BUCKLE UP: Desperate times, we are told, call for desperate measures. So, early last Sunday morning — with the fog still ripe — I went to Mass up at the Mission. Aside from weddings and funerals, it was the first time in 40 years I’d attended a Mass. Nine years of Catholic school has that effect.
I had no idea what I hoped for. To be embraced by an overwhelming sense of calm would have been nice. I can’t say I found it. Maybe I needed to open a Tinder account instead. During the reading of the Gospel, I strained to make out the words. But Mission acoustics are notoriously muffled, and Jesus made a point to be oblique. During his sermon, the priest boiled it down for us. “Salvation comes from unexpected places,” he intoned. Admittedly, the fortune cookie I opened a few nights before seemed more meaningful. Even so, it was a start. Hope hid in the wrinkles of those words.
To be clear, it’s not all Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Doctors have recently discovered that life — when taken in chronic doses — can take a toll. Accordingly, my doctor prescribed a dose of white line therapy. “Hit the road, Welsh,” he ordered. “Get out of Dodge.”
Armed with my bicycle and an eight-string baritone ukulele, I headed north to Cambria. Some friends who have a place up there kindly allowed me to crash.
Cambria, I was to discover, has been a quiet hotbed of amazing jazz hiding in plain sight since 1991, thanks to the arrival of legendary West Coast jazz vibraphonist Charlie Shoemake and his wife, the equally talented jazz vocalist Sandi Shoemake. He is 87 going on 58 and plays a variant of bebop that’s flat-out exhilarating. He plays with a striking grace but also swings hard. And when he accelerates out of a curve during a solo, you can’t help but laugh out loud. It’s that amazing.
The Shoemakes play at a restaurant owned by an Italian chef living in the U.S.A. for 40 years. Unfortunately, coming from a country with a history of fascism, the chef’s none too thrilled by the prospect of ending his days with the Il Duce knockoff now occupying the White House. He’s been thinking about moving back to Italy, where the chaotic dysfunction of that political system — there are nine parties there instead of two — might minimize the damage any elected leader can actually do. Should that come to pass, the Shoemakes — and all the musical magic they attract — will have to find a new perch.
Some things you just can’t escape, not even in a coastal town of wind-chime shops and cookie emporiums. No one — not even the most apocalyptic catastrophist — could have conjured the symbiotic malignancy of Donald and Elon Musk. Who’s Batman? Who’s Robin? Who knows.
But Musk — having never been elected to or appointed to or vetted for any government post — has now seized control over the highly sensitive federal agencies responsible for cutting billions of checks to millions of people worth trillions of dollars a year. He seized the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and sent out quit-or-get-fired buyout slips to millions of federal workers. A small detail, perhaps, but as of December, the United States Air Force has denied Musk the security clearance needed to step foot inside any of his own SpaceX facilities when highly confidential matters are being discussed or worked on at the time.
The Air Force — which oversees Musk’s SpaceX rocket launchings from Vandenberg — has reportedly expressed concern that Musk has failed to disclose relevant information regarding his recreational use of ketamine, LSD, and magic mushrooms. More alarmingly, Musk never disclosed that he has been in regular private conversations with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin since 2022. Given the Air Force’s total reliance on SpaceX rockets for vital military missions, it’s critical that Musk not be a rogue operator running his own personal foreign policy. The reality is that we don’t know.
Back in church, we came to the “hear-our-prayer” part of the service. The priest called on us to pray for the poor to have the medical care they need, to pray for women and children to be protected from domestic violence, and to pray that the government only deported truly hardened criminals for being in the country illegally. The message was subliminal but pointed. Nobody walked out. When the Mission doors opened so we could leave, the fog was still thick and pregnant. But it was suffused in the brightness of the sun trying to break through.
And no, I’m not making this up.
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