ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Nothing beats near-death in getting a guy to face his facts.

While the specter of shame lurks like a hatchet, we the clever idiots, deny what's obvious and conceal the rest. By the time we're finally ready to dice our delicate fictions into harmless lies the damage has already been done.

Shakespeare called us "poor players" only he was wrong about the strutting. We crawl like beggers before the enormity of our charade.

We're all fakers but there is no greater faker than my good friend David Schoffman. He pretends to pretend, rendering his pretensions the majesty of farce. He calls himself an artist but his artistry lies only in his mocking self-regard. In truth he fools no one and by so doing everyone was equally deceived.

This all came crashing into clumps when he came face to face with his god (or was it his G-d? The story changes with each retelling).

A rare rectal infection had Schoffman picking the lock on the Gate of Pearls and for a while we all thought he was a goner. I was writing his obituary in my head when a nurse came (strutting) over to me with the news that his vitals had perked.

I greeted the information with a mixture of gratitude and disappointment.

David now justifies his Gnostic inactivity with the same revolting intolerance that characterized his earlier defenses of work. With his slickly polished prose he waxes like a grifter about the ecstasies of nature and the beneficence of sloth. 

The man is tiresome beyond measure and had he succumbed to the incubus I dare say we all would have been better off.

So now we wait and as we wait his paintings lay fallow, accumulating new value as they gather old dust. 

Could it be that the sly old hedgehog is conjuring a third act?