Safety Zones

A complicated experiment in reducing informational intake.

When I first arrived in Le Perche in 2021, I went to the supermarket, saw an issue of the local paper Le Perche, and nearly fell down dead laughing. The photography was terrible, its subjects mostly unsmiling. It dedicated enormous amounts of space to tea salons, trout fishing and questionable art fairs. Somebody won the blood sausage contest, and it would get three-quarters of the front page. I was transfixed.

For context, remember that I am a journalist witnessing the apocalypse of my profession. I was saltier about it four years ago than I am today, and still identified with the Important Fancy Outlets I wrote for (and sometimes still do). I knew Le Perche didn’t have the budget to do investigations or national stories. Still, just barely out of the pandemic, it was jarring to see a news sense so removed. It clarified the cultural shift I was about to make in a way that was actually a little terrifying. Exile in Bag End.

Vincent Malone, a humorist, musician, author and advertising exec who used to work with a friend of mine, was similarly gobsmacked by Le Perche. Malone once had a weekend place out here and back in 2013, he published a coffee table book entirely sourced from the broadsheet. He called it Le Perche à l’aube du troisième millénaire, or, Le Perche at the dawn of the third millennium. It’s a collection of some of the paper’s most mundane headlines and grimmest flash photography, plopped into a picture book with no introduction or commentary. None is needed, frankly. It’s hard to tell if it’s affection or derision that powers this surreal artifact, but a little of both will do.

The point of Malone’s title is that the third millennium will arrive much like the last two out here. Twelve years later, as I scan the paper weekly when I go to Saint-Jouin to buy veal chops or tarragon or whatever, the thesis holds up. This week’s cover story announces the construction of a local refuge for bats. Inside, there is a feature on the 30-odd species of the winged rodents native to Normandy.

I don’t know if this taxonomy counts as breaking news, but how are we all doing these days with breaking news?

The Country Festival was lit, I swear.

If the cool kids find Le Perche hilarious, the paper was my first exposure to how atomized people are in the country, how isolated, and how much they need local craft festivals or whatever, and someplace to read about them. Let me rephrase: how much we need all that.

Last July was my second year at the Country Festival—pronounced “coontrie”—in the nearby Big Village. My friend Béatrice and I wanted a girl-date and they were serving chili con carne. Why not hang out with some randos line dancing to Billy Ray Cyrus? I went the year before with Michel. It was goofy as hell, but I didn’t mind being somewhere where Americanness was a plus for once. Each May, the foire aux tripes, the annual tripe festival, is even better than le coontrie because there are bumper cars, a flea market and grotty live bands after dark. (There is also tripe boiled in cider if you want; I don’t.) Like with the summertime outdoor jazz festival, where quite good groups from all over France come to play on street corners throughout the village center, Le Perche will be on the scene to wrap it all up in a bow.

The chili was not Texan but it was not bad either.

Not long after she moved to Saint-Maxime, Cassandre worked a few years for one of Le Perche’s local competitors. She’d show up to boozy town hall meetings, her hot-rollered blonde hair bouncy, her pens and notebook organized, and swat away the occasional wandering hand while fielding nonchalant answers to her basic questions. She was instructed by her editors not to investigate instances of local corruption that were staring her in the face: weirdly ambitious urbanism in places that definitely didn’t need it; mayors giving local business breaks to spouses.

It is what it is.

I’ve been thinking about Le Perche lately, as the most prosperous political experiment in human history degrades into a tiny island kleptocracy, because I am trying to “focus on my community and what I can manage,” as the well-meaning people advise. For me, that’s meant radically shifting my news diet away from in the 24-7 hellstream of horror to things in my backyard. I still contact my reps, I’m not dead. It’s just, I don’t mainline the details anymore.

This is supposed to help.

Results so far: very mixed.

Cutting back on the outside stimulus of outrageous headlines means there’s only one place for your attention to go. This is where the idea of a safe cocoon falls apart. It’s not a rural idyll in my mind. There are no trout fishing seminars. It’s a bloody war of attrition on mixed terrain at best.

In revising a book proposal for a ghostwriting project the other day, I had one of those unusual moments of being able to observe very clearly how the whole machine works. Eckhart Tolle fans, you might say I became the watcher, the neutral eye in the sky who was briefly able to simply chart the territory.

When you are a freelance creative, time management is paramount. You need to muster motivation on command to turn a disorganized mess of half-baked ideas into an argument, with reasonable evidence and nice turns of phrase. You need to subsume your fury at whatever revision notes your editor has given you and just get on with it. Nobody is standing over you, it all falls on you, and you are standing on a ledge.

At some point, you find a groove and then you start to cook and then you’re off the ledge and skipping through the fields. When I get into that zone, phrases and arguments pour out of me as if already written. It doesn’t matter if it’s commercial copywriting or an article about something I care about, or flailing trying to write iffy fiction, or just me sitting here writing this now. It is magical every time.

Finding that groove is a search for the Grail. ADHD gets worse as you age, especially for women. (Shout out to hormones.) As my brain gets jumpier and more reactive, it takes greater levels of dopamine-infused courage to tackle the blank page. I need tiny mental vacations, thousands a day, to fill my tank with enough candy droplets of good feeling to push me one more step up the mountain, blindfolded, until momentum happens.

When I take too much time at the dopamine pump, which is to say, ten seconds or more, a nasty censorious superego reminds me that I am lazy, venal, unserious, and avoidant by default. It feels like a physical kick in the stomach, and it comes whenever I am not writing productively, which is 20 out of 24 hours a day. This bitch harangues me when I’m taking a bath, cooking a meal, watching a movie. I’m wasting the day, she says, and I will continue to waste all days until I die alone. I feel a knot in my stomach and my heart pounds and I am drenched in a kind of generalized disappointment that I need to chase away with more morally inferior distraction.

The seizures of anxiety were so bad on my last book deadline that I legitimately worried about myself, which only begot more worry, like an upward spiking asymptote of panic. This was a paycheck job and while I had to crunch a lot of complex information quickly, it was by no means a reinvention of the wheel. But it almost took me out. If my mind stops behaving, I can’t do my job anymore, I would say to myself as I lay in the grass in my backyard trying to regulate my breath. No pressure, it’s just the end of the world on the line.

So anyway, long story short, I stopped paying attention to Trump but instead of gamboling through a green field of small-bore simplicity, à la Le Perche, I dug into my own brain and discovered it was the Blair Witch Project.

Catching myself in the act this week, I was adding another perspective to this outworn dynamic. It was one of understanding, with the ability to soothe. “Of course you’re annoyed. These revision notes are stupid. Just do another paragraph. Good job. Now go pet the cats and come back in ten minutes.”

OK fine I will pet the cats.

I have another deadline in three days. I pray this nice lady comes back.