We’re so lucky

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

You know, this column isn’t really supposed to be that relevant. Sometimes, I can write about stuff going on here at the paper, offer clarifications, give a heads up when we do something particularly noteworthy.

But its real purpose is sort of like the Walmart greeter. I’m not trying to do anything but establish a tone for people who read the newspaper. I’m just trying to show that our editors—Dennis, Brad, Kat, Kelley and myself—are just regular people. We have kids, we garden and hit the bars, and we have the triumphs that get most people from one day to the next. We suffer the troubles that sometimes make the roads feel like they’re all uphill.

I’m sitting here in my office at World Headquarters of the Reno News & Review staring down the maw of the three-day Memorial Day weekend. I know that Memorial Day celebrates all the people who served and lost their lives in the military. But, as I write my Editor’s Note early for next week’s four-day week, I’m thinking about smaller heroes—single-parents, teachers laboring in unappreciated obscurity, students who plug away with uncertain futures, street cleaners, flower waterers, poetic bloggers, abstainers, ditch diggers and hamburger flippers.

I’m reminded of the first stanza to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which is too long to quote, but begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” and the conflation of Memorial Day and the helplessness I saw as I drove down Center Street today, doesn’t make me feel sad at all, but really, really privileged that all the wrong forks I blissfully took didn’t lead me into a mire I couldn’t slough my way out of.

I’m heading into the weekend with less than $10 in my checking account. It’ll be cool. I’ve got a fee-prevention thingie that’ll keep me from overdrafts, and I’ll get my last UNR paycheck of the semester Saturday.

So, to offer a little advance retrospective. I hope you had as much fun as I did this Memorial Day weekend. Broke isn’t the worst thing that can happen.