Full confession: As the news of the world has gone deeper into the ditch of death, fear, illness, ignorance, irresponsibility and flagrant falsehood since the Fourth of July – it’s hard to believe it could get worse in America, but it’s true – I’ve been fighting the urge to go fetal, curl up into a protective crouch and just hide. Disconnect. Hell, disappear, even.
Maintaining any semblance of optimism is a tough sell at the moment. I’m to the point where if I feel myself in a mildly sunny mood, I must be going crazy. Then I’ll read a slew of news online, hop onto social media, sigh and realize that I’m normal. The rest of the world is nuts, too. The federal “government” is way gone. Certain state governments are right there with them. Kanye West threw his hat in the ring, then pulled it out. Masks are still up for debate – and a trigger for crackpot theories and angry outbursts for far too many (check out this hilarious and depressing video for a reminder). Our kids and grandkids, and their teachers and parents, are life-and-death political pawns. Respected medical experts are demonized and retired game show hosts are deified (or handed the keys to the Oval Office). The words “world power” have morphed into “world pariah,” a fact that, shockingly, puts me on the same page as ancient conservative sages like George Will.
Down is up, up is down. Reality has shoved Alice and the White Rabbit off their perch behind the looking glass. So why not roll with it and smile?
Not to say I’m giving up, abdicating my faith, losing all hope. Yes, I’m worried, I’m pissed and I’m determined to do what I can to help turn the tide this fall and beyond. But like so many folks, stressing through the day-to-day onslaught of bad news, especially from my position of privilege, will only lead to true despair.
Over the past couple months, I slid toward that zone, and it affected my health, costing me sleep and exacerbating allergies that led to incessant headaches and a pesky cough that – combined with the fact I’d attended one local protest and, in June, hopped a plane to Colorado for four days of golf with my son – led to a nagging fear that I had contracted some mild case of COVID-19. So I finally got tested. Negative.
Whew. Time to chill and embrace what makes me smile. Right now, these five things have done just that.
BOB GETS ROUGH AND ROWDY
With his 80th birthday hovering on the horizon (May 24th, the same date as my dad’s), Bob Dylan is now the only recording artist in history to notch Top 20 albums in seven different decades. On Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first collection of new material since Tempest in 2012, the Wizened Mr. Zimmerman has, once again, tapped into the American zeitgeist with his inimitable mix of colorful and cunning wordplay, cultural and historical reference, weathered and wistful wisdom and sly humor – all wrapped in American rhythms and styles he’s channeled forever, from stripped-down swing to swaggering rockabilly to grinding twelve-bar blues. Every song wafts with thoughts of mortality, seen-it-all weariness and grudging regret, and Dylan emotes it all beautifully through his gnarled (and often surprisingly soft) rattle. I’d say his vocal work is his best since Time Out of Mind back in 1999, the last Bob album that I listened to almost obsessively.
I’m still trying to figure out my favorite tune, they’re all damned good, but at the moment, “Black Rider” is in the lead. Dylan goes pen-to-toe with the Reaper (and perhaps the current Commander In Chief, via such lyrics as “The size of your cock will get you nowhere … You’ve been on the job too long”). Then there’s “Crossing The Rubicon,” where death again takes center stage; Dylan’s narrator knows he’s headed there eventually, in his own time and his own way: “I turned the key and broke it off/And crossed the Rubicon.” After the elegaic “Key West,” where an aged wanderer heads to “the place to be if you’re looking for immortality” while staying connected to his past via a series of fading “pirate radio” signals, the rambling record ends with “Murder Most Foul,” a nearly 17-minute, history-steeped, name-dropping fever dream that revolves around the JFK assassination, which Dylan clearly considers the defining event of latter-20th-century America – whose shadow extends to this very day.
For a while there, as Dylan reluctantly picked up the Nobel Prize and continued his never-ending tour, I figured he might play out his monumental musical string with covers and Christmas trifles. But, perhaps because of the pandemic closing his road indefinitely – or in spite of it – he’s come back rough, rowdy and raging against the dying of the light. That gives me hope.
HAMILTON HITS HOME
The moment we heard that Disney Plus would stream a movie version of the wildly popular Broadway hit “Hamilton,” featuring the original cast and filmed over several performances in 2015 – both in front of live audiences, and in individual scenes to capture close-ups – I knew we’d have to take the plunge and sign up for yet another online subscription. I bought a year’s worth, and even at that $69.95 price tag, it was beyond a bargain. In fact, finally getting to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda and company rap and dance and croon their way through the heart of America’s founding – however condensed and liberty-taking their dramatic pass at history may be – was priceless. Even if we never get the chance to see the “real thing,” we got the full force and wonder and emotional wallop of this groundbreaking musical, straight through our big screen. Best thing is, we don’t have to give up our shot at seeing it again. And again.
COLLIN COMES CALLIN’
The instant I saw Collin Morikawa swing a golf club on TV, I knew he was the real deal. Then he came to Reno for last year’s Barracuda Championship and I got to watch him win the damn thing up close, going on a fine birdie run down the stretch to snatch the trophy in only his sixth PGA Tour start; he turned pro in May 2019 after a solid college career at Cal. The Southern Cal native displayed all the marks of a player with staying power – intense focus, even-keeled attitude, meticulous strategy and a gorgeous, balanced, smooth-yet-powerful move through the ball that’s simply built for the big show.
