Category: Letter From An Editor

Categories
Letter From An Editor Opinion

Meerkat Manners

Photo: Joeely | Dreamstime.com

Editor’s Note: Other Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.

During a 2014 advanced fiction workshop my senior year at Rhodes College, our professor stopped speaking mid-lecture and turned to look at me. For several uncomfortable moments, his gaze lingered on my frame, eyes raking up and down as I began to squirm in my seat. Had I done something wrong? Looked too disinterested? Started nodding off, perhaps?

“You are a meerkat,” said the late, great Mark Behr, in his inimitable South African accent, as I sat there looking like a, well, meerkat in the headlights. “You really look like one.” Another classmate also failed to escape animal classification later in the semester, drawing comparisons to an antelope.

I’m still not sure whether I took that as a compliment, an insult, or brushed it off as a simple in-the-moment observation. But that little tidbit has stuck with me for years. When Contemporary Media (the Flyer’s parent company) began using Slack in 2017, I had yet to procure a decent professional headshot. So, rather than dig up an old photo of higher-ed debauchery from my social media pages, I trawled Google until I settled on a fine-looking close-up of a majestic-looking meerkat, gazing determinedly off into the distance, to use as my avatar instead (more businesslike than the smiling meerkat pictured here). As the years ticked by, and Covid turned us from an in-office operation to a remote one, that little meerkat photo became the only visual component of my daily interactions with my colleagues. As writers left for different pastures and fresh journalists came through our “doors,” I started wondering if they even knew what I actually looked like. Or if their one visual reference, that darn meerkat, was how they pictured me.

It got me thinking of a show I used to watch as a kid, Animal Planet’s Meerkat Manor, which followed a specific family of mongooses (mongeese?) as they struggled for survival in the harsh Kalahari Desert of South Africa. Scrounging for resources, competing for territory … heck, it almost sounds like journalism in the 21st century. Maybe I am kind of like a meerkat, after all? Looking around at the industry, it’s a similarly bleak picture. Newsrooms are smaller, and it seems like you can’t go online without seeing news of another round of mass layoffs, or of writers replaced with shoddy AI application.

Others can talk about these sweeping issues more eloquently than I, so I won’t harp on it. But a smaller staff means more bases to cover per individual, and it got me thinking of the many hats I’ve worn in my near-decade at Contemporary Media. There’s the writing and editing, of course. But I need to remind myself that there’s been event planning, billing, mailroom management, accounting, social media, web management, photography, and plenty of other professional responsibilities that I’ve either forgotten or repressed.

It’s left me with quite a messy head of hat hair. And in a less amusing way to put it, having your focus split in so many different directions all the time can make it feel like the walls are closing in. But that’s the nature of the industry today, if you want to stay competitive. And it makes me truly appreciative of all the behind-the-scenes hard work that every member of our team puts in every day.

But the thing about meerkats (yes, them again) is that they’re social creatures. And while companies calling their staff “families” makes me want to hurl, this job has let me make a lot of really cool friends and connections, ones who will let me off with a roll-of-the-eyes when I make my fifth lame joke of the day on Slack, or never complained when I crunched on wasabi peas for hours at our old Downtown office.

All this is to say that this meerkat will be leaving the manor, with February 16th as my last day at Contemporary Media. I’ll be embarking on a new professional adventure later this month, so if you’re one of the several people that enjoys my weird brand of writing, stay tuned. It still hasn’t sunk in that I’m leaving what has essentially been 100 percent of my professional career, but here we are. It will be strange not logging on to Slack to Shara Clark’s “Good morning, all!”, or Michael Donahue constantly reminding everyone that his birthday is coming up on February 1st even though it just happened two weeks ago. But what I really look forward to is picking up the Flyer every Wednesday morning as a fan. And not having to worry about fixing a dang thing.

Categories
Letter From An Editor Opinion

An Untalented Chef and Lent: A Recipe for Catholic Guilt?

Photo: Abigail Morici

Editor’s Note: Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.

I have a few good cooks in my family. My grandpa mastered a recipe for red gravy, passed down through generations of Sicilians — yes, red gravy, not red sauce. My mom has her signature chocolate chip cookies; my dad has perfected his crab and crawfish boils, and he also makes red gravy now. And my sister, as much as I hate to admit (because of sibling rivalry and all that), can make a mean red velvet cupcake. Today, my cooking set off the smoke detector. I burnt butter. It’s fine. It’s whatever. I’m definitely not insecure about my apparent un-inherited culinary skills.

