Not Scared

3:30 on a Friday afternoon and guess who’s fact-checking the motherfucking President again.

It’s a Squawk, obviously. It’s always a Squawk. My editor pinged me the second the President posted it on his Squawker account. Now I’m sifting through data tables from NASA for hard, linkable evidence that the Moon cannot, in fact, “easily grow our great Nation’s most important Foods.”

Nice out, for once. The rain has finally shut off and the afternoon air is twitching, shaking itself out. I reach behind the couch to open up the window and breathe in the, what’s it called. That smell. When fresh rain hits the dirt and fires up all those dormant plant oils. Earthy and dark. There’s a word for it—something Greek? I read about it once when my editor asked me to disprove the President’s claim that the smell of new rain came from “our tremendous smelling American clouds, you can’t find clouds like this anywhere in the world,” I shit you not.

It’s going to bug me all night.

I blink the dryness out of my eyes and post the evidential links into the site’s shared spreadsheet, along with a screenshot of the President’s post and a couple lines of explanation (“can’t believe I have to say this but data shows Moon has (a) no carbon dioxide, (b) no organic soil nutrients, (c) no possibility of supporting liquid water at surface, (d) daily temperature swings of -279 to 212 deg. F”).

Which, who am I even trying to convince?

But that’s my job, or one of them anyway. Obviously I don’t get paid to write the actual articles. Way above my pay grade. Freelancers are just the fluffers, and we’re always on-call. Tomorrow one of the site’s staff writers will take my notes from the spreadsheet and turn them into another heavily trafficked and bright purple essay lamenting the sad state of Alternative Facts in our country. It’s like the blog version of screaming in a bad English accent Have you no decency, sir? Well, no, man, he doesn’t. It’s exhausting. Just article after shareable article proving how the most powerful person in the world routinely and blithely makes stuff up, for no reason, even minor shit that can’t possibly help him, unless you’re one of those people who thinks the President is wily enough to intentionally distract the news cycle from his laundry list of literal actual war crimes with some Squawk about how you can definitely grow crops on the fucking Moon.

Now the whole internet will be bloated with hilarious memes about the Moon for a day or two instead of actionable ideas for stopping the new autonomous cop initiative or saving all the refugee kids he’s got locked up in those floating offshore superprisons. Nobody wants actionable. They want shareable, cute, funny, arch. Something to slap in their reels or ReSquawk as a branding technique to show the world hey, no, fascism is a no thanks from me, pal.

I’m not complaining about fact-checking, by the way; it’s my bread and butter, even if the bread is a little moldy and the butter comes in a big greasy discount tub. It’s more than just scraping out a living. I’m obsessed with objective provable truths, with that little shiver of dopamine you get when you find the guy on camera saying the thing he claims he never said, and from three different angles to boot.

It’s just that nobody gives a shit.

I close the spreadsheet, ping my editor, and add another half-hour’s work to my invoice, i.e. like twelve measly dollars. Then I start wearily popping all my joints in preparation for Max waking up from his nap. Sure enough, right on cue, I check the monitor and he’s sleepily chanting, “Don’t eat green part of strawberry. Don’t eat green part.”

I head into our apartment’s only bedroom—I sleep on a futon in the living room—and open the blackout drapes. Watery light leaks in. “Hey bud,” I say as I lift Max from his crib. “Good nap?”

“Yes,” he says, nuzzling his face into my beard. “No dreams. Don’t eat green part of strawberry.”

“Good call,” I say.

“Just red part.”

“That’s right. You want some strawbs?”

“Only red part.”

“You got it.”

I change his diaper and give him a snack—red parts only. In his highchair, he peers at the berries closely, from all angles, holding them up to the light like a jeweler, to make sure I didn’t leave any flecks of green when I hulled them. Then he gives a little whuff of satisfaction and digs in.

Red juice waterfalling down his chin, he turns to me and hopefully asks, “Go to park?”

“Sure. Let me just check on a work thing.”

“Big slide?”

“Definitely. If you think you can handle it.”

He gives his little thinking-about-it pause. “What is handle it mean?” he asks, intrigued.

“Oh, um. I just mean you can go on the big slide if you want to, if you’re not scared. But it’s okay to be scared too. Like remember last time, when you got up the ladder and then decided you didn’t want to go down? Either way is fine, though,” I add. God, am I giving him a complex?

“Not scared,” he says.

“Then big slide it is.”