Morikawa’s performance spurred me to write that he was destined for greatness on Tour, and he hasn’t made a liar out of me in this year’s somewhat weird, coronavirus-reshuffled, gallery-free Tour season. After a near-miss playoff loss in June to Daniel Berger at the Charles Schwab Challenge in June, he missed his first cut on Tour – only Tiger Woods had a better start out of the gate – then came roaring back last week to win the inaugural Workday Charity Open at Jack Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village in Ohio, in a three-hole playoff with Justin Thomas. Ironically or perhaps fittingly, Thomas was the veteran Morikawa sought out for advice before his Tour debut. Guess the tips stuck.
Morikawa will stick around for this week’s Memorial Tournament, again at Muirfield Village, with a tougher course set up, a much bigger purse and one of the year’s strongest fields, including Woods himself. The first two days he’s paired with headline-grabbing, muscled-up and fellow recent winner Bryson DeChambeau, and another young star, Patrick Cantlay. Wouldn’t it be something to see this 22-year-old burgeoning star still standing on Sunday, maybe even in the final pairing with a resurgent Tiger? I won’t put it past him, now or any given weekend in the future. He’s proved he can tee it up with anyone.
LOCAL SCRIBES KEEP GRINDING
It’s no secret that among the many industries getting gutted by the pandemic – and by economic and technological shifts long before that scourge showed up – local journalism is truly on the endangered list. With Google, Facebook and other digital behemoths sucking most advertising oxygen out of the room, print newspapers in particular are on the media version of a ventilator. The lifeblood of their revenue streams, classified advertising, dried up long ago, display ads are a fraction of their former selves, and subscriptions are not just swooning, they’re cratering. Newsrooms in every size market, from big cities to small towns, are decimated by layoffs and retirements, leaving skeleton crews at best and isolated, overworked ink-stained wretches at worst, like the intrepid Pottstown, Pennsylvania reporter at the center of this recent New York Times feature.
It’s a sad situation, probably irreversible, especially in the short term as vulture capitalists swoop in, strip formerly robust media companies to their bones, extract maximum profit, then leave them to die. My father-in-law, Rollan Melton, who passed in 2002 after a stellar career as reporter, editor, publisher and columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal, was as old school as they come; he’d be appalled at what’s happened his proud, beloved business, especially since he helped facilitate the sale of the Gazette to Gannett in the 1970s, when consolidation just made papers stronger.
Now Gannett itself is pretty much gone, swallowed whole by another media company in early 2019, and while the Gazette lives on, I fear its days as a print daily are numbered. I’ve certainly lamented its glaring problems in recent years – weak or nonexistent copy editing and proof reading, a hollowed-out sports section, flimsy hard news coverage and way too much canned content from USA Today or other sources. I’ll admit that we only take delivery on Wednesday and Sunday, relying on their website and app for the rest of the week’s news.
That said, the Gazette, and many mid-market papers like it, somehow maintain a dedicated core of journalists who do their damndest to report on their community’s most pressing issues, dig deeper to sniff out malfeasance or irresponsibility among government entities, politicians and corporations, usually against restrictive, early-in-the-day deadlines, with ever-shrinking “news holes” to work with. Yes, they can keep content fresher online, but understaffing and a maddening tendency of even the most conscientious outlets to give precedence to sponsored “click bait” stories threatens to drown out the information citizens really need to keep a steady pulse on what’s going on, and what matters. Local TV news just doesn’t fill in the blanks.
Thankfully, this lamentable situation has given rise to several excellent online news outlets in Nevada, including the non-profit Nevada Independent, This Is Reno and others. New voices are emerging, and a new wave of young, hungry (and underpaid) reporters are just as dogged in their quest to get to the real gist of what’s happening, the facts – the truth. Sometimes it’s harder to weed out, but it’s there, and that’s a good thing when it seems that truth, and reality itself, is under more attack than ever.
COMMUNION IN PAJAMAS
Finally, I’m thankful I’m member of a congregation – Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Reno – that has embraced the necessity for holding remote services via YouTube in the face of a pandemic that doesn’t stop at the sanctuary door. When the lockdown dropped, the pastor and staff scrambled to get a cohesive, comprehensive, welcoming service, with a somewhat familiar structure and flow, online. I volunteered to help with video editing and production here and there. It took us a few weeks, but by Easter we were in a groove, and folks seemed to find the spiritual nourishment they needed. We’re still going strong, though of course we’d certainly rather be meeting in person; debate and discernment continue on how and when to make that happen safely.
At first, the idea of practicing the central and holy sacrament of communion at home was dismissed offhand, but we came around to the possibility after a couple Zoom meetings. “Why chain Jesus to the church building?” I asked. “With some imagination, we can make it a meaningful experience remotely.”
A couple weeks later we took the plunge, giving worshipers the option of taking part or not. At home it’s just the two of us, serving the body and blood to each other, often barefoot, in our robes or pajamas. I don’t think Jesus objects, and with open minds and hearts we find a way to feel His presence – and that of our fellow followers.
Is it perfect? No. But faith isn’t perfect, either. That’s what makes it faith.