on the world that seemed to be sinking ever faster, but rather punching up to an idea of what we could be. I’m aware I’m not writing a motivational column for O, the Oprah Magazine (hello, Oprah, I am available whenever you need me), but it seems to me if I’m going to try to make people laugh on the internet, maybe it should also make them happy. Like the original viral Facebook post said, “We may be two minutes from doomsday but…”
* * *
—
Okay. Back to bed. No time to search the darkness for the bend in the moral universe tonight. I turn my phone off. I pause. And then pick my phone up again. Another thought about Mrs. Obama:
“You ever seen someone work this hard to leave a job?”
Now I’m done. Phone off, head on pillow, deep breathing, better life, etc.
My eyes spring open again as if my eyelids are like “Child, who you think you foolin’?” I grab the phone. “On her way to the convention, Michelle stopped by Independence Hall and snatched all of the Founding Fathers bald. And then she rang the Liberty Bell, just because.”
I turn on the bedside lamp and get comfortable. If I’m doing this, I might as well be able to see. Plus, the light keeps that haunted-ass chair in its place. At work the next day, I will explain my sleepiness by muttering, “Sorry. I was up late. Got called into a jokes emergency online. Michelle Obama is Shawshanking through the walls of the Oval Office.”
I don’t exactly know what I’m doing. Or why. (Put that on my tombstone: Here lies R. Eric; he didn’t exactly know what he was doing.)
Nevertheless, I’m trying it.
(Correction: please put that on my tombstone. Here lies R. Eric. He tried it.)
There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland
When I was a kid, maybe six, Maryland Public Television (MPT) took Lassie rebroadcasts off the air. My younger brother Stephen and I were incensed. Our youngest brother Jeffrey hadn’t been born yet, but I’m sure he was furious in utero. The Saturday morning following, Stephen and I came marching downstairs and went right to the set of desks our parents had set up for us in the living room. My mom asked what we were doing. Stephen told my mother, in no uncertain terms, that he’d decided I was going to write a letter to MPT and make them turn Lassie back on. Stephen was the spokesman and idea man, even at three, so I deferred to him.
We fumed about Lassie’s removal. We were shaking with anger. It was outrageous. I excused myself and went to scream in another room for a moment. Who did these people think they were?! I was determined to let them have it.*
Even from an early age, my parents imbued in us the knowledge that although life wasn’t just, we could always do something about it. We lived, the soon-to-be five of us, in a big house in the middle of a broken-down neighborhood in West Baltimore, lassoed by red-lining and crippled by the drug trade. My parents’ pleas to elected officials and city agencies, about everything from broken streetlights to increased police presence near open-air drug markets, were constant. Sometimes they got a response, sometimes they didn’t. But they were relentless because they were trying to create the world that they wanted their children to live in. At six, I saw the discontinuation of Lassie as a perhaps less urgent injustice but an injustice nonetheless. I assumed my parents’ mantle and set about to make the world I wanted: a world containing a highly communicative collie with an impressive sense of urgency. At Stephen’s prompting, I wrote a strongly worded letter to MPT on that beige paper with the big blue lines that they give you in first grade. My mother mailed it and we waited. I remember going to the television the next day, turning it on, and being thunderstruck that they were still playing whatever trash they’d replaced Lassie with. “Haven’t you received my letter?!” I bellowed, as I threw a plastic plate filled with plastic food against the wall of our playhouse. “What is this world coming to?”
Eventually, MPT sent us a couple of tchotchkes for our trouble, among them a mug with Disney characters on it. I unwrapped it and poured myself a juice, shaking with indignation. If this was a parable, I guess the lesson would be that life isn’t fair but if you