There's something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.

People from New York have been calling, to see if I'm still alive. When I answer the phone, you can hear the disappointment in their voice.

Yes, there have to be places for safe wonderful stories.

We're supposed to do all these things which trouble us deeply because it's so against what we naturally would want to do.

Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that's the story that we're not seeing, and it's unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock.

If you think about the traditional mafia stories we grew up on, it is always about the death of criminal organisations - things like the 'Sopranos' - the last vestiges of once proud families subsumed by the modern era.

We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.