What does “family friendly” mean to you?

Out the fifth floor window of this hotel room, birds fly in the air or search a patch of grass for food.

Hundreds of motor vehicles, parked or moving, transport the sets of states of energy I accept as members of my species.

Rows of businesses take up 30 percent of my view which is accented by a nearly-full supermoon.

The sun sets behind me, having joined me from sunrise onward during this day of summer solstice.

I will soon return to Mars.

What about family-friendly, though?

Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin divorce their wives. I remain married to mine.

What is this family that is so friendly?

As people flock from one business to another — grocery store, cinema, restaurant, mobile phone sales, general merchandise shopping centre, etc. — what average, what mean, what hump under the bell curve would best describe a typical parent/child/spouse unit we would call a family?

And what is friendly to them?

A night out at the movies?

An evening of video games?

Watching/playing ball at the local sports park?

Bailing someone out of jail?

Sitting at the bedside of an ailing family member in hospital?

Is a single person — a party of one — a family?

What about pets or extended social media connections — are they family?

The moon and the stars? The birds?

How about the friendly faces behind the counter in the hotel lobby? Aren’t they my family now, too?

I drink a bottle of Jones cream soda flavored water, produced by the Jones family, independent since ’96.

Is death family-friendly?

Birth seems to be. So does the tradition of marriage.

To secure my household, I killed a rat, three mice, dozens of insects and several amphibians. I chased away a mother raccoon and her three babies. I attempted to scare off the ubiquitous squirrels. I also saved two newts and a box turtle, not to mention the tree seedlings I didn’t cut to the ground or the vines I removed from the side of the house. I cleared uncounted privet bushes and poison ivy that clogged part of our front yard, to open up a sunny spot for our Rose of Sharon bushes and forsythia canes.

So killing can be family-friendly in the right measure.

However, a family that commits murder-suicide is not friendly, is it? What if everyone was dying of extreme radiation poisoning? Would a humane death be friendly, in that case?

What about a family that had lived on the same plot of land for centuries but died protesting their recent or soon-to-be forced displacement? Is that family-friendly, dying for a shared cause?

Watching the cars, minivans and trucks cycle in and out of the shopping district across the street, which triggers my thoughts to fill in the required infrastructure that supports the luxury of internal combustion engines, cup holders, powered seats and large carparks, prelabeled clothing sizes, preapproved dinner menus, landscape lighting and traffic signals…well, I’m easily distracted, aren’t I, by GPS satellites, shopping centre architecture, local building codes and “green” technology implementation schemes.

Since tattooed ladies have walked out from under the circus tents and into suburbia, what is family-friendly?

Is family-friendly an arbitrary label for changing tastes in community standards?

Hmm… All the chain restaurants lighting up their logos for my attention.

Think I’ll go to the local Irish pub for a beer and a bite to eat for dinner tonight, family-friendly enough for my tastes.