Away from perverse pleasure of local news

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© St. Petersburg Times
published August 20, 2002

To those of us who deal in it, news is like a drug. We started using at a young age, have now been at it so long we can't remember what life was like without it and we panic when our sources are cut off.

Then again, and it is heresy for those in this business to say so, a week or so without news can be a beautiful thing.

I sometimes enjoy not knowing what is going on. I pause here for the expected chorus of those saying I never do.

But my annual visits to the mountains of Colorado have become all the more attractive because I am almost totally without exposure to news for as long as I am there.

The campground at which I stay has no television sets, radios or public-access computers. If I was really desperate, I could listen to one of the two or three radio stations available on my car radio, but most of them have only a few minutes of news, most of which isn't the Sturm und Drang stuff that a real news junkie wants.

One morning I ventured to a nearby town to buy gasoline and, while having a cup of coffee in a restaurant, spied a copy of Denver's Rocky Mountain News on the table. It was like being a reformed smoker (which I am) and seeing an open package of Marlboros lying there.

Surely, I thought, it wouldn't hurt me to see what was going on in the stock market. But, even though there is no 12-step program for news addicts, some Higher Power kicked in and said, "If you look at the market, you will not be able to avoid the Middle East, or crime news. Take that first look and you're a goner. You'll be reading the sports section in half an hour, even though you would rather shave your head with a cheese grater than read a sports story."

Leaving half a cup of coffee on the table, and feeling cold sweat beading my brow, I hurried out into the mountain air and headed back for the land of noncommunication.

On my return, I had to start reintegrating myself into the news process. In a Clearwater Beach hotel room, I began sneaking peeks at CNN. All you really need to know at first is what the market is doing and that they have the standard talking heads that they use for filler when nothing is happening.

Then I graduated to newspapers and noticed a few things I missed while gone.

First, Lee Cannon obviously planned to purposefully spite me by waiting until I left to serve Mike Fasano a major political softball in what is shaping up to be a state Senate race between them. For those of you who were with me in the vacation equivalent of a cave, Cannon, with typical political acumen, attacked Fasano on what might be one of the few issues on which he is absolutely unassailable -- legislative pay raises, which Cannon claimed Fasano favored. Not only does Fasano oppose them, he has personally refused to accept any raises since 1995.

Those of us who remember Cannon's days as Pasco sheriff see nothing new in his shooting himself in the foot, although he usually does it before he puts the foot in his mouth.

In Citrus County, I note, a School Board candidate who had proclaimed himself as one of the "God Guys," and criticized a board member who urged generic rather than specifically Christian prayers at meetings, withdrew his candidacy after a Times reporter asked him about his arrest on charges that he masturbated in a mall parking lot. His explanation was that he was depressed and abusing drugs.

And, finally, I arrived home in the middle of a campaign of letter-writing attacking my old pal Barbara Fredricksen for a review and news story she wrote about a theater performance in New Port Richey. Funny, the Angel Cabaret and Jimmy Ferraro, which she is accused of unfairly attacking, have been the subject of so many oral and printed raves from her that I am amazed at the reaction to one hint that everything there isn't always perfect.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said something like: "When I go to a country and read only good things in the newspaper, I'm pretty sure that means a lot of good people are in jail."

Angel Cabaret doesn't have a kitchen but serves already-prepared food. Maybe they couldn't handle the heat.

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