[BRATLEY, a very beaverish man, sits in front of an old typewriter. He wears a very tall tophat. He types rapidly, madly, as he talks to himself]
BRATLEY: Muga. Mungamunga, munga! Muggga mugga.
If the dreamer examines his pillow, why doesn't the beaver examine his DAMN
Face? Does he not see himself!?"
[The speed of BRATLEY's typing increases as he continues]
Muga, mungamunga.
There are forty five thousand thieves in the toilet.
It's high time we introduced them to MR CLEAN!!
Muga, mungamunga. Do my few remaining friends have any idea that I am beginning to resemble a beaver!?
[The speed of BRATLEY'S typing increases tenfold, nay, much more than that. Steam begins to rise from the typwriter. BRATELY begins to cry]
You silly typewriter . . .(With insane rage) LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE!!! NOW I MUST EXTINGUISH YOU!!! I TRUSTED YOU!!!
[BRATLEY removes his tophat and pulls a ridiculously large hammer out of it. He uses the hammer to smash a hole in the wall of his apartment building. He sticks his beaverish head through the hole in the wall and bellows to his neighbor]
Stunkus! Stunkus! Loan me your fire extinguisher!
STUNKUS [offstage] Loan me your sandals!
BRATLEY: FIRE EXTINGUISHER!!! NOW!!!
STUNKUS [walking through the hole. He is a tiny man.] Close this hole. What's wrong with you? Hey, hold on . . . is it just me or are you beginning to look like some kind of . . .
BRATLEY: What?
STUNKUS: of . . . well, you just look . . .
BRATLEY: Say it, Stunkus!
STUNKUS: You, you, you, you, you look a . . . a bit like a . . . a
BRATLEY: A BEEEEEEEAVER!!!!!??
STUNKUS: Don't come near me! You should fear me. Look at me. Look how tiny and strange I am! I'm a strange little man, Bratley. A strangle little man that puts munchkins and all other strange little scary things to shame. You should think twice before you make another hole in my wall.
BRATLEY: It's my wall too!
STUNKUS. Well, anyway, there's no fire, so I don't know why you called me over here. Watch your back, Beavis. [exits through the hole in the wall]
BRATLEY: My name is Bratley. DAMN YOU!
STUNKUS: [offstage] Yeah, I bet you WOOD like to dam me, wouldn't you, you disgusting, beaver-like weirdling! Only I'm not a river! Why don't you go and talk to your friend Mr. Mississippi!?
BRATLEY: [to himslef] Calm, calm, stay calm. I am not a werebeaver. There is no such thing. I am a man. A man and nothing else. I'm at a point in my life where my body is going though a lot of changes. I may be experiencing new emotions and feelings, and that is okay. This is perfectly healthy for a thirty-nine year old. [BRATLEY absent mindedly wanders to the fireplace, grabs a log out of it and begins nibbling on it as he continues.]
Well, well, well. Wump, lungfish . . . take a chance on the old times. That's what I say. That's what I say.
My gosh, I haven't slept for three days! Three . . . days.
[BRATLEY munches on his wooden log as the lights fade, very, very slowly, to black]
When reading these poems, it is best to pretend that they are being laboriously recited to you by someone who you would never want to receive a love poem from. This could include: 1) A celebrity that you had a crush on when you were younger (e.g. any of the New Kids on the Block, a cartoon character, Six from the show "Blossom", David Bowie in tights, etc.).** 2) A celebrity, acquaintance or friend that you have a nonsexual/nonromantic crush on. 3) One of those friends that you hope against hope does NOT have romantic interest in you because you have NO romantic interest in him/her, and if they ever came forward and said they had feelings for you, you would probably close your eyes as tight as you could and pray for the awkwardness to go away.
So before you read on, pick one of the three catagories, get an image in your mind of a specific person . . . and you may begin:
YOU
I'd like to make a YOU turn
Onto the highway that leads to
You being with me.
And once I get on that highway
I'll never look for an off ramp,
But I will slow down for the construction
Of a lasting relationship.
And I'll pay the tolls.
As long as those tolls aren't you telling me that
You don't love me the way I love you.
You, you, you, you,
I love you, and without you,
My soul would wilt like a flower in winter.
