You remember May 2020? That was the month that Donald Trump announced he was prophylactically taking hydroxychloroquine, and there were murder hornets, and nobody really knew if everyone else was really making that much sourdough or if everyone was pretending to because we had all just been stuck inside for a couple of months. There really weren’t many rules anymore on social media because we collectively decided that we were all going a bit weird together, separately. Life went on, of course, but adults have come to depend on the permanence of society to feel quite as though life is stable.
In a movie, when you have seen the same barista repeatedly as part of a sequence meant to explain a character’s life and suddenly there is a new barista, you can be fairly certain that the character is under some kind of surveillance or maybe is about to have a life-changing day at work. It is jarring. It was like that the May before last.
We were mostly stuck inside, half afraid that we were talking about opening up too soon, and half afraid that it would be too late. I think no matter where you live, it felt like endless winter. Just as spring was about to show up, we were all stuck indoors and half the Internet was having to share wisdom like “please don’t bleach your vegetables” and “please don’t microwave your mail,” which are both things I have said to a stranger online during the kind of surreal discussions we had at the beginning of the pandemic. Neither of them were quite serious, but neither was I completely joking.
There are lots of generally haphazard people in the world, folks with unswept floors and too much mess because with two kids and three cats there’s just not much point trying to keep up with it all when there’s books to be read and life to be lived. I’m one of them. I go through fits and starts of being generally healthier as life dictates, which is to say when the weather is nice I walk more and when I’m near cream sauces or steak frites I tend to forget about things like cholesterol.
But I’m reasonably well-trained in kitchen safety and the cleaning of retail spaces and merchandise, and had assumed that most people would know something about bacteria and viruses. Wash your hands, disinfect things, wash your hands more. Then my kids started showing me helpful tips they found on the internet on how to not bring the virus into your home, and I remembered that time a dude accidentally made chlorine gas at my job because we sent him to clean the bathrooms and he figured if one cleaner was good two would be better, and I realized we were wholly fucked and some people definitely were probably bleaching vegetables.
We have long ago moved on from the newness of the pandemic, but back then we were all quietly freaking out and making nervous jokes about it all. In a matter of weeks, we’d simply lost all of the normal we had left. The baristas disappeared entirely from our days. Nobody knew quite how long it had been since normal; too long to count when time is meaningless but not long enough to be measured in infinities yet. We worried about bills and how long until work started, and we worried about our friends, and we ate a lot of takeout from local restaurants when we could because we wanted to at least help a little bit. We worried about our kids, who couldn’t even go to the playground because what if some kid with COVID had been playing? You can’t disinfect a whole jungle gym. We worried so much we sometimes just went numb and waited for someone to tell us what to do, until we remembered that there weren’t any fucking grownups in charge and then we worried more. We just didn’t have any experience with this definition of normal.
It’s difficult to think back that far, because now we do measure by impossibilities and it makes time warp a bit. It’s all a bit dreamlike, really. It feels like the kind of waking up one sees in a children’s movie when the suspended animation spell wears off the villagers and they just pick back up with whatever conversation they were having 500 years ago. I keep telling people, any delay in anything in the last year professionally or personally just doesn’t count. We were all trying to not die, that project could wait. If I’d been offended you didn’t call I had your number. I probably didn’t call for the same reasons you didn’t, which means we both get it and nothing more need be said.
I haven’t heard from many people I know since late May 2020, which is a month I think about a lot. I don’t mind that; I have only recently had the bandwidth to catch up with friends. I remember the kind of fear people had back then particularly because in the last week of May I was trying to find a partner to go to Minneapolis with me to cover the protests. Typically to cover breaking news, I’d make a dozen calls and find someone who was also headed in that direction to split gas with, and a hotel with decent wifi and hopefully decent breakfast. That time was different because most people knew that if they went to any kind of gathering they’d likely be exposed to COVID and we all knew that meant quarantine. Most of my colleagues have partners and aging parents and sometimes kids or roommates, so it was difficult to figure out how you’d pay for not just the trip and your work, but also two weeks in an airbnb or something upon returning home.
