Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,4

sends shivers of embarrassment down my spine, would lead to a daily freelance humor column, called Eric Reads the News, and, later, a full-time, salaried position at ELLE. It would also eventually bring me to the attention of editors at The New York Times, provoke theater makers to express interest in reading my plays, and pave the way for this book. Publicly thirsting after a sitting president would, it turns out, change my life.

“My husband was called to his profession by God,” I would later tell people at parties or mumble to my houseplants. “I was called to my profession by a very accomplished woman in Manhattan.”

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I should be asleep. It is the responsible thing to do. Although I am writing the daily column—for three weeks now!—on ELLE, I am also holding down a day job as a program director at an LGBTQ community center. Every day, I wake a few hours early, chat with Leah on Facebook Messenger about what’s happening in the news, decide on something to write about, and attempt to fire it off before running to the center. Sometimes that actually works. Other times, I am squeezing writing into my lunch breaks or carving out a quiet half hour in which I can type madly into my phone before jumping back into my day. I have never freelanced at this level before—I’ve written a couple of hyperbole-filled concert reviews for Philadelphia Magazine (“Ms. Ross’s third costume change was into a king-size periwinkle duvet cover”), but those were the kinds of things I could dash off on a Saturday morning at a coffee shop, or spend an evening after work on.

This column is a whole different animal. It feels like the already lightning-fast news cycle is speeding up. The presidential campaign is kicking into high gear now that, improbably, C-list grifter Donald Trump has made an ascent in the Republican Party and it seems clear that Hillary Clinton will not face any obstruction to her nomination in a few days from Bernie Sanders. We are in a moment where the news is, blessedly, fairly predictable, which makes it easier to make fun of. But I find that you have to be quick about it. If something happened last night, you have until maybe midday to write about it. Otherwise, the world—and the internet—will have moved on. As a spectator on the internet, someone who lives in Philadelphia and whose only understanding of the New York fashion media world of which the column is tangentially a part comes from The Devil Wears Prada, I understand the speed and the drive but I don’t really know what to do with it yet.

I am still trying to figure out what this column is, and if it will continue past, say, tomorrow. I am convinced that everyone will realize they have made a mistake in giving me money to make jokes. I am writing summaries of happenings or “reads” of newsworthy photos that, I hope, have the tone of a late night comedy monologue screamed through a bullhorn by a very excited gay black person. There are moments when I wonder if this is problematic—the audience I’m writing for is largely straight-identified, so my use of my communities’ vernaculars might read as a performance rather than a genuine expression. But this is how I was writing before—Diana’s duvet ain’t gonna describe itself, honey—and that writing was for my friends. Even the Obama thirst was, ostensibly, for people who knew me, a little note dashed off to a small community that also happens to be the entire internet. So when I wonder about the column and the hyperbole I find works well for it, I have to ask if everything about myself is minstrelsy and whether there is any part of me that actually exists in reality, and I don’t have time to sort through that. I am an Internet User and I am trying my best!

I have to get this column up and get to work. Which is why I should be asleep. I can’t be burning the midnight oil when I need to wake up in three hours, figure out what to say about the Democratic National Convention or Jeff Goldblum’s hair or Idris Elba’s absolutely everything, and then hop on the subway to my job where I am trying to make community for LGBTQ people. In reality.

I scan the darkened bedroom—the window with a view of the South Philly stadium where the convention is currently