To make peace with what had happened to him, he decided to reframe his story, alter the names of things, if only to be able to tuck it away and move on with the act of living. He determined that he had indeed met an actual tornado, a force of nature driven by conditions created by God. It was not something he sought, but rather, what can happen in a world where the relative serenity of the day is often susceptible to nature's destructive forces. He had been just another Kansas farmer whose fate was intertwined with that of natures. Nothing more, nothing less.

And viewing himself as something natural, and earth born, running into something equally so, allowed him to question it no more, and to go on fishing.

But he would take a different route to the city next time. He had learned his lesson.