GO: Face it, you deserve it.
JS: Must admit the frontal lobes are winkin' back 'atcha.
GO: The only person you've told a lie to in the last 5 years is your mother.
JS: Yes, and in that case there was no need to apologize!
GO: You are highly transparent.
JS: Oh George, is that another one of your puns-
GO: Rather cunning puns than NewSpeak chat, Sav.
JS: No doubt.
GO: And when it comes to taking responsibility, you've left the blame-sayers in the dust.
JS: Yep.
GO: I want to say from the git-go how sorry I am that no one addresses - nay, even remembers - the vital connection between health, kindness, and natural erectile function for men over 50 you've made and, in your own chaste way, bear out.
JS: Thanks. They really don't know an interesting narrative when they see it, eh?
GO: Let's just say they prefer your patience and compassion.
JS: George, I'm liking you better than your novels already.
GO: brb
GO: The topic is prevarication, then.
JS: Yes, and how prevarication is essential to "player mentality". And how the difference between cruel omission and tasteful silence is an inexhaustible discussion down here and yet a trivial boring matter of degrees to the angels.
GO: "Player" is a word with multiple meanings. I know the sense you describe. Where the difference between life and chess is that chess pieces don't dress up and go out at night.
JS: William S. was writing multi-laterally when he scribed 'the play's the thing'....
GO: Because they are themselves characters in a play? That's reaching. But you do point out to 'play' being centuries older than hustle or con.
JS: Or flim-flam, snake oil, white lie, scam, grift or fix.
GO: All in the game.
JS: Shakespeare also saw through the petty emotional drives behind one's self-legitimated motivations.
GO: Indeed. But he can't stop people from making those moves, can he?
JS: No, George. He's older and more studied than you, and no, you're right. They have better therapies for enhancing awareness now, but somehow matters of conscience remain---
GO: ---as constricted as chess pieces in a new version of the same old game?
JS: George, I wish I had someone as sensitive and wise as you to speak with about all this in real life.
GO: Oh Sav. You're not a child anymore. And playing Horatio to your Hamlet requires a reversal of omniscience. Get thee to a punnery.
JS: I was thinking a woman like Kerry Washington would be that kind of friend.
GO: Who is Kerry Washington?
JS: Not anyone who respects the politics of the English language in American mass media anymore. You've at least been that effective.
GO: Thank Christ.
JS: Anyway, when your own mother plays the omission game in collusion with your sister for 8 months while Fred Daley rewards you for writing a good letter in the Hill Country Observer about big-box stores by publishing in the next issue scum from a guy - like everyone else connected to my case - who is now nowhere to be found - well, it makes you realize that anything you thought people have said about you but not to you for the last 5 years may well be true.
GO: And that most of those things are very good, I have to remind you, John.
JS: Yeah, yeah, I know that's true. That's part of the crazy irony.
GO: It's their problem.
JS: Yes, yes, it is.
GO: And it took Rosey Cross being banned from Esoteric Online to accelerate the justice within your mother's psyche....
JS: Don't remind me about Twin Flame Ascension, please George. Now I'm feeling the weird upper chakra magnets that are the real reason it was just as well to leave me to my taping process all summer.
GO: But you've trashed that cheap recorder now, haven't you?
JS: Worked with it right up until New Years.
GO: And you could have made the same music under more loving circumstances.
JS: I guess.
GO: NewSpeak is a failure, John. The new generation of sensitives hear you, and they are telling you it is not the same as the abbreviated language of chat. You know now about how genuinely shared "group mind" feelings seep through the wires, er- wireless.
JS: My little angels, Google Jiminy Cricket.
GO (nods head and blushes): Yes, "always let your conscience be your guide."
JS: Don't make phony agreements.
GO: Forgive and forget.
JS: Don't conceal. Way back before I'd even formed the concept that I was a Rebel Poet Pollyanna I was reading Barbara Hand Clow. The Star Man's first advice is don't conceal, no need to conceal, you are innocent, you are free. I've never had anything to hide.
GO: You went in the direction me and Lennon and Janov were pointing you.
JS: I sleep well at night. My dreams are not in NewSpeak. Rolling Stone has crossed Sean Penn over as a journalist. If they're reading this, I'm restructuring the offer I made Bob Dylan's birthday 2012 from Water Street: I don't have to achieve anything musically first. I'll sell you the lurid prose narrative. I can change it round, a million pages give or take a few, 'cause i need a break and mom always did say I'd make a great paperback writer.....
GO: Well paperbacks sit in old cardboard boxes, and you have a lot to hide if you're going to let your Google page represent you.
JS: A sense of purpose and a Google page like that are incompatible. It's like my first small victory would be to write, sing, meditate, or teach my way into enough web mentions that the print media of 2011 would fall away.
GO: In my book it always catches up to you.
JS: Only people who want to know the difference between self-love and narcissism are going to find out. In the big world, the shades in between are where the attention goes. Fashion therapy.
GO: Why do you think your life is an open secret, a legend in the making, a quaking rumor, a throwback to the old-school oblivious to Tik-Tok, Spotify, and the surge of diligence that is about to overtake the dumbing-down we've come to associate with scrolling and emojis?
JS: I don't think that anymore, George. I'm just not sure what to do with myself in the void of that revelation.
GO: I'm not going to send you a Christmas card either this year. It's not that you've been naughty. You've been nice enough. It's that you're too needy. Forgettably needy. Dependent on people to increase the length of your leash by a few drives to Price Chopper or the dentist and back. You don't have a cat, a dog, a wife, an employer, a car, you don't have an heir to your hundreds.
JS: He means the useless LPs.
GO: I mean the dollars you didn't know how to spend.
JS: You mean that there is no young person in my life I can leave any belongings to.
GO: I'll take the last word on this. Which is, that you're safe from the incriminating items on your Google page because nobody bothers to go that far. Nobody needs to follow up. There is no conversation. Tomorrow is the first day of 2023. While your peers retire from jobs they worked their whole lives and turn to things they've always wanted to do in their spare time - things related to their profession in most cases, like the way a philosopher turns to canvas to paint his reflections or a music teacher becomes a full-time performer - you are purifying yourself not only as a vessel for your prayer to future generations, but because you have no choice.
