Ask me about my agony and despair! By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Often is the question posed to me, maybe over on my Facebook page or via email after someone has made it through the messier parts of my book, but also in sundry sweaty nightclubs or boutique SF coffeeholes and therefore almost always fully clothed but almost never in a state of calm emotional stability: Mark, how the hell do you do it?

How do you avoid becoming horribly soiled and tainted, downtrodden and depressed every single day by the relentless onslaught, the endless horrors and bleakness hurled forth by the blood-soaked and desperately panicky mainstream media, inside of which you apparently still writhe and (mostly, sporadically, drunkenly) thrive?

It's a common refrain, of course, a question posed to anyone not merely aswim in the MSM, but also to upbeat politicos and yoga teachers, spiritual gurus and organic farmers, smiling scientists and perky baristas -- pretty much anyone at all who seems to move through life reasonably free of the bone-crushing angst so delightfully common to our misery addicted species.

Take, for example, how the UN and the International Energy Agency just revealed, like a gun to the head of humanity, that 2010 was the year in which worldwide carbon emissions broke yet another record, easily surging past any known threshold of planetary pain for the first time in our species' short, sputtering history. ...

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/08/notes060811.DTL&nl=fix)