Water me.
Water me or I will die.
SUNRISE MY SWEET
Before I met you, the sun looked like a grape.
Now the sun looks like a mass of flames.
Speaking of flames,
Have you felt the heat of the flames
Of my love for you?
Assuming you have, did it make you uncomfortable?
If not, would you please fan those flames
With the constant reasurrance that you also love me?
Although you probably don't love me,
Because nobody ever has,
I have this irrational hope that perhaps you could be the one,
To finally bring a little light to my pathetic life,
To love me for who I am,
And believe in me,
Even though I don't believe in myself,
Because I'm not actually sure if I exist
Or if I'm the figment of someone else's imagination.
A LITTLE LOVE RECIPE
One cup of sweet thoughts,
A few sprinkles of laughter,
A smattering of kisses,
A pinch of disaster,
A spoonfull of recovery,
A few pints of forgiveness,
A dash of damnation,
Another pint of forgiveness.
This is a recipe
For a love strong and true.
If you'll be my Iron Chef,
I'll be your surprise main ingredient.
I LIKE YOU
You have taken my heart.
Give it back!
But you can't just give it back,
It belongs to you!
So the only way for me to get my heart back,
Is for you to belong to me!
Be mine, be mine,
Cause my heart is yours.
Your eyes are multifaceted
Like diamonds.
You are wonderful
Like the sky at sunset.
Those are just two of the reasons why I like you.
I'll tell you a hundred and one
More reasons why I like you
If you promise to be mine forever.
Do the math, sweet owner of my heart,
Do the math.
That's a total of one-hundred and three
Reasons why I love you.
[Note. If you didn't think those were funny, pretend Sean Connery is reading the poems to you]
**the examples used to help illustrate category 1) are NOT a reflection of people that Nathan Davis was ever romantically interested in. They may, however, be a reflection of people that his friends and/or family were romantically interested in.
Well, I tried. I really did. I gave it my all, but I don't think our society has progressed to the point where ANY portion of the population can appreciate a Freelance Amoeba Impersonator (FAI). As far as I know I'm the only FAI in the history of the world, so I should probably be in the Guinness Book of World Records. Then again, since I only did it for a day, maybe it doesn't count. But I didn't do it for posterity's sake, I did it because I thought people needed it NOW. And I was wrong. I refuse to be one of those artists who thinks he knows what people need to see and lashes out at public ignorance when people don't like him. Hey, if a given performance provides people with something they need, it will resonate with them. If not, be a public servant and find something else to do because nobody wants to hear you complain about being underappreciated.
Which brings me back to the story of my first and last day as a FAI: Never have I been so utterly underappreciated; not to mention humiliated, embarrassed and, quite literally, shat upon. I think the basic problem was that nobody really knew what I was doing. Perhaps I should have explained my "act" (as it were) in some way, but my plan going in was to let observers figure out for themselves what I was doing. I knew they would find it weird at first, but I expected people to flock around me and begin a spontaneous guessing game. They would notice, first of all, that I was not pretending to be a human or recognizable animal. They would notice my apparent lack of a spine, and the mindless, yet organic quality of my movements. Finally, someone would observe a seeming weightlessness surrounding my being and blurt out "Amoeba! Amoeba! He's an Amoeba!" The crowd would cheer, perhaps begin repeating a chant of "AMEEEEEEBA! AMEEEEEEEEEBA!" and work themselves into a nearly insatiable frenzy. Then and only then would I stand and take a few modest bows, humbly accepting donations for my performance before moving on to the next location.
But that was a dream, a vision. Reality proved colder than the grizzled maw of Winter. It was in fact a cold day, which threw my plan off from the start. I had daydreamed the idea while in a warm room. And in my daydream it was springtime, students filled the quad and street gangs lunched on the soft grasses. But I decided not to let a minor detail like the weather upset my chosen course. I arrived in front of the Student Union at noon and began immediately, as planned. My only potential audience was too busy rushing to get out of the cold to take much notice of me. After an hour my legs and arms were completely numb, save the occasional shooting pains that ran through my bones like tiny bullets.
