Auchtoon!

As always, you are free to take the cartoon however you’d like. But I feel compelled to say that I did intend it in a spirit of camaraderie. It’s an incredibly stressful time — the fires, the floods, the ongoing pandemic. All whipped into a frenzy by the upcoming election. I’m with you. I feel you.

So when I read the headline this week “Rare mosquito-borne virus suspected in Michigan,” I thought, “Yeah, that seems about right.” I laughed and then went looking for something that would cheer me up.

I think most of us have certain go-tos (songs, videos, stories, etc.) that we have seen or heard over and over and yet they always bring the joy. One of mine is “Learn to Fly” by the Foo Fighters. Specifically, the video of the 1000 people playing the song back in 2015. A young man, Fabio Zaffagnini, wanted to have his favorite band come play a concert in his hometown of Cesena, Italy. So he organized an effort to have 1000 musicians play “Learn to Fly” in the hopes of attracting enough attention to make it happen. (Spoiler alert: It did.) The video just fills my heart.

A day or two later I happened to catch the recent story of Dave Grohl, founder of the Foo Fighters, had written a song for a 10 year-old girl, Nandi Bushell, who had recently beat him in a drum-off competition. Again, fully filled heart.

All that to say, there are a lot of truly terrible things going on right now. A little humor and a bit of joy can go a long way toward making it tolerable.