I was also told that the way I was holding the knife was wrong and that I was bound to slice a finger off. My “nice” cooking knife privileges were swiftly revoked before I was handed a less nice cooking knife. But it’s fine. It’s whatever. I definitely didn’t take it personally.

I also might have let a few chickpeas explode in my boyfriend’s oven. But, again, it’s fine. It’s whatever. He said it was, as he ushered me away from the kitchen. I’ll make it up to him one day, perhaps by sticking my head in the oven. To clean it.

These days, I’m trying something new: cooking something other than pasta with three ingredients. You see, I’ve got about three recipes I know — three recipes that, for the most part, are harder to mess up than to get right, yet somehow only come out right for me about 75 percent of time. But there’s only so much pasta a human can/should consume in a given week, at least that’s what the internet says, so I’ve enlisted my boyfriend into a Hello Fresh trial as advertised in every true crime podcast you could listen to. Three packages of ingredients come delivered to the door, and it’s up to us to assemble them into something edible. A bonding experience that hopefully won’t make him think less of me. It’s fine.

So far, I’m mostly the sous-chef … or the anti-sous-chef, more of a menace in the kitchen than anything. (It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem.) I’m not sure where my culinary incompetence stems from — if it’s a nature vs. nurture thing. I guess it doesn’t really matter because the problem is here nonetheless. Growing up, I never really wanted to be in the kitchen to learn to cook; that was my sister’s thing (and we couldn’t possibly like the same things, God forbid), and I was (am) a picky eater, so there was no way I was going to touch half of the stuff that was being prepared. Rolling up meatballs with my dad might sound like a charming generational memory, but that is one my sister can cherish ’cause I won’t, just won’t do that. I don’t eat meat, never had, couldn’t tell you why, but I can tell you that the thought of rolling ground beef between my knuckles makes my skin crawl. (It’s just one of those things, okay?)

But I eat seafood. And for most of my life that’s been the caveat that restarts people’s judgy hearts and unrolls their eyes after they hear that I don’t eat meat, especially since I’m from New Orleans, land of the seafood fanatics.

This is why I love Lent, which is coming up in about a week and means no meat on Fridays (or Ash Wednesday) for us Catholics. Growing up, Lent for me was a certified guarantee that every Friday no matter what we were eating as a family it was going to be something I liked. Alleluia. Red gravy without meatballs? Hell yeah! Boiled crabs? Music to my ears! Grilled cheese? Sure thing! Crawfish? Yes, please! Shrimp? You know it!

Sure, Lent is supposed to be a time to reflect on the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ and to pray and make your own sacrifices, blah blah blah. Like, my dad would give up sweets for those 40 days, so that just meant more dessert for my sister and me (score!). I did do my own sacrifices, too, like giving up meat on Fridays (score!). For a few years, I gave up watching the Disney Channel. It was hard. I missed my Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Hannah Montana, but I lived. Obviously.

The idea of Lent is nice, though. It makes you see what you can live without, makes you respect the important things and practice gratefulness. Could you go without TikTok for 40 days? What about cursing at traffic? My fourth-grade teacher once told us we could also commit to do something extra every day instead, like saying the rosary (what fourth-grader is going to do that?) or picking up an extra chore (nah). I think my new 40-day commitment might be cooking a new recipe on the weekdays/not burning the house down (whichever ends up less ambitious). The great thing about it is that it’s only 40 days to give something up or add something new, and it’s only your relationship with God on the line, which is fine. It’s whatever. If you’re not Catholic, it’s a nice challenge for mindfulness.

But the best part of Lent has always been gathering for meals on Fridays, usually seafood boils back home in New Orleans, and since I’m not in New Orleans, these mostly edible meals with my boyfriend will do. It’s better than fine.

Categories
Letter From An Editor Opinion

On Making Money Matters

London Lamar (Photo (left): Clyde Sims, Jr.); Elena Delavega (Photo (right): University of Memphis)

Editor’s note: Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.

Some news stories don’t finish where they started. This week’s “Money Matters” cover story is one of those.