Ultimately, though, it was the complete lack of any support from anybody whatsoever that convinced me to stop. Usually if you're involved in the arts you can do something abstract and experimental and count on a few strange minded people to be there for you and offer their encouragement. But, in this case, that was completely lacking. At no time did anybody say or do anything whatsoever that could have been interpreted as complimentary. People taunted me throughout my performance. A guy wearing a cape laughed at me and called me a weirdo. I resigned to get up and walk away at that point, but since all of my limbs were numb and partially frozen I had to curl into a fetal position for a few minutes to gather up enough warmth and energy to stand. I looked up at the sky, hoping to find some measure of solace in the brightness of the sun, and it was then that the only bird that hadn't flown south for the winter hovered over me and, using the last of its remaining energy, shat upon my face. Its life force spent, the bird fell to the ground beside me and died as I began weeping (not for the bird, for myself). Unfortunately, it was so cold that when I wiped my tears away they had become tiny icicles, which scratched and stabbed my eyes.
So, although I'm not the kind of person who would just give up on his dreams because he had a bad day, I chose to retire after less than two (2) hours as a FAI. Thanks for the suggestion, Husayn. I know you meant well.
There are certain reasons why acting school is not for everybody. Although I am in an intensive acting program and about to graduate (FINALLY!) in May, I must admit a certain envy for people who took a more so-called "traditional route" to college education. Despite my teachers reminding my classmates and I, quite often, how lucky we are to be in these exciting acting classes while other students at the university suffer through "boring lectures" and solve infinitely long math equations at gunpoint, I am still haunted by the possibility that the grass really is greener on the other side.
My teachers probably do have a point. I mean I wouldn't doubt that there are lots of college students sitting in classes that they hate, or studying for tedious midterms, who would love to get a degree by playing pretend instead. But look at it from my perspective. In class I have more than once thought to myself, 'I could be learning about the affects globalization on the world economy, or comparing Kant and Aristotle, or acquiring vocational skills that have the potential to earn me money some day. But I'm here instead, rolling around on the floor pretending to be an amoeba.'
Seriously though, there are a lot of great things about going to school for the arts. The best of them being that it really forces you to use your imaginative powers. And imagination is, to use an understatement, awesome. It's really what separates humans from other animals. And the more I learn about different strands of knowledge, the more I realize how similar they are, fundamentally. On the surface, one might think that scientists and artists are on completely opposite ends of the proverbial spectrum. But great scientists and artists and philosophers and doctors all rely heavily on the imagination. The ability to think beyond what is already understood, proven or accepted is essential if any new progress is to be made.
So please, whatever your career path seems to be at the moment, don't let it confine you in the rat infested hallway of narrow self definition. The deeper our knowledge in one subject the greater our understanding of reality and, therefore, of all other subjects. I really do want to know everything, and I actually think that might be possible, or at least more possible than it generally appears to be.
"Knowledge is a single point which the ignorant have multiplied." -Baha'u'llah
10. Take some guy hostage and force him to make me an authentic looking Werewolf Crossing sign and place it next to the highway. People would drive by the Werewolf Crossing sign, thinking it was a hoax. Then, after driving a few hundred more feet, they would find me standing near the road, in the exact same position as the figure on the sign.
9. Go to the dog grooming shop at the mall and demand a grooming.
8. Lock myself in a cage during the day, so at night I could find a way out of my own trap and kill all of my friends and family in a fit of blind rage. The next morning, upon realizing the scope of the devastation I had caused, I would flee to the seclusion of the forest where I would live a life of solitude and heartache. The benifit of all this is that I could howl at the moon in a dark and scary forest every month, the way werewolves are supposed to.
If you ever truly listen to a werewolf's howl, you will perceive that it is the mangled cry of a broken heart; therein lies its beauty, its frightfulness, its mystery.
7. Run with a wild pack of wolves and see how long it would take them to notice that I was not one of them.
6. Go to a public park just before moonrise (meaning I'm still in human form) and begin barking wildly at everybody in sight. People would think that I was some crazy guy barking at them in the park, but then I would turn into a werewolf, and they would do double takes and wonder how their eyes had deceived them. They would try in vain to figure out if I was a dog, a dog-man or a person in a dog suit. Little would they know that I was in fact a werewolf, a werewolf who was about to fall upon them with a senseless fury that only the purist evil can possess.
