Internet, TV images too graphic to watch

While searching the Internet for a wooden jungle gym and swing set for the grandchildren, I accidentally typed something about “playground” that introduced me to another whole world – that of pornography. Right there on an 18-inch flat computer screen was some pervert’s version of playground. The irony of the incident was almost funny.

Except that the scene was so shocking – repulsive and offensive – I turned away, bending my head almost under my arm like a bird while asleep. I used to do that in science fiction movies when monsters lurched from spaceships; I’d slink down into the theater seats until I couldn’t see over my knees propped on the seats ahead. There were moments so terrifying I could not swallow a chewed-soft Milk Dud.

In similarly unnerving shows, horror films such as “The Exorcist” or, even earlier, “Pyscho,” I’d merely spin my head – owl-fashioned – to avoid scenes too terrible to watch.

Later as an adult, while watching videos that scared me into stuttering, I’d bury myself in covers till the violent scene passed and the musical crescendo subsided.

The pornography unveiled unwittingly while surfing the Net for slides and gliders, swings and sandboxes made me want to puke, to be blunt – not so blunt as the surprise shots I suddenly glimpsed before exiting whatever site I stumbled upon.

But even those graphics were not nearly as disturbing as others. Certainly not as memorable – or haunting.

All week long, I found myself turning my head as if dodging a blinding light or ducking a rock flying into the windshield.

By instinct, my head turned in fright, in disgust, in pain. To be honest, I couldn’t view one more photograph of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

I couldn’t read one more news story describing the beheading of Nicholas Berg.

I certainly wouldn’t watch a television show on murderer Charles Manson and his followers – and the dreaded words “helter-skelter.”

I wanted no more scenes from the funeral of seven mothers and children killed in a car crash closer to home.

Why, I didn’t even wish to read about a pig-killing bear.

Instead, I picked up a favorite book of poems and I wandered out through the mist of a cool May afternoon along the coast. I turned to something from which I would not turn my head: Byron’s opening words in his “Apostrophe to the Ocean” from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar.

“I love not man the less, but Nature more.”