Everything settled now? Good.

To call American elections “free” is not accurate under our current system. As long as the Democratic and Republican parties, two sides of the same corporate coin, continue to wield—I hadn’t even heard of the Brown Noser, so I don’t understand why I’m getting all these emails from their editors instead of my usual bosses at the Times.

I just Googled this other paper, and it seems like it’s Brown’s satirical newspaper. My article’s not supposed to be funny: without campaign finance reform, we are doomed—jeez, the logo of this thing is a nose. I write for the paper of record. The paper that the President reads, not whatever this joke thing is. The corporate takeover of our democracy is not a joke.

I’ve been emailing other journalists, trying to figure out if this weird, confusing situation is happening to anyone else. It doesn’t seem like it. Dear God, I hope I’m not being demoted or fired or anything like that. I’m trying to do serious journalism, and the only place that happens is the Times.

The New York Times is the greatest. It signals respectability. It means when I talk, you listen. It doesn’t seem like you get that sort of set up over at the Brown Noser. At the New York Times, you can ask interns for coffee, and they’ll go out and get them for you. You can even be sort of mean to them. It doesn’t matter because you write for the greatest paper in the whole world.

There’s definitely no interns at the Brown Noser. They’re a college newspaper, for Christ’s sake! They’re also satirical as in not serious as in a waste of my fucking time.

This isn’t going to get to me. I’m sure everything will be sorted out soon enough. Back to the important issues. Elections are carefully constructed diversions from real democratic action (i.e. acts of civil disobedience aimed at dismantling the corporate state). I must’ve gotten on someone’s bad side at the paper. If that’s the case, I apologize. It doesn’t need to be this way, I have critical things to write about, and I’d like to continue doing so.

I just got the call. Fired. The word stings. I don’t even know what to do with myself without that job. I’ve been “New York Times columnist Timothy Egan” for as long as I can remember. What the hell am I going to do now? Maybe it’s time to suck up my pride and give this Brown Noser thing another shot.