Every time you look up these days, it seems, the news gets only worse.

Now, being in the news business myself, I’ve never been one to advocate for burying your head in the sand and ignoring the news altogether. An uninformed populace is how we’ve gotten the last few presidents, ranging from lackluster to entirely incompetent (I’ll let you rank them accordingly).

But sometimes you can only read so much more about India and Pakistan threatening to start a war, or Israel starving Gaza into submission, or President Donald Trump’s latest inane barrage of social media posts pretending to be a coherent political philosophy, before you need a bit of a break.

That’s one thing that the arts are good for.

On Friday, I braved the perils (and ennui) of Atlanta rush hour traffic to see the Atlanta Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried,” the third opera in his vaunted Ring cycle.

And while the drive was terrible, the music was worth it. Watching the pageantry of the performance, with dragons and dwarves and gods all vying for the powerful Ring of the Nibelungen, set to some of the greatest music in the canon, was definitely an experience.

The Atlanta Opera will be mounting a production of the final opera in the cycle, “Twilight of the Gods,” (or, using my preferred way to say it, the German title of “Gotterdammerung”) next year, and I’m already saving the date.

The opera, with intermissions, was nearly five hours long, so that was a good break from all the stupidity in the world.

Then, on Saturday, I went to see the new Marvel superhero film, “Thunderbolts*,” and that was a treat. The film was probably the best Marvel film in years, with the right balance of action, humor and heart the series once used so effortlessly and struggled to find the last few attempts.

Makes me excited to see “The Fantastic Four” in July.

I went back to doomscrolling through news stories by Monday, but, I plan to distract myself with a celebration of the many positive attributes of my mother.

She’s definitely an improvement on the worldwide dumpster fire. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

Stephen Milligan is news editor of The Walton Tribune. Email comments to stephen.milligan@ waltontribune.com.