Your family is affection, but since opening the door to various winds, your family seems slowed, causing them to sit braced in ill repose, sometimes mumbling a little word of encouragement, but not much. We (your family) know only the dread of cavelike living and the perverse incentives that cause the panicked to “stay in place.” Your family is communion and future, a living devotional, amid that which is heartrending and gray, whether placed (see the family encircled) below arid, dreamlike breezes, patriotic banners (faded now), acid rain, and eggshell skies very zebra-like with velvet tunnels of birds.

The family is heart, a corporation of becoming, bound loosely at the logic of love. A skyscraper of looming proportions, holding the huddled family (visiting the big city) in its vast, mirrored surfaces. We have experienced the disruption of a darkly-eyed son or daughter wandering away for a hot dog or coke, reaching the monolith’s wind-haunted rooftop (ushered by the devious ghost of a grandfather), then returning to the family standing below, altered, yes, hurt, yes, but intact, wholly present, the same. We may now reflect the world held in us, as families are reflected by their members, just as families are reflected in skyscrapers, complete with ups and downs, but please find ways to keep the carnage sidewalk-bound, for skyscrapers and their mirrors speak to the heights of love, rather than the gutters and stuck-on gum of the world below.

We remember the family and the bond itself, a loving currency enabling the family to peaceably visit theme parks, tropical hot-spots, rickety haunted houses erected on boardwalks honoring balmy nights. And if the family bond is broken, mutilated, frayed, the memory of the bond will whisper: away with unusable sadnesses, rusted chains, the ugly bodies (very unlike your own, dear reader) of now-vanished sons and lovers. Or perhaps the age is to blame. For it is the age itself that has been lowered into the mud, suffocating our love. Others, as always, can be found to have played a part, albeit, in most cases, a small one.

I won’t go away, nor descend from my TV studio. I am here in print, with a message for America. I cannot be an accomplice to the anger of disparate women, nor to the war-like dreams of men. I cannot be a party to sin. For all things done have been done in full, even when half-done, for even that achieves a kind of completeness when workers wander away. Man’s longing! His breaths! His various and irregular faces! His blue lassitude after being dunked, head-first, into a lonely swamp-like mire. Yes, America, I am here again. And so again I ask you: To whom do I owe the pleasure?