How do we transmit grief? Loss? Via tears and via telephone. The receiver dropped on the wooden floor, whose grain links the message to the cord spiraling back to the telephone’s base. Telecommunication holds the community together. The message—through tears—reverberates down empty hallways, across telephone wires, and even at water’s edge over a body wrapped in plastic. We transmit and receive and resend the message, connecting it to the black phone—not the brown phone—whose blackness transmits its own dark message through tears, through wires, through cables, through sobs which connect all the players in their grief, their disbelief. Yes, this is about Laura. And it’s about all of us held together through our tears, our grief. This is about the telecommunication of sorrow because we are not there. Not present when Laura’s absence is discovered. We are not there when Laura’s absence presents itself to the community ripped apart in questions and suspicions. In this way, television, too, is a seeing of what is no longer there, communicating with the ghosts of television past in order to resend and receive this dark message of sorrow.

(This is the kind of thing an under-employed philosopher/writer writes during the summer when he begins watching Twin Peaks for the first time in his life.)