Does Blink-182 know something Gov. Brown doesn’t?

[...] this summer, the portrayal of California by nonpolitical storytellers is far less triumphant — in music and film, we’re in a state of frustrations, forgotten places and struggles.

No document speaks to this alternate view more powerfully than “California,” the new album from Blink-182, the Southern California pop punk band.

Earlier this month, Blink-182’s “California” rose to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 Chart, which ranks the top albums across all genres.

The hit “Bored to Death” is even bleaker in its sense of disconnection in a California in which “life is too short to last long” and people are “broken, lost and cold and fading fast.”

[...] the same sense of anxiety and foreboding about California has been a strong recent theme even from more upbeat singers.

Last year’s California-heavy album “Wildheart” from Miguel, the Grammy winner from San Pedro, was popular for its frankly sexual songs and mood, but couldn’t disguise an underlying fear of decline.

Heart caught in a rip tide, cold Pacific waters keep on pulling me under,” he sang on the album hit “Leaves,” with its chorus juxtaposing “sweet California, sour California, bitter California.

Blink-182 writes about not being able to go home again, the same idea at the center of the plot of the year’s top-grossing movie, “Finding Dory,” from Emeryville’s Pixar.

Dory, it turns out, is from Morro Bay.

[...] like so many Californians who grew up along the coast, she dreams of figuring out a way to return home and live near her parents.

While this is very difficult for human Californians, given the daunting combination of stagnant incomes and sky-high housing prices, Dory is a fish in a movie fantasy so — spoiler alert! — she escapes the aquarium and finds her family in the waters of San Luis Obispo County.

The San Francisco startup Niantic (a Google spin-off) had little time to celebrate the global triumph of its “Pokémon Go” before a huge public backlash against the free smartphone game began.

California’s mix of political triumphalism and cultural anxiety has left the public somewhere in the middle.

In a new Field Poll, a narrow majority of voters says the state is “on the right track” even as other surveys show stubborn and broad concerns about the economy, drought and the country as a whole.