I have a diffident and half-hearted announcement to make: We’ve agreed to reschedule our gameplay duel, for November 20th. My adversary seems to have developed a numbers and percentages fetish, and seems to enjoy spewing out random odds about this and that, and his “expansions”. It’s all nonsense of course, he has very little understanding of math, even for a half-baked artist, and I don’t need any illusory “expansions” to tell me to estimate that the odds of the roll-down happening on the 20th are very low. I seem to have gotten him into a bit of a spot, and he is squirming to get out of it; in our last meetup, to survey the proposed setting for the combat on the 20th, he took me aside (from Gerald, of all people, the second with whom I am honor bound to share all details) with a very serious expression, probably the most sober and serious face I have ever seen him with. I expected him to tell me that Duane had passed away of malnourishment or some other horrible news, but he proceeded to tell me that he had been running “illicit simulations” of the duel, and he needed to come clean. “I’ve used my special relationship with the pentoidals for personal gain,” he told me in a theatrically hushed voice. “I’ve disappointed myself and the Fellowship.” The Fellowship? I thought he was making some kind of reference to Tolkien for a moment, then realized that he referred to his sad and illusory Institute Fellowship, which he had declared me disbarred from. I suppose he had expected me to do something other than throw my head back and guffaw, because he became incoherent with rage when I did precisely that. Then he told me that the pentoidals had predicted my defeat in November or something, and apologized for cheating. I indicated that if he believed all this he should concede to me, and he had the staggering gall to suggest that I should concede myself. After I laughed this suggestion away, he indicated that I could wothdraw from the match and we would go our separate ways as if it had never been brought up. At this I immediately understood that he had lost his nerve for the upcoming combat. I do not blame him for that. On the contrary, I feel that his realization of the total unreality of his posture, his grasping of the basic truth that his participation in any board gaming competition with seasoned players can only end in his humiliating defeat, is a hopeful sign, a harbinger of growing maturity that in an adolescent might signify readiness for the grave responsibilities of a drivers license or a newspaper route.
Unfortunately I can not release him from the onus of his own word without his ceding the rights to the work, and this he does not seem prepared to do, relying on the bluster of his vacuous mumbo jumbo. That failing, he seems to have changed his tactics to the tried and true last resort tactic of all mindless animals, desperate wriggling. I glumly and resignedly await the next clumsily and hastily produced excuse, grasped at with the usual thoughtless desperation, no doubt to be vomited over the oft-polluted electronic pages of the Institute blog at around the scheduled begin time of the next agreed combat time. It will bear only a passing resemblance to reality but will, I hope, at least provide me the solace of a bitter and ironical chuckle at its invention. But even this meager hope may represent illusory thinking, on my part this time, a delusion based on fond sentimentality really, that an individual whose extensive deficiencies in character proved him to be an inadequate failure as a friend, might somehow make a worthy foe. But I am to be denied this and other consolations, I am all but sure of it.
Sperberspeak 