- April 25, 2024
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I guess you can say this was inevitable.
About 14 months ago, the bigwigs here at PCO (aka Brian McMillan) gave me the old “it’s not you, it’s me” routine and sent me off to help launch the new Ormond Beach Observer. Out of town would be a much better fit, McMillan told me, since the circulation was smaller, there would be way more uncompensated responsibility and, at least over there, he threw in, “you wouldn’t steal the show so badly.”
Made sense. So I relocated, transformed the way Ormond Beachers thought about news and their community real quick, and things were going great.
I mean, sure, I’d heard the stories — the acts of protest and civil disobedience spreading like wildfire through the streets of Palm Coast after my departure. The hunger strikes. The boycotts. Oh, I’d heard the tales. But I never dreamed, guys, that things over here had gotten so bad.
The crisis came to a head recently when that bottomless-pit feeling of loss so many of you tried to bury this past year — you know: that boiling, what’s-life-without-Cavaliere? anxiety you experienced — manifested itself in heated exchanges over the construction of a new City Hall.
I felt terrible. To think all of these Cavaliere-deprived readers misplacing their grief so completely like that, and then turning it into aggression toward our fine City Councilmen, I just knew it was time to return.
It’s like Mayor Jon Netts so eloquently stated at last week’s City Hall meeting: The entire situation had gotten old — “about as old as eyebrows on eggs.”
I knew what I had to do.
“One heck of a wild ride, eh?” John Walsh, our publisher, said to me as I was packing up my desk in Ormond Beach.
“’Wild ride’s’ my middle name, Walsh,” I wanted to spit back at him. “Now, outta my way. I got a city to save.”
Truth be told, though, all I had to pack was a laptop and a green, toy robot I liked to talk to for fun when I was alone in the office. But I wanted to make like one of those movies, you know? Where the hardened reporter gets laid off, stares at the now-empty desk where he’d written all those Pulitzer pieces and grumbles: “I gave ‘em 30 years of my life, and all I get back is a loose handshake and a lifetime of regrets.”
But important moments are always better in movies. In real life, I just kind of chuckled, said, “Yep.” Then I got into my 14-year-old Civic and drove home, knowing I wasn’t actually fired, just moving around a bit. And I thought about how that’s all any of us are doing: moving around. Doing stuff, then doing other stuff. Trying to make the second stuff worth missing when it’s time to move around again.
Here out, I’ll be managing the web presence for the Palm Coast and Ormond Beach papers. And you can expect me here every week, too, somewhere in these pages, trying to make you laugh at me, or make me laugh at me, or maybe just trying to make this moment matter.
Remember that anxiety you used to have? Maybe try some deep breathing, some focused distraction. Actually, let’s try it together.
