Like most liberal sophisticates, my good friend David Schoffman was a skeptic. As a native New Yorker of a certain age, David's dyspathetic attitude toward the meditative, medicated cult of the feel-good had been an article of reliable faith.
At least that was the case until he moved to Los Angeles and started hanging out with the lovely but kooky Dahlia Danton.
Almost overnight, Schoffman went from a hard scrapple, sarcastic, chain smoking curmudgeon to a shaved-headed, juice-fasting lover of cats. And what some might consider even worse, he moderated his opinions into equivocal, milquetoasted, pre-diegested evasions that granted gentle amnesty over anything likely to be deemed judgmental.
In a word, David went native.
He puts his findings and speculations into a cognitive cocktail shaker and has an uncanny ability to be consistently right!
Needless to say, all this has proven to be remarkably lucrative and as a consequence David has given up painting for good.
Which brings me to a prediction of my own:
No one is going to notice.
Almost overnight, Schoffman went from a hard scrapple, sarcastic, chain smoking curmudgeon to a shaved-headed, juice-fasting lover of cats. And what some might consider even worse, he moderated his opinions into equivocal, milquetoasted, pre-diegested evasions that granted gentle amnesty over anything likely to be deemed judgmental.
In a word, David went native.
He even developed a reputation for possessing what they call in Santa Monica, "second sight." By this I think they meant that he acquired such a piercing intuition that speech was no longer necessary. In order to maintain this luster of incorporeal premonition David proclaimed himself a living oracle and began to offer workshops on what he called "the accessible cultivation of the real powers of prophecy."
And truth be told, he both anticipated the Cubs winning the World Series and the election of Donald Trump. He uses a strange graphic system of mapping where probabilities are delineated with obscure pie charts on smudge-proof white boards.
Needless to say, all this has proven to be remarkably lucrative and as a consequence David has given up painting for good.
Which brings me to a prediction of my own:
No one is going to notice.