Back in October, the national Economic Policy Institute (EPI) published a report critical of the South’s “business-friendly” economic policies. They favor the wealthy, are “rooted in racism,” and their promised prosperity doesn’t really trickle down the way we’ve always been told, the study says.

EPI is a nonprofit think tank “that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people.” The Flyer is a paper for people. Tennessee data in the report were interesting. So, I wrote a post back then outlining some of the findings. At Large columnist Bruce VanWyngarden suggested at the time that the story could make a good cover story with some local quotes and context. Does this model work for working-class Tennesseans and, especially, Memphians? That’s where this week’s cover story started.

Just as I began to report on the story, the Tennessee General Assembly began to crank up. Most of the folks who head to Nashville to make our laws every year are evangelists of the “business-friendly” economic theory. They love it, promote it, and (usually without any kind of evidence) believe that it really does work for all of their constituents, whether they own the car dealership or just work there. So, a story based on data that showed the Southern economic model didn’t work seemed well-timed.

But as I began to dig, I found new money issues in Tennessee were pressing old class frictions to the top of discussions at the beginning of the session. GOP tax cuts for the business class were flattening state revenues, making the budget even more dependent on the state’s regressive tax structure. Some argued Gov. Bill Lee’s controversial school voucher plan would take money from lower- and middle-class taxpayers and give it to the wealthy so they could pay for private schools they can probably already afford. This all comes as Lee’s administration has fumbled two federal programs to help the state’s working poor, a sign to most that those folks were not a priority for Lee.

With all this, I diverged from the main idea of the story and these class issues became the primary focus of the main “Money Matters” piece. And I feel like I flubbed the very good original idea.

Information on the new story angle edged out some enlightening commentary from two Memphis thought leaders. Elena Delavega is a professor at the University of Memphis, a Memphis poverty expert, and co-author of the annual Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet. State Sen. London Lamar (D-Memphis) is a constant voice for poor and working-class people in the legislature. Look for full interviews with both of those this week on The News Blog at memphisflyer.com under a “Money Matters” headline.

For a sample, here’s what Delavega said when I asked if pro-business policy models work for everyone: “It may help two or three people at the very top, but it ends up hurting everybody else by denying the investment in the community that would make it a livable community, that would attract people who can have a choice [of a place to live].

“So, it’s sort of like this downward spiral,” Delavega said. “We don’t invest and then become even less attractive. Then, we cut taxes. Then, there is less money for investment. We cut more taxes and so on.”

Lamar said Tennessee policies have favored the wealthy since Republicans took power in 2011. She rattled off a list of cuts including the millionaire estate tax, the luxury gift tax, the reduction in the jet fuel tax, and more. But she said there have not been big moves to aid “those citizens who are working the hardest to contribute to our economy,” especially Black and brown people. This is on purpose and permeates the system, she said.

“You can look at that in the campaign funding of Black candidates in Tennessee,” Lamar said. “We’re funded far less than Republican white folks, even white Democrats. As long as our community stays poor, then we can’t compete against rich people who have the ability, access, and resources to play in a political game in a real way.

“I think this system of racism is reinforced through classism. As long as you keep people of color poor, other white folks get to stay on top,” Lamar continued. “This, more than likely, correlates to who owns the most businesses that are doing well, who owns the corporations. What’s the income makeup of policymakers and people that they’re voting to benefit? So, you can look at all those things, not just the economics side. Racism is rooted in the whole system.”

Categories
Letter From An Editor Opinion

Office Space

Editor’s note: Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.

The other day my Mac laptop started freezing up. I looked at its storage capacity and saw that it was more than 90 percent full, stuffed to near capacity with photos, documents, music, apps, and email files. I needed to offload some of that RAM-devouring content.

I began by deleting hundreds of photos, since they are on the iCloud, anyway. Next were thousands of old Word files, everything I’d written since 2015, most of it duplicated elsewhere. Also deleted were a couple dozen ancient apps — Chess, Stickies, Photo Booth, Lensa — all unused for years.

