I am a communist. Communism is always dead meat in the slaughter house of survival. How can an ally, an accomplice, a comrade, bro. Even be an ally when the ally is in repose. Dead informants are not informing, or maybe, with their deaths, they are. The analogy is a 17-year-old desperate to ride the plane. All of our policies have deteriorated. Failed institutions. Such as the institution of the family has managed to create a severe shortage of foster families (when their real families go to prison), and any foster home with older adolescents is going to get more of the same. I was once a foster parent with thirty kids. Being responsible for thirty kids is hard. Let us speak to grief. Despondency. Kids whose parents had shot it out in the kitchen at the family table in the process of emptying clips into each other. For the next three years these children did not say one single, solitary word. They were bad informants. We do not like informants. I could have an impact on the little ones. Not the older ones. You learned to rock and roll, or you were inevitably picking up the pieces when all thirty of them fail school, and the school principal shaves their heads bald in the gym. I had informants in the schools. As a writer, I have informants. Smile. Revenge. I love them madly. One is a janitor. One is a PA chained to her phone. One guy is a criminal lawyer who has a gravitas that smells of some complicity. But I want to see what violence is coming at us next. It’s always war.