"February is the worst month of the year, but it's an honest month. It's a month that doesn't hold up life any better than it really is. I mean, look around here. These buildings, they look like they don't even have any lights in them during a work day, and something great happened here, but it's over with. And that's the way February is. You can see it in the way people walk and how they look. Let's go just check out February. This says it all. This has a spring-like or floral pattern on it, but somebody on this February day has abandoned it with its broken shaft, like a desperate flinging off of something that's not true anymore. The expedition is getting desperate. People are throwing things aside. Look around downtown on a February work day. This looks like a place where people who are being punished are sent. If you notice the way people cross the street in February, it's different than in the summer. Nobody is tap dancing or breaking into a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. It's their lunch hour, and they're just barely able to get across the street and hunker over a bowl of chili. Carbohydrates are big this time of year. Also, lotions because everybody is itchy and tired and irritable. Even the land is tired in February. Most of the birds who can afford it have gone to Florida, and the trees that once cheered us, they're hard to look at this month. It's as if there is some awful truth out there in the trees. It's hiding in the branches. Look at them. Something that's been bothering you for a long time is out there. What is it? You can almost see the shape of it when all the color is gone, but life is stripped down to the starkness of February. To try to hide the bleakness of February, man invented Valentine's Day and also Mardi Gras. But then February answered back with another holiday, Ash Wednesday. What other month could host a holiday that's designed to remind us that we're all going to die? That's February for you. It is bleak, it is honest, and it just tells you the way it really is. My father used to have a saying that if you can live through February, you'll live another year. With a whole other story, I'm Kevin Killeen."