Then I really hit pay dirt: emails, thousands of them from 2010 to 2014. I’d transferred them to this computer from my old one for some reason. It was like finding a time capsule. All the pressing problems and issues and humor and humanity of that time brought back to life: Can we change the cover photo on the Weirich story? Is Branston’s column ready yet? Don’t forget, the annual 20<30 party is tomorrow night. Bianca put cupcakes on the Flyer table. Cashiola wants to have lunch about the size of the paper after the meeting.

As I scrolled, other names appeared that I hadn’t thought of in years — ad sales reps who didn’t make the grade, that weird receptionist who liked to use the intercom just a little too much, that snooty intern who dropped a milkshake on the front hall carpet and just kept walking. “That’s what janitors are for,” he said. Keep walking, we said.

It was a different time, a different culture. We ate lunch together, smoked on the back stairs together, stayed late when a story was breaking, ordered pizza and drank beer together on Tuesday after the paper went to the printer.

We hung out. We gossiped. And we emailed: What is going on with Rhonda’s hair? Is Phil getting divorced? What’s the deal with this new CFO? Is Donna P. wearing a f—king wig today? Are we getting a bonus this year? All this and more, captured for posterity in those long-forgotten office emails.

There were emails about snow days, which didn’t exist on Tuesdays because the paper had to get out, no matter what. There were Tuesdays when I picked up staffers from all over Midtown because I had a four-wheel-drive vehicle and used to live “up north.”

On days when school was called off, the office was filled with toddlers, as staffers brought their kids to work. The break room became a de facto kiddie lounge. We all knew the names of everyone’s kids. Most of them are in college or older now.

But the real email gold was the discovery of several issues of The Tattler, the now-defunct monthly company newsletter. It was written by senior editor Michael Finger, and to say he took liberties with the truth is, well, something of an understatement. The Tattler featured the expected office news, but it also featured long, rambling stories, very loosely based in truth, but mostly just created by Michael’s fertile imagination. No targets were spared. Once, the CEO had a fender-bender on the way to work. Not a big deal, you might think. But the story published in The Tattler featured ladies of the night (the Richardson twins), the deployment of 17 meticulously enumerated airbags, and the subsequent confinement of the CEO to a mental hospital with aluminum foil on the windows.

And no, Michael didn’t get fired. It was just business as usual for The Tattler. Everyone was fair game.

But those days are gone now, lost to the great office diaspora spawned by Covid. Millions of companies and businesses discovered they could produce their products with their employees working from home “remotely,” which is a perfect word for it. No more rent! Zoom became a noun, as in “I’ve got a Zoom at 10:30,” and now millions of us who once worked in offices mostly see our co-workers in little boxes on a computer screen.

An entire culture has vanished for millions of people. The office once was a congregation, a club, a family. People spent more daylight hours in their office than they did at home. Now, not so much. We take the change for granted because humans are nothing if not resilient. But something of value was lost and is unlikely to return.

Categories
At Large Letter From An Editor Opinion

Mayoral Morass

Paul Young (left) and Van Turner (right). (Photo: Brad Vest for MLK50)

“So, who are you voting for for mayor?”

I’ve gotten asked that question a number of times in recent days. I wish I had a resounding answer, but the truth is, I still don’t know for sure.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of possibilities. There will be no fewer than 17 (!) mayoral candidates on the ballot. In case you don’t have them memorized, they are: Carnita Faye Atwater, Jennings Bernard, Floyd Bonner, Joe Brown, Kendra Calico, Karen Camper, J.W. Gibson, Reggie William Hall, James M. Harvey, Willie W. Herenton, Michelle McKissack, Brandon A. Price, Justina Ragland, Tekeva Shaw, Van Turner, Derek Winn, and Paul A. Young.

Early voting started last week and Election Day is October 5th, so we all need to figure it out soon, obviously. I’m going to run through my thinking process here. You are free to take it or leave it.

By process of elimination, I can get rid of 11 candidates, either because I’ve never heard of them, or I’ve heard of them and can’t imagine voting for them for mayor. Looking at you, Judge Joe Brown.

That leaves six possible candidates for my vote (your mileage may vary): Floyd Bonner, Willie Herenton, Michelle McKissack, Paul Young, J.W. Gibson, and Van Turner.

