I want my own echo chamber

I am surprised by the idea that everyone is sitting in an echo chamber, filled with only like-minded people. People who have ideas and opinions that I agree with, without having to first explain why I am not going to explain why I am married to the person I happened to have married. I feel sure that these people, my echo chamber people, do exist around here, I just have no idea how to find them.

I am tired of having to make sure that what I am listening to isn't playing too loudly when I hear my neighbor drive into their driveway. I am tired of smiling and politely not commenting on the insanely fucked up thing that some random person just said to me when I was grocery shopping. Or that fucking guy! That guy who insists, insists, that I please go in front of him. I want to have, in some form, someone to talk to about this kind of shit.

I want to talk to someone who knows why I am creeped out by that guy. I do not want to explain. I want to have a neighbor who just might listen to a podcast, even if it mentions, casually, the stupidity of religion, or the necessity of abortion.

I had to stop, about half way through the day yesterday, reading or listening to anything containing reality. I haven't been able to do any of the normal newspaper reading I do everyday. I read a lot of newspapers. My brain and sanity are extremely taxed and overtired.

I want to talk to someone who could guess, just by the above paragraph, why I am so worn down and completely relate to why I cannot read the paper. But I feel damned to this singular existence, somehow the only person in the state of Mississippi who isn't a fucking conservative. Ugh.

Sometimes, when I am overly optimistic, I do something like read an article that says, check this website to find the ________ (fill in the blank) near you. And I actually, quite stupidly, go and check the little location checker and find that, why no, there are not any protests happening in my state.That means that no where, in the entire state of Mississippi, did a few people think, "hey, I want to do that too" and then successfully create a similar thing. Seriously, that means out of the 2,994,000 people in this state, no two were able to find a comfortable, safe place, to create a parallel protests.

I do not think that this means that no one in Mississippi, other than myself, was super pissed when they found out that pussy grabbing was an acceptable activity to pursue and then be elected as president of the United States. I do think it means that living here is toxic to my ability to express myself, and certainly the ability of a lot of other people to express themselves.

I have managed to somehow miss the fascination that so many people have with facebook and twitter. That is not to say that I haven't got into the internet, or strangely haven't kept abreast of the technological advancements of the world. It's just to say that while I like haiku, but I am more of a long-form imbiber of information. I would rather read the book than watch the movie. I read the paper rather than watching news channels or shows. And no matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to give any shits about what is happening on twitter or facebook.

Its like there was a decree that the only new friendships allowed are ones based almost entirely on internet activity, and not on one's actually daily life. At least it feels this way to me. Shit, I love the internet. It's like having all the books. I love that.

None of this helps me find that clearly valuable echo-chamber I keep hearing about...