I peek at my laptop again, hoping I can be done for the evening, take my kid to the park, make some kimchi fried rice, put him to bed, drink one (1) beer, and then finally, blissfully, sack out, but nope: My editor pings me again on our IM channel:

Hey man, got another project for you tonight.

I groan and quickly respond:

hi jerry, would love to help but my kid’s up from nap. tackle it in the morning?

Jerry replies:

Actually it’s pretty pressing. Really need you to be a team player on this one. 10k words just came in from Matt on the President’s mass deportation initiative, and we want to run it first thing, by 8am eastern (so 5am your time). I think you’ll like it. Needs both a fact-check and copy-edit, okay?

I carefully type back:

i really do appreciate the work, jerry, but i’m fading, man. remember how i pulled an all-nighter the night before last for that movie review? can one of the folks on staff handle this one? i need to take my kid to the park, make him dinner, etc. you know i don’t have childcare.

I grimace as I see his reply instantly come back, like he already had his answer typed up and waiting for my pushback:

Sorry pal but all the on-staff fact-checkers and copy editors have gone home—a couple are on vacay, the rest are on East Coast hours. And you’re the only freelancer online right now. Think of it like some bonus cash, yeah? To buy more formula and babyfood? I know that stuff is expensive. My sister has kids. And not to get too hard-a$$ about it, you do great work for us, but if you want us to keep sending you projects we really need you to step up here. We’ve all made sacrifices for this site. We’re doing important work. Take the big guy to the park, play a bit, flirt with some park moms, put him to bed, and then dive back in? Not due till morning. You’ve got all night. Rise and grind. Appreciate you, bro. Ping me when you’re done. We can do $100 for this project.

I want to point out the fact that I’m not a team player at all, I’m not even on the team, I’m a contractor making probably less than twenty an hour for this bullshit all-nighter, minus the thirty-ish percent I’ll need to set aside for taxes, compared to Jerry’s own lush salary plus medical. But I don’t. This is the closest thing I have to a regular gig, and my rent isn’t going to pay itself.

So: another long night. I tell Jerry okay (just lowercase with a period after, so he knows I’m pissed off, but not aggressive enough to get me fired) and sigh and start filling up the kettle for coffee to bring to the park, then swing by the fridge for some bread and cheese for Max—he’s two, he eats regular food, not formula; Jerry very obviously doesn’t have kids.

“Dada give you some breaaaaaaaaaad,” Max yells from his highchair.

“Give me some bread,” I correct, plopping a slice down on his tray. “Please.”

He grins through a giant mouthful. “Give you give me give you some bread please.”

“There you go,” I say, tousling his hair.

Ah, wait. Petrichor. That’s the rain-smell word.

Later that night: Trudge through. Press down. Spark brain with caffeine. Ineffective. Click, click.

Check dates. Check names. Read sentences again, again.

More coffee. No effect.

Comma splice, delete. Missing serial comma, add. Misspelled Michigan senator’s name, fix.

Data misrepresented. Check source. No, “studies” do not “show” that “unprecedented waves” of immigrants are correlated with “drastically rising crime rates” in border cities. Add specificity: one non-peer-reviewed paper, written by former ICE deputy director, shows some people in one neighborhood of one particular city feel that crime is up, contra actual crime rate figures, which are actually lower than last year. Leave note: safer to delete section entirely.

Change “illegal” to “undocumented” (17x).

Delete references to “extremists on both sides,” due to: actual extremists on the right murder people at drag clubs and mosques while “extremists” on the left are sometimes mean to people online. Leave comment with link to study showing that illusion of objectivity by giving equal weight to claims from right and left actually benefits right-wing conspiracy theories far more drastically, which = opposite of objectivity. Somewhat bitchy, perhaps, but tired of this writer’s centrist clichés.

Delete entire paragraph supposedly paraphrasing the President’s primetime speech, which, in the writer’s words, was primarily about “securing our nation’s borders” and “assuaging the very real, very salient economic anxieties of the country’s forgotten corners” in the “folksy and occasionally irreverent tone that has come to be recognized as the President’s hallmark.” Replace with relevant section of actual transcript of the President’s rambling and incoherent pseudo-speech, which used none of these phrases, and which mentioned “true-blood, pure-blood Americans” twice and Hitler once, and which included the President simulating oral sex on the microphone of the podium for a full ten seconds, purpose unknown.

Delete incorrect population figures, incorrect median home prices, incorrect crime statistics. Replace with correct figures.

Coffee.

Blink.

Repeat.