Though the mayor’s race is technically nonpartisan, Bonner appears to be the candidate supported by the Republican Party. You probably received a flyer from the self-proclaimed nonpartisan group, The 901 Initiative, recently. The “grades” that the (anonymous) group posted for all mayoral and city council candidates make it clear who they’re backing. Their roots are showing. The fact that many candidates didn’t participate in the survey didn’t stop the group from giving out (mostly bad) grades on those candidates’ policies. This is some bogus crap.

Bonner is a cop and probably a decent guy, but 55 people have died in Shelby County Jail on his five-year watch and I don’t trust Republicans these days (or that A- they gave Bonner), so I’m going to pass on ol’ Floyd.

Then there’s Herenton, who was elected the city’s first Black mayor in 1991 and won reelection four times. After winning his fifth term in 2007, he resigned in 2009 to run for Congress. He lost that race and ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2019, losing to current Mayor Jim Strickland. Now 83, he’s back again, with a platform that can be basically summed up as: “I’m Willie Herenton and they’re not.” He’s refused to participate in any forums or debates with other candidates, preferring to sit back and trust that his loyal base will come through for him. Sound familiar?

Here’s the thing: With so many candidates in the race, getting 15 percent of the vote might be enough to win, and some early polling has shown Herenton in that ballpark. I voted for Herenton three times, but he’s not getting my vote this time around.

And speaking of polling … here’s the latest (September 7th) from Hart Research and the nonprofit TN Prospers: Young (20 percent); Bonner (19 percent); Herenton (13 percent); Turner (9 percent).

Gibson (5 percent) and McKissack (3 percent) are long shots. I’ve worked with McKissack and like her, but neither she nor Gibson appear to have gained enough traction to win this thing, so I’m not going to vote for one of them and possibly help swing the election to Herenton or Bonner.

So what about Paul Young? He worked for Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, then headed the city’s Division of Housing and Community Development, and now is CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission. Of the top three in that poll, Young wins my vote, hands down.

But … I’m vacillating because lots of smart progressives I know and respect are supporting Van Turner, including three who endorsed him last weekend: DA Steve Mulroy, County Mayor Lee Harris, and Congressman Steve Cohen. I’ve voted for these guys and I trust their judgment, but as I stated above, I don’t want to vote for someone who can’t win and thereby help swing the election to Bonner or Herenton.

So, as much as I like voting early, this time around I’m going to wait a little longer, hoping to see some more polling before I head over to Mississippi Boulevard Church to cast my vote. At this point, you might say I’m Young and restless.

Categories
At Large Letter From An Editor

Sweet Dreams

Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox (Photo: Library of Congress)

Did you see the video of President Trump singing the Eurythmics’ 1980’s hit, “Sweet Dreams”? He’s really pretty good, to be honest. Except honesty has nothing to do with it. The video — all of it, including the imitation of Trump’s voice — was created by a Google artificial intelligence program, an algorithm trained on Trump’s voice and speech patterns and tasked with creating this bizarre cover song.

The video was only online for a couple of days, but it’s just another example of what we’re all going to be facing in the coming years: The fact that most human creative endeavors can be replicated by artificial intelligence, including novels, screenplays, television scripts, videos of politicians or celebrities (or any of us), pornography, political propaganda, advertising jingles, emails, phone calls, “documentaries,” and even the news. It’s going to be a huge influence in our lives, and it has an enormous potential for creating mischief via disinformation and the manipulation of “reality.”

That’s why seven companies — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI — met with President Biden last Friday to announce a voluntary commitment to standards in the areas of safety and security. The companies agreed to:

  • Security test their AI products, and share information about their products with the government and other organizations attempting to manage the risks of AI.
  • Implement watermarks or other means of identifying AI-generated content.
  • Deploy AI tools to tackle society’s challenges, including curing disease and combating climate change.
  • Conduct research on the risks of bias and invasion of privacy from the spread of AI.


Again, these were voluntary agreements, and it bears noting that these seven companies are fierce competitors and unlikely to share anything that costs them a competitive edge. The regulation of artificial intelligence will soon require more than a loose, voluntary agreement to uphold ethical standards.

The U.S. isn’t alone in trying to regulate the burgeoning AI industry. Governments around the globe — friendly, and not so friendly — are doing the same. Learning the secrets of AI is the new global arms race. Using AI disinformation to control or influence human behavior is a potential weapon with terrifying prospects.

