The recap is later than usual. The recap is later than usual because I procrastinated, and I procrastinated because I couldn't decide whether I found the episode dead boring or highly offensive, and in lieu of making up my mind, I prepared my corporate tax return. Do you know what that means? Do you understand the significance of my choosing to commune with a stack of IRS-related paperwork instead of writing the recap? Do you know how much I hate math, even when armed with a calculator? And do you know what I said to myself when I got up at eight in the morning on a Saturday to get to a meeting with my New Jersey accountant, and when I slept through my stop on the train and had to beg and plead with the conductor to let me off on the tracks instead of making me wait until New Providence to get off, and when I had to walk up to my parents' house lugging a duffel bag full of forms and receipts, and when my parents had taken all of the cars and I had to walk back down to my father's office to steal my car back from him and my business-like shoes gave me a blister on the bottom of my foot that burst and filled my shoe with gucky stuff, and when my accountant looked over the prep and told me that I'd calculated everything incorrectly and would have to start over from scratch and make a tracking chart in Excel, a program that hates me? I said to myself, "Well, it could be worse. I could be writing the recap for 'Mind Games,'" and I sat there at a conference table, crippled, uncaffeinated, surrounded by the detritus of my fiscal life, and I smiled, I tell you, because I would rather have sawed my own foot off with a grapefruit knife than write the recap. The point in the season had arrived at which I truly believed that I could not go on. No more nicknames. No more sidebars. Only sorrow.

Then I got home and caught Contrivance in the act of trying to convert one of the cats into a bong, forcing me to postpone my retirement for a least a week in order to dispense with The Deception That Could Come Between Everyone.

Previously on Dawson's Creek: Sars's new boyfriend Tom Frost busted out the mind science on Jen and won her over; Pacey and Joey squabbled over not telling "the whole world" about their sex life, and Pacey said Joey just didn't want Dawson to find out, and Joey made a "busted…uh, I mean, fuck you!" face; Dawson asked Joey if she'd slept with Pacey, and Joey's face melted, and then she lied and said no; Mr. Peepers dried Sars's tears of exhaustion with a banana peel.