And that was all assuming you didn’t fall ill; tests were near impossible to get, vaccines weren’t even a question. We were seeing pictures of morgue trucks to cope with the body count as the hospital morgues overcrowded. Nobody knew when we were going back to the everyday patterns of life, of collecting a check and paying the bills and picking the kids up from school.
The whole world felt frightening and uncertain that week. George Floyd had been killed that Monday and I was headed to Minneapolis two days later. I remember that it felt very like I had to go for this story precisely because all of my colleagues agreed that someone needed to but it seemed like very few could. And I remember being worried more than vaguely about going to location for the first time. When you’re walking into a declared armed rebellion or an actively repressed protest, you always take basic safety precautions like having goggles and a respirator. You pack a medkit and wear good shoes. I am used to walking into potentially violent and chaotic situations but I’d never walked into a crowd of sweaty screaming people during an incurable respiratory plague before and it’s honestly the first time I ever truly considered the risk of taking a job worrisome.
It was the first time I had ever been frightened by conditions on the ground, but it wasn’t the protests that scared me. It was the virus. So obviously that’s the time I went to report on a protest and lost an eye. I remember waking up in the hospital, and the doctors informed me both that they had performed a COVID test and it came back negative, and also that I would probably always be blind in my left eye. I remember that I said to the nurse “wait, that’s all I had to do to get a COVID test” and the nurse laughed but the doctors became concerned for my mental health, having just informed me about the blind thing.
That’s the sort of moment that separates life into a before and an after. I haven’t written much since then. I didn’t have many thoughts that weren’t a kind of dull rage or rudderless grief with occasional spurts of general disbelief, and while those are perfectly logical things to feel when you’ve just lost a major body part during what was already the most surreal year of your life, they are not particularly interesting to read about. Besides which, everyone else was feeling all those things too for varying reasons and to varying degrees. People were losing parents and children and friends and jobs and homes; very few people made it out of 2020 unscathed. It’s just that I took the idea that the year scarred us all a bit literally, so now I have an eyepatch and a whole new range of jokes I can tell.
Before last May, I’d always pictured my career as a kind of whirling sparkler. For years I’ve been rattling around the world learning about people and how they live and what they believe and I’d write when I could sell something or call it research for my next book when I couldn’t. I gave lectures and edited things for friends and generally made my way. Sadly, it’ll be years before I’ll be able do that again; eventually I’ll be able to drive, for example, but for now I’m still learning to consistently pour coffee into the cup instead of on the counter an inch away. These days, I’m facing down a different set of options.
People who have followed my work and/or social media for a while will know that I have never done recurring projects; my life was far too unpredictable to maintain a blog or podcast. But it finally happened: I can’t blame the road anymore, and I’m itching to work. I’d been poking at different projects for a couple months, but nothing had clicked. Then I got an email from Substack asking me could they pay me what’s essentially a yearlong grant in exchange for writing a couple things a week. (With much love to a few specific people who have been asking me for this for years, here’s your fucking newsletter, you beautiful bastards. To everyone else, may I formally announce my newsletter in predictably polite and properly commercial terms!)
I know that Substack is not everyone’s favorite platform, and I know some of the reasons why. So let me say this: the only gig I’ve ever turned down in this line of work has been that time that RT wanted to pay me during the time I spent covering Ferguson, because I won’t work for a place where I can’t speak freely. I decided when I started out that I wasn’t interested in working only in places that didn’t come with complications, because I never wanted to write just for people who agreed with me. Reasonable people can and do differ on this point; in a political moment this fraught there is value in bright red lines and there is value in outreach, and I don’t think it’s a question of which you prefer. I think it’s a question of what you’re best at. Everyone to their strengths and we’re all better off.
That said, one of the controversies that I can now speak to with some authority is the money. Substack is very very clear on their framing, which is that they’re not paying me to write, they’re giving me what’s essentially a grant so that I can focus on my work. I’m getting $85k, which is $10k more than they offered me. It’s less than others signed for, and I’m sure more than some. Substack doesn’t release contract details, which is pretty standard practice in my near-decade of work. I tend to think we all do better when we talk about our pay, and we specifically help people who are new in the industry. When compensation varies wildly but is opaque, it’s nearly impossible to tell if you’re underpaid.
