Yesterday I tried to distract myself from the events of the day as much as possible and, for a few short hours before the world woke up and began to obsess, I didn’t see enough in the news media or on social media to trouble me. That was never going to last, of course. When the flurry of breaking news reports and doom posting got to be too much, say around eight-thirty in the morning, I closed down my web browsers and went to my bookshelf to find a comfort read.

My pick was “The Collapsing Empire,” the first book of a space opera written by John Scalzi. It’s an easy read, it’s lots of fun, it’s thoroughly distracting and fully engaging, and almost before I knew it I was a hundred pages or so into it and didn’t want to stop.

I did stop, just for a moment, to take a quick peek, see if everything was as awful as the doom-posters were predicting. I didn’t dive in the deep end. I opened up Tumblr, where I figured I would be at least safe from drowning. I go there mostly for the cartoons and the Star Trek lore. My short visit there was for the most part enjoyable, but even on Tumblr there was an undercurrent of anxiety, so I put down my phone and spent the rest of the day with my comfort read.

In the evening I had to remove myself from the living room, where My Darling B was listening to news squibs, because every one had at least a short clip of That Voice. Like fingernails on a chalkboard. I couldn’t listen. I padded off to the bedroom and closed the door behind me so I could once again fall into my book and read until bedtime.