Okay, brace yourself for another shot of my Ankler good cheer.

It should be the doldrums of summer news-wise, but is it? Our ongoing nervous breakdown has settled into some kind of stasis for the moment. Is it because things got a little better than the near-total sense of sky-is-falling collapse of a few months ago? Or did our denial mechanisms just kick in — denial always being our collective superpower?

Maybe we're heading for a rebound this fall. Or is this a pause before another big lurch downward, another floor ready to fall out from under our feet?

Across the industry the data may be mixed (Top Gun! And Gray Man is Netflix’s fourth most-watched movie after all!) but for a natural-born Cassandra like myself, while L.A.'s front lawns may be turning to dust, there is fertile ground aplenty for a doomsayer to feed on.

At the very least, there seem to be a lot of conversations we're about to have. A lot of thoughts hover on everyone's lips that can't quite be spoken just at the moment. So forgive me for interrupting the lull for a moment, but I wanted to give some of those thoughts a little air to breathe — a preview of catastrophizing to come, if you will.