December 20, 2016

Dear Sam,

As the day of reckoning draws nigh, I am indebted to your commiseration and grateful to your wise counsel, buttery nipples and other libations provided this Friday last.

What cannot be cured must be endured. I fear there is no practicable or expedient way to escape our current predicament and though I may yet find solace in your fine microbrews—uncorrupted as they are by corporate gluttony or gluten—we must maintain some temperance in a protracted campaign.

I have lost too many days. The arc of history does not bend towards justice from the weight of self-pity, nor does it follow a path contaminated with sarcasm or cynicism. For now, let us be our best selves! Let us tend to our conscience. Let us avoid sugar substitutes. If the worst among us is destined to be our leader, let the best within us be our guide. Or let us at least not play lacrosse.

Abigail has enlisted me in hot yoga and I have begun brewing kombucha and drinking lemon water upon rising, giving me the stamina and alkalinity to weather the day’s moments of both rage or mourning.

I have unsubscribed to such an abundance of electronic mailings that I feel marvelously liberated, as Mr. Franklin must so often feel, unfettered by clothing or responsibility.

But as you know well, this retreat towards survival and self-improvement must at some later date, bear fruit. Thereupon we will know the virtue of this long winter and discover the true strength of our republic’s Constitution and the constitution of our peoples. At some date, there must be action.

I will not at present point out the names of the men by whom, this Union has been put so often in jeopardy. Your recollection can be as no more less than mine. But you know as well the nature of our current threat. If not for my aforementioned pledge to dispatch sarcasm, I would say it is not only severe but unpresidented.

John Adams