They also provide a suite of services to writers in the Pro program; for example, I get 12 hours of editorial/research/whatever a month. I was given my choice of design teams for the logo and headers and such. (All my art was done by Talooka Studio, who describe themselves as a “Black, LGTBQ+, Women-owned studio” and I can’t recommend them highly enough if you’re in the market, it was a wonderful experience start to finish!)
Pro is definitely a very very different experience than just signing up for and running your own newsletter. It is a job by any definition I would use, whatever the niceties of contract law may be; I signed a contract saying that I’d post twice a week for a year. Everyone I have dealt with has been wonderful, and I believe them when they say they’re personally really excited to help their writers with a year where all you really have to do is write and work on your other projects without worrying about the bills. But it’s still a business and that comes with a business model; they’re giving benefits to writers with established audiences because they run a newsletter site.
The second controversy I’m aware of is that I’ll be sharing a platform with that asshat. (Yes, probably that one. And that one. And that one too.) Honestly, fuck them. I’m not ceding a platform to them.
What it comes down to, for me, is this: I’ve got an incredible career and maybe a few decades ago that would translate into a consistent gig. These days, it usually doesn’t. I take astonishing sums for one speech from a place that has the budget and then I can afford to give ten for free to places that don’t even have budget for travel. I depend on the people in my audience with enough to spare to pay me $10 for $1 of work because they know they’re subsidizing nine other people to keep my work generally available. I’ll take $85k from Substack and turn it into twice the value, because that’s all I know how to do.
I did have to concede on the paywall; I have always vocally been against keeping my work paywalled and they couldn’t negotiate on it because paid subscriptions are their entire model, so we came to an agreement. A newsletter for twice-weekly content is $5. A free newsletter will have some new content, but won’t have access to some premium content. Once something is three months old, I will make it free on the website. That way I maintain my promise to never require money to read that one thing I wrote, and the business concept stays whole.
Also. If you can’t afford a subscription but need one for school or really any other reason, just let me know. I can comp you access.
So I have a newsletter now, and the reason I started it with May 2020: that’s the last time I really thought like a writer. I got a lot of awards and gave a lot of interviews and was a witness in a Congressional hearing and I’m a plaintiff in a federal civil rights lawsuit and I’ve been busy since then, but I’ve been busy with other things than writing. When I’ve sporadically written anything, it’s been voice notes or particularly eloquent emails done on my tablet. For this project, I got out the laptop. Writing again, and I mean the kind of writing where you’re glad you type so quickly, feels like home in a way I haven’t felt in a year and a half. Like time has folded and I was just calling around to see who wanted to split a motel in Minneapolis.
I’ve found that my camera is a remarkable adaptive device. Looking through a viewfinder is a way to see the world as it used to look to me, with proper depth perception and full peripheral vision on both sides. It’s like getting my eye back for just a minute, and I thought that was good but writing again feels like getting my old self back, and I think I can live happily with those things. It’s a good place to be after a pretty awful year or two.
I named this Stories From The Rail because I have always found that the best stories are the ones I’ve heard at the bar, whether as a worker or as a patron. Bar conversations are meandering and observational and full of good storytelling. They include politics and pop culture and philosophy and humanity. Depending on what kind of mood everyone is in they might be full of raucous fun, or a quiet vulnerability. A story from the bar could be anything and there is no rhyme or reason to it.
I have always been and will always be grateful for my audience. I could not have made it from last May to now without the financial and emotional support you guys have always given me; it gave me time enough to heal and figure out what my career might become now. I still think it's fucking weird that you people are interested in anything I have to say, but it’s something that I take quite seriously. It’s one of the great honors of my life that complete strangers not only hear me, but think that I’m worth listening to. Thank you for being with me through all this; I hope that someday I’m half as good as y’all believe me to be
Here for this.
Yours is a voice we need.