<[b>Words. All of them.]
<[b>Numbers. But only some of them.]
Irreverence.
<[b>These.]
-To look at a baby you've got to be brave,
In the black of his eyes is your own grave,
Something darker you want to touch,
It must be love, because it hurts so much...-
.Mason Jennings.
-And she said honey take me dancing,
But they ended up by sleeping in a doorway,
By the bodegas and the lights on Upper Broadway,
Wearing diamonds on the soles of their shoes-
.Paul Simon.
-Rain it wets,
Muddy roads,
Find myself,
Exposed,
Tapping doors,
but irritate,
In search of destination-
.Damien Rice.
<[b>Exchanges.]
: I would let you in, but...
: But the world is watching.
: Yes.
: Besides, you haven't got any furniture.
: Oh that's good.
<[b>Sparingly.]
<[b>Are Created.]-The deceptively simple rules of the game of sincerity, as played late one Friday afternoon in May 1990 on the terrace of the Café Gerbeaud in Budapest, Hungary:
1. Players (in this case, five) arrange themselves around a small café table and impatiently await their order, haphazardly recorded by a sulky and distracted waitress with amusing boots: dollhouse cups of espresso, dense blocks of glazed with Art Nouveau swirls of translucent caramel, skimpy sandwiches dusted red-orange with the national spice, glass thimbles of sweet or bitter or smoky liqueurs, tumblers of bubbling water ostensibly hunted and captured from virgin springs high in the Carpathian Mountains.
2. Proceeding circularly, players make apparently sincere statements, one statement per turn. Verifiable statements of fact are inadmissible. Play proceeds accordingly for four rounds. In this case, the game would therefore consist of twenty apparently sincere statements. Interrupting competition with discursive or disruptive conversation, or auxiliary lies, is permitted and praiseworthy.
3. Of the four statements a player makes during the course of the game, only one is permitted to be "true" or "sincere." The other three are "lies." Players closely guard the identity of their true statements, the ability to simulate embarrassment, confusion, anger, shock, or pain being highly prized.
4. Players attempt to identify which of their opponents' statements were true. Player A guesses which statements of players B, C, D, and E were true. Player B then does the same for players A, C, D, and E, et cetera. A scoring grid is made on a crumb-dusted cocktail napkin with a monogrammed (cmg) fountain pen.
5. Players reveal their sincere statements. A player receives one point for each of his or her lies accepted by an opponent as true and one point for each identification of an opponent's true statement. In today's game of five people, a perfect score would be eight: four for leading each poor sap by the nose and four more for seeing through their feeble, transparent efforts at deception.
.Arthur Phillips, "Prague".