It’s also a tool that corporations are already using. I got an email this week urging me to buy an AI program that would generate promotional emails for my company. All I had to do was give the program the details about what I wanted to promote and the AI algorithm would do the rest, cranking out “lively and engaging” emails sure to win over my customers. I don’t have a company, but if I did, the barely unspoken implication was that this program could eliminate a salary.

It’s part of what’s driving the strike by screen actors and writers against the major film and television studios: The next episode of your favorite TV show could be “written” by an AI program, thereby eliminating a salary. Will the public care — or even know — if, say, the latest episode of Law & Order was generated by AI? Will Zuckerberg figure out how to use AI to coerce you into giving Meta even more of your personal information? (Does it even Meta at this point? Sorry.) You can be sure we’ll find out the answer to those questions fairly soon.

And we’ve barely even begun to see how AI can be utilized in the dirty business of politics. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign used an AI-generated voice of Donald Trump in an ad that ran in Iowa last week. Trump himself never spoke the words used in the ad, but if you weren’t aware of that, you might be inclined to believe he did. Which is, of course, the point: to fool us, to make the fake seem real. It’s coming. It’s here. Stay woke, y’all.

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something …

Categories
Editorial Letter From An Editor Opinion

Confessions of a Writer Who Does Not Know What to Write

Blobby awakes from his nap. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

I have a confession to make. Well, confession might be too strong of a word. That would connote sinning, and I don’t believe I’ve sinned in this case. Maybe, an admission — yeah, that sounds better. I have an admission to make. Although on second thought, admission reminds me of college admissions, which reminds me of college admissions scandals (re: Aunt Becky). And I’m not about to bring on a scandal in this column — that just might cost me this job, and I have a dog named Blobby to support. So scratch that while I go on to thesaurus.com (as any professional would). Okay, okay, I got it. Proclamation. I have a proclamation to make. Now, doesn’t that sound regal? At last, we’ve settled on the perfect word, but before I proclaim what I’m about to proclaim, I must ask that you not judge me. Good? Okay, here goes nothing … if you can’t tell I’m stalling … because … because I have no idea what to write.

I know, I know, what you’re thinking. Wow, so novel that a writer is afflicted with writer’s block. Boohoo for you. But, yes, boohoo for me. This is supposed to be my thing — writing and all that jazz. Back in the day, I could pull a topic straight out of my ear like a magician pulling out a quarter. I mean, do you see what I’m talking about? I don’t even think that metaphor works, and I sat here at this computer for a full three minutes trying to come up with it. In my youth, which wasn’t that long ago, I could write about anything. Once, I wrote a beautiful essay detailing the strengths and weaknesses of Julius Caesar’s leadership style — with each strength and weakness being compared to a different component of a Caesar salad. Anchovies were a weakness; croutons were a strength; lettuce was Caesar meeting the bare minimum for something or the other — I can’t remember, but I remember I got an A (and a note to maybe not compare Julius Caesar to a Caesar salad on my AP Latin exam).

I just know my younger self would be so disappointed in me. My therapist would call it a symptom of my anxiety — this need to be perfect. But look at all this space I have to fill with my words and thoughts. You’d think at this point that surely — surely — I would have thought of something. Anything. So much is going on with the world. So much. Something’s going on with the debt ceiling, but I couldn’t tell you what exactly. Then there was the season — or is it series — finale of Succession that happened recently, but I’m only on the second season, so I can’t talk about that. Of course, there’s the fact that Tennessee’s “anti-drag” law has been declared unconstitutional! (Yay!) But our reporter Kailynn Johnson has been doing a great job covering it (see p. 4), and I’m not about to compete (see my failed magician metaphor above).

Ummmm, I suppose I could talk about how Covid has been declared over but not really or about how the U.S. Surgeon General has declared a decline in mental health of kids as an urgent public health crisis or about how gun violence seems to be a permanent mainstay on news headlines or about how it’s been almost a year since Roe v. Wade was overturned or about how the WGA strike is still going on or about how Taylor Swift was dating a sleazebag of a man until like yesterday or about how social media is rotting our brains or about how carbon dioxide is growing at a near-record rate which is very much a bad thing or about how Ring cameras have been used to spy on customers which is also bad or about how capitalism sucks and politicians suck and sleazebag men suck, and this is where we end up with a run-on sentence and what we call a negative thought spiral that my therapist would not approve of (though she might approve of the run-on since that breaks the perfectionist tendencies in me, yay me).

