Hwæt bruh,

Thank you for reading my sepulchral storiette.

You're the archetypal best. The cat's whiskers, the duck's guts, the ant's pants. If no one's told you today: You're the ne plus ultra of peaches, a sockdolager's sockdolager, a lollapalooza extra-superhumanly thwarting the worst of what this creepingly sick, sad metamodern world has to offer as if it were de nada. Dearest epicene friendo: You put the you in joyous.

Me? I'm in the aging hybrid, per yuzh, using the ole voice-to-text, driving an hour to work, winding-crumbling-hilly-wooded back roads mostly, navigating a messy, anfractuous mesh-network of crisscrossing crik-running township veins that predate Manifest Destiny, that have me cutting through tourist trap farmsteads, ramshackle equine facilities, illegible cemeteries, the "Mushroom Capital of the World," zipping past cobblestone ruins jutting from unkempt verdant tall-grass, obviously and seemingly abandoned postmedieval houses, lived-in front yards with serpentine driveways, deer and fox and raccoon roadkill. On my nighttime hour home, no streetlights, high-beam cruising stygian landscapes, through hot-tub-sized picture windows: gleaming glimpses of Jeopardy! The Bachelor. March Madness.

When it fogs, my family lives in a Cimmerian exurb.

While I have you: What use does fiction have in these atomizing, ephemeral, parlous now-a-days? Should it Kafkaesquely rive the frozen interoceanic, transglobal lonelinesses that separate us? Or should it aim to please as a sort of atavistic magic-mirror-stage upon which one is meant to entertainingly project the subjective objectivity of the inward—outward?

Can it foment radical empathy?

I believe: Yes.

You?
   
Vale,
R.S.P.