Season 26: Done, 30, Hasta la Vista, Baby

Today’s WORD on Journalism
Year 26 — Afflicting the comfortable since 1995
Friday, May 21, 2021

 

Did you hear that loud whooooshing sound? Like a sudden leak from a massive bag of hot air? That was the WORD running out of gas.

Thus endeth a difficult 2020-2021 season, the WORD’s 26th. The poor guy just collapsed this week. His MedicAlert gizmo went off and the men in white coats responded like Shriner clowns, loading the WORD up in a padded van and carting him off to St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose.

You loyal WORD regulars know how this works. When the WORD just can’t hack it anymore and the world’s woes overwhelm him, he retreats to St. Mumbles for some intense hammock time, soothing soup and serious omphaloskepsis (there’s a $64 word for ya!). 

After this year of COVID fear and political insanity, the docs have prescribed several weeks of sensory deprivation and a complete ban on news — any electronic input, really (because what’s more disturbing than “Gilligan’s Island” reruns?). 

For those of us left behind (no — St. Mumbles is not accepting new patients. Sorry.), we are left with muddling through without the WORD’s daily élan, panache and joie de vivre. How will we cope?

John Muir offered this good advice: “I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

Personally, I was thinking of a solo sailing voyage due west from here, but then I remembered the massive gyre of plastic trash out in the middle of the Pacific. I do not want to experience that! But may I suggest that (if you haven’t already), we all shoot our TVs and disable all but the phone and camera functions of our cell phones?

We also might stroll through the WORD’s offerings of the past year for random bits of reassurance and wisdom. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s suggestion from last September is encouraging: “We live in an age in which the fundamental principles to which we subscribe — liberty, equality and justice for all — are encountering extraordinary challenges . . . . 

“But it is also an age in which we can join hands with others who hold to those principles and face similar challenges.” Holding hands with sympathetic friends is a good prescription.

Helen Exley, a British author and book publisher, urges a lot of summer escape in books: “Books can be dangerous,” she warned. “The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’”

Whatever you decide, dear friends, please be good to yourselves. Breathe deep, find joy and play with a dog if you can. 

I’ll let you know if/when the WORD recovers and feels up to returning to the fray.

Good thoughts. Write if you find work.

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“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard