THE CHURCH OF BIRCH

I tried texting my good friend David Schoffman the other day ...

... but he was busy talking to God.

He does that a lot lately.

He almost severed the lumbrical tendon of his right index finger in an accident that involved a small jar, a bathtub and an anonymous double-jointed friend and ever since then he seems to have found religion. 

This more circumspect David spends hours staring

at the stars and when he's not intoning some rhyming Sikkimese couplet he's painting bright mandalas on seasoned birch panels.  

He used to light votive candles in his studio but he almost burnt the place down. He then tried wearing shirts and slacks strictly made out of red burlap but his chest hair got too caught up in its itchy weft.

Talking to God seemed to him the kind of pastime that was vague enough to be innocent but lofty enough to merit the investment of his valuable time.

Oh ... did I mention he was a Pisces?

ACT III

 
There comes a moment in the life of a man of promise when the promise becomes undeliverable and the options evaporate into the ether of "what ifs." It is at this precise moment when the road forks into two gloomy throughways.

The first points toward compromise. The second toward danger. 

Whichever way our traveler veers he'll find stones in his rucksack and pebbles in his shoes.

My good friend David Schoffman has just reached that point.  

Like a tall tree bent by a gentle wind, the agency we inappropriately call free will is both less and more than we think. The forces that brought our hero to this crisis point are immaterial.

The wasted efforts, failed romances, geographical dislocations, unwanted pets, bad jobs, bad digestion, poor investments and unsolicited riches have all played a part in David's undoing. But the past is immaterial. It's his next move that is the subject of this screed.

I've known David for over forty years and I have never seen him in such fruitful despair. His painting, the very vocation that defined his essence and through its usury extracted the marrow of his afflicted life, no longer interests him. His relationship with Dahlia Danton, once the source of such joy and hope has crumbled like a coffee cake. 

What little zest that's left is squandered on fantasies of rebirth, new love and a quiet retirement in a cottage by a lake.

He'll be in Paris this summer and something always sprouts out of his shiny dome whenever he visits the City of Lights. We are still in the youth of our old age and class is very much in session in this unruly school of life.

David, je t'attend!

REFUSNIK

There's something about the dazzling sunlight and its mindless persistence that makes life in Southern California a culvert of concussed hopes and shattered dreams. Many people - among them, my good friend David Schoffman - migrate there in search of absolution only to find distended suburbs and slow moving traffic. The lucky who are indigenous to the area treat leisure like a deity and therefore seek neither indulgence nor mercy. We call those wretched souls 'the happy.'

The Happy try not to tax their compassion by reading too much serious literature. They avoid wheat and eggs and typically don't own cats. They enjoy the outdoors and teach their children to swim by throwing them into warm, bubbly pools shortly after birth. They're partial to repetition and nothing soothes them more than the sound of a vibrating iPhone.

Schoffman fits in like a third rail. He leads his volatile life, outcast and in parallel. The only converging vanishing point between David and his environment is the inevitability of extinction and even that seems uncertain.

In Paris where they value their intellectuals in excess, Schoffman felt a constant thud of shame. After serving his necessary apprenticeship in the early 1980s he returned to California and the certain misery of total alienation.

He's been living in blissful terror ever since.

DISRUPTION

Collaborators and confidantes, my good friends David Schoffman and Dahlia Danton share a volatile lust for technology

The only time they're away from the squeaks and twizzles of their electronic alerts is when they retire to one of those southern California, New Age, ersatz Buddhist retreats.

Even then they've been known to cheat.

Somehow, Dahlia had figured out how to chant and check her email at the same time.

Her new book has recently been released on Kindle and between you and me, reading on an I-Phone is like listening to Mahler on a transistor radio.

But what do I know ...

Her book is about me, though I never really authorized the use of my images.

Schoffman and her connived to have my assistant send them an entire file of my Palimpseste drawings. She then made up a ridiculous story about me and my irrational appetite for a Nobel Prize.

I blame David for all this.

He's always exploited me like a mule.

But then again, the book has already sold out its first edition and the royalty check they keep promising to send me is allegedly close to five figures.

Could a dual-language podcast be next??