Clean on the Outside

I used to be a huge fan of BET's Comic View, especially when Cedric the Entertainer was hosting. Before he started going the Eddie Murphy route of kids' movies, cartoons, and weirdly perfect facial hair, Cedric was the pioneer of incorporating dance moves into his routines. It helped that Cedric was chubby and jolly and actually a really good dancer, and that he never smiled while doing it, which is part of what made his opening routines so hilarious.

Now a lot of comics seem to incorporate song and dance into their routines. Kat Williams' epileptic "Everyday I'm Hustlin" bit is less a Cedric-style song-and-dance number than it is a staged battle of wills between Williams and an unseen DJ who continues to queue up the song despite the comedian's protests: "Shit! Turn it off, sir. Don't play it again."

But there was no one quite like Cedric. What he lacked in hyperactivity, he made up for in smoothness and prowess. And every once in a while, I'll hear a song and think, "This would be perfect for Cedric."

This is such a song. Yeah, buddy.

The God Particle Is in the Details

Perhaps you've heard about the 17-mile long super-collider buried under Switzerland. Apparently, if everything works out, we'll wake up the next day with the power of invisibility and time travel. I think that's correct.

Anyway, there was an article in the New York Times today about how they've been having problems of late, which is a buzz kill for me, who was looking forward to walking through the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte unnoticed. And naked.

A friend of mine pointed out a particularly noteworthy sentence in the article, which is hilarious in the deadpan way that only objective print journalists can muster: "The energy shortfall could also limit the collider’s ability to test more exotic ideas, like the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that characterize life."

This sentence has inspired me to write a play. It is called "Energy Shortfall."

Energy Shortfall

Switzerland. Deep below the earth's crust. No, deeper. The mantle. A Mechanic and a Physicist stand talking in a tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider.

Mechanic: So you've got an energy shortfall.

Physicist: Oh, an ENERGY SHORTFALL. You don't say?

Mechanic: Listen, I'll come back tomorrow and take another look at it.

Physicist: Oh, yeah. Just come back tomorrow. The energy shortfall isn't really a big deal. I mean, it COULD jeopardize our ability to know the truth about the universe. But you know other than that. No big deal. Go home. You're TIRED.

Mechanic: I said I'll fix it tomorrow!

Physicist (mocking): "I said I'll fix it tomorrow."

Mechanic: Super-collide this.

Mechanic punches Physicist.

Physicist: Fucking asshole! Fucking dumb fucking asshole fuck! Once this supercollider gets going I'm gonna fucking use it to zap you into the fucking Paleozoic era so you can get fucking torn apart by fucking Pterodactyls! You fuck--!

Mechanic punches Physicist again, knocking him against the super-collider, which miraculously begins to function. Zoom out. A black hole opens up over Switzerland. Europe, the world, the galaxy, blogs, are all engulfed into it.

Mik gasps as he awakens from a terrible day dream. His boss is standing behind him.

Boss: Ahem. Mik, did you finish creating those spreadsheets for the progress report?

Mik: No, sorry. I had, uh. I had an energy shortfall.

Boss: And why are you dressed like Napoleon Bonaparte?

Mik punches Boss.

THE END

(...Or is it?)

Fortunes

There was a fortune cookie left over from dinner last night. I broke it in half and removed its lone intestine. "Your future is boundless as the lofty heavens," it said. There were smiley faces on it. They did not seem particularly friendly.

I am not a fan of the taste of fortune cookies, but feeling fortunate, I popped half of it into my mouth and proceeded to fumble the other half. It shattered on the floor, which somehow seemed to contradict the optimism of my fortune.

And like that: my friend Jesse was sitting in my kitchen. On this day a year ago, he died in a freak accident while he was out jogging. His future was not boundless. His future ended on the corner of Vanderbilt and Atlantic Avenue on a day exactly like this one. And yet who better to verify the truth of the fortune? Who better to ask about the loftiness of heaven than him?

"Jesse," I said to an empty chair. "Is it really that...lofty?"

"Eh," he shrugged. "I mean it's only heaven."

I picked the brittle, broken pieces off my kitchen floor. I tried to think of what else we could say to each other, a year deeper into my boundless future, and him into the one I continue to imagine for him.

For me really.

I looked over at him and began my boundless, lofty future this way: by taking dirty, broken pieces of fortune and eating every last crumb.