Dear Mr. Greenfield: My First E-mail to the RedEye

I promise to stop talking about the election soon. I am fairly certain that—once upon a time—I used to think about other things. But, as long as the world keeps talking about the election, that is all I have to respond to.

For example: this morning’s RedEye starts off with a little, anecdotal article by Jimmy Greenfield about election night. The piece is called “My historic night—sitting on a couch”. Jimmy talks about how he regrets not having gone downtown for the election night rally, citing several reasons for his home-bodied-ness. One of his reasons was an assumption/fear that, were he to go downtown, he would miss the CNN coverage of the event, and his Blitzer/Gergen/Borger/Toobin addiction would eat him alive. For some reason, I found the prospect of soundly and callously bursting his bubble to be so enticing, that I had to write my first ever RedEye response e-mail. It was entitled “My historic night—watching CNN in Grant Park” and went as follows:

Dear Mr. Greenfield,

I just read your article this morning, and I have something I should probably tell you. Oh Jimmy, I don't know how to say this; it seems cruel every way I put it, but it must be done: I was in Grant Park on election night, and I was watching CNN.

Every jumbo-tron in Grant Park—assuming you were close enough to see them—was displaying CNN right up to the moment the election was called. For hours, I watched Wolf Blitzer speak to me in an image stunningly clear and twenty feet tall. Two days before every Super Bowl, I dream that— suddenly and without warning—I win a raffle for the biggest, most beautiful TV I could possibly imagine. Tuesday, I saw that television... and it was playing CNN. I may never recover from the mammoth majesty of Will.I.Am's colossally radiant hologram or Anderson Cooper's titanically magnificent hair.

You could have had it all.

I am so very sorry,

Anneliese Toft