5. Join a midnight basketball league so I could rock the court like Teenwolf.
4. Schedule a business dinner meeting with someone who wanted to make a good impression on me. As I slowly turned into a werewolf I would carry on with the business at hand, pretending not to notice.
3. Loiter n' loot
2. Play wolfenstein 3D. (A classic among first person shooter games) Just because it would be cool to play a game called Wolfenstein while being a werewolf.
1. Fang a pedestrian in the kneecap and then say "Sorry about that, I guess I wasn't a-WARE of what I was doing!"
*Well those are my top ten. What woud you do?
Do they?
This question has been plaguing my mind, like a swarm of unyielding locusts for the past few days. In reality, of course, the answer is quite simple: No. They don't because mermaids don't exist.
But(t) let us put that issue aside for a moment. If mermaids did exist, would they have butts? All the mermaids that I've seen in pictures and movies have had what I would term "implied lower extremities", meaning that their lower bodies look basically like the lower half of a (usually very slim and shapely) young woman, only with a shinny fin wrapped tightly around her legs. And since we're talking about a life form that is based entirely in fiction and fantasy, it's enough to know that a mermaid is basically a beautiful woman with a fin instead of legs that you only see in glimpses. And if you are a sailor dude and you are lucky enough to drown, maybe she will kiss you and breathe life back into you.
But the question became all too real for me recently. Yesterday I was walking alone on a quiet beach at sunset. I was humming to myself, as I am prone to do when I am alone, when out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed what I thought was a mermaid. I turned my head to look at her, fully expecting that she would vanish into the vastness of the ocean, yet to my surprise not only was she in full view, she was moving towards me. She flopped up to me rapidly, and shockingly ungracefully, and she said, "Hello." I talked with her for some time, cloaking my surprise with all the skill of an expert magician and weaving conversation topics from nonexistent threads. I sensed the conversation was turning sour when she stopped laughing at my witty references to the Little Mermaid movie, so I started remarking that it was getting late and that "I had better get going because I had to meet my wife for . . . a game of uno." Then, inexplicably, the mermaid looked at me, with a strained, teary expression, and she farted. I was at a loss. Should I just leave? Should I try to fart too to make the situation less awkward? It wasn't the kind of fart that you could pretend not to have heard and walk away from. It was loud and she was looking at me when she did it. In fact, she was still staring at me, which made everything all the more awkward.
And that was when the question struck me like a shaft of lightning. 'How did she just fart? Does she have a butt? because it looks to me like she just has one, shiny fin below her navel.' I could have ended the mystery simply by looking to see, but that would have been a little rude. If she did have a butt, she might think that I was looking at it, which I would be. And "I just wanted to see if you had one" doesn't sound like a very reasonable excuse. Meanwhile the mermaid had stopped looking at me and was gazing dreamily up at the sky; she said she liked to watch the stars come out. It wasn't a very easy note to get out of a conversation on, but I made it work. I said something like "stars make me thirsty" and left, presumably for a drink.
I was happy to get out of the increasingly awkward situation, but the aforementioned question has been haunting me ever since. I just don't know the answer. Maybe I never will. Maybe it doesn't matter. What do you think about this issue? Or for that matter any issue related to mermaids? I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks for enduring this incredibly long post.
I promise there is more to my life, but I'll save deep and interesting thoughts for a later time.
#4.
One unfortunate day
I was cut off while driving on the free way
And became hopelessly consumed with roadrage.
Like a frenzied werewolf,
I was confined in a cage of my own making.
A cage of self imposed conventions,
A cage of unbreakable promises, that I had fashioned
In the morning of my life
To contain the monster
That would assuredly arise within
When the full moon of my ego
Rose in the midnight sky of my anger.
It was while attempting to break
out of this metaphorical cage,
That I shattered every bone in my body.
#5.
One unfortunate day,
I fell from the 8th floor of a building.
I was happy to find out that this was only a dream.
Yet I was unhappy to wake up on a concrete sidewalk
Having fallen off the top of a bunk bed
And out the window of the 8 th floor of my apartment building,
Shattering every bone in my body.