From the Jill Schwartz Memorial Library here in the wilds of Connecticut.

This is obscure season four in American tragedy. I'm your host, your friend, your ear lover,

and literary.

Mansplainer-in-Chief Michael Ian Black, reporting today from a library still very much under construction, so much so that I had to clamber.

I had to downright clamber over various boxes and piled up furniture in order to even assume my correct reading position supine on the Jack Jack Memorial Reading throne.

And that is where I am. Where I am reading from today, Christmas has just passed.

We are heading into 2026, and I've given up now on wishing that the coming year will be better than the subsequent year,

because every year for the last, however many, the sentiment seems always to be on New Year's Eve,

good riddance, 2019, or 2020, or 2021, or what have you, good riddance, 2019 or 2020 or 2021, or what have you. Good riddance, we say.

And while that is certainly true for 2025, I have no expectations that 2026 will be any better.

I suspect it will not. In fact, it is likely that it will be worse on so many

fronts. But at least none of us, so far as I know, are sitting in a jail cell awaiting a trial for murder, like Clyde Griffiths is.

No matter how bad your 2025 was, at least you don't find yourself in Bridgeburg, New York,

having consultations with your attorneys who are basically trying to concoct some fiction

for you to swear to on the witness stand, which is exactly what Clyde's attorneys are negotiating

at the moment.

When we last left them, they were saying,

What's his face? Jefferson had sort of cobbled together a story that has elements of truth

and elements of fiction. I mean, it's more untrue than true. And at the end of the last episode,

Jefferson said to Belknap, you know, we're going to have to put this kid on the stand.

And Belknap said, oh, geez, I don't think that's such a good idea.

I mean, he's an unreliable narrator, just as your host is an unreliable narrator as well.

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