How to stay sane during the descent into dystopian nightmare

An incomplete list of coping mechanisms

Nirvana is right where you are, provided that you don’t object to it.

-Alan Watts

I’m sitting in an isolated cove at the Bear River, listening to the steady current and watching the sun cast glittering jewels across the water’s surface. It’s early spring and the riparian landscape is alive with butterflies and birdsong, the weather temperate, the river ice cold, the sky a vast expanse of blue. I am taking a mental health day, and for the first time this week I am completely at peace.

With rivers like the Yuba and the American in such close proximity, the Bear River gets little, if any love. Some folks around here pejoratively refer to it as a creek, ranking the misfit tributary lowest on the hierarchy of places to plunge oneself into snowmelt runoff—but it’s precisely the river’s undesirability that makes it one of my favorite places to be. I’ve got this section of the shore all to myself.