I guess I could mine something from my personal life, but not much is going on there — even though everything seems to be going on all the time everywhere. It’s both overwhelming and underwhelming. All I want to do is crawl under the covers and listen to my dog snore, morning, noon, and night.

So I guess I do have something to confess: I have no idea what to write, and the sin of it all is that, if you’ve made it this far, I’ve brought you down with my sinking ship of despair. But I’m not sorry. As I said before, I have to fill this space, so I can keep my job to support my dog, who sleeps by my side as I write this, snoring and wagging his tail as he dreams about who knows what, as if everything is not happening everywhere all the time.

Categories
Editorial Letter From An Editor Opinion

May Flowers

A Santa Fe (not Memphis) skyline. (Photo: Paul Brady | Dreamstime)

Editor’s note: Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.

The stormy spring season has thrown a wrench into my carefully crafted plans this year. Power outages, lost internet connections, new patio furniture hurled from my balcony thanks to strong winds, and rained-out soccer games have been April staples (although my hamstring is grateful for the last one). But as the old saying goes, “April showers bring May flowers.” April has indeed been a bit of a wet blanket, but it’s set to usher in some other notable moments for yours truly.

One such moment is May 12th, a day I’ve had circled on the calendar for the better part of this year. That day, as I’m sure most of you readers are aware, is the official release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, in which the intrepid hero Link will continue to traipse around the wild expanse of an open kingdom of Hyrule. That big mountain off in the distance? You can go there, if you want. The ocean stretching off into the horizon? Go build a boat and sail. Or just fly around the floating island in the sky, soaking up the joy of unparalleled freedom in digital format.

While the game and its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, do capture a freedom unlike anything else in the medium, such wanderlust was a big part of my live, non-digital time growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The views from our patio unfolded endlessly into an expanse of snow-capped mountains, infinite blue skies, and rollicking fluffy clouds. And the recurring pastel sunsets, I must inform you all, put Memphis’ to shame. That little peak jutting up way in the distance? Well, odds are that you can probably head over, hike up to the top, and catch a different view of the sunset.

I picked up a friend before heading to the Porter-Leath Rajun Cajun Crawfish Festival this past weekend, and she stopped by my car trunk for a few beats. “Why do you still have your New Mexico license plate?” she asked, with a mixed look of both interest and distaste. And that proved to be an excellent question. This summer marks the start of another year in Memphis and as a citizen of the Mid-South. And I don’t regret a second of it, learning about the city, finally having a professional basketball team to root for, and having close proximity to the best kind of barbecue. But as I’ve settled into the humdrum routine of life as an adult in a city that requires a car for traversal, it has sometimes felt like a balancing act of absorbing the influences of my new city and holding on to that fleeting feeling of freedom from my Santa Fe years.

No longer can I step outside and immediately set foot onto an interconnected series of complex mountainous hiking trails or turn to my left and see someone walking their llama up a dirt road. The yellow license plate, complete with the requisite Zia symbol in the middle, has always been a pleasant reminder of the sky-blue desert days before I begin a journey to work Downtown that requires nimble maneuvering through myriad speed bumps, construction zones, and our patented potholes. This might all sound a bit negative, but I love my new city. I wouldn’t change a thing about my time here and hope to have many more memorable Memphis years.

But my pieces of Santa Fe have been drifting away in the past couple years. My New Mexico driver’s license disappeared along with my entire wallet at a Grizzlies playoff game last year (still worth it), and now this summer, the state of Tennessee is insistent that my NM license plate finally be replaced with one of their own. The dilly-dallying of our county clerk has given me a little extra time with my beloved yellow plate, but my last material connection to New Mexico isn’t long for this world. It’s been a steady companion over the years, as I’ve navigated some mild fish-out-of-water feelings while functioning alongside many friends and colleagues who have personal and long-standing connections to Memphis and the Mid-South. I’ve always wondered when I can truly call myself a Memphian, or perhaps that benchmark was passed long ago. Again, I love being part of the 901 and all it entails. But letting go of the yellow license plate has just been that little bit harder than I thought.