copyright © 1997 Dan Brooks

Dan Brooks

353-0839

"Crack Your Neck"

or

"The Ideal No Shame Piece is Seven Seconds Long, and While None of These Pieces is Ideal, or Seven Seconds Long for That Matter, I Think You Understand the Kind of Mimetic Perfection Concept I’m Going for Here"

(Lights down. Throughout this thang, I will use a flashlight for lighting and click it off briefly for the breaks between "pieces".)

Yesterday I said to an acquaintance of mine, "Hey, did you see the World Series on TV the other night?" And this acquaintance, who for the sake of avoiding unnecessary embarassment I will call "Roger the Brainless Ape" said to me, "Oh, I don’t watch television." And I thought, Well aren’t you just Noam fucking Choamsky. Hey everybody, let’s all be like Roger the Brainless Ape here, who takes pride in having eliminated from his life the primary communicative medium of our society. Instead of wasting our time with "I Dream of Genie", why don’t we all just sit at home and be like Roger, who apparently spends every night drinking port under a watercolor of Ayn Rand while writing essays for the New Yorker and coming up with earth-shattering platitudes like "I don’t watch television"? Writers, painters, musicians – everybody just take a dump on your Stradivarious and wipe your ass with that MFA, ’cause after Roger here gets done not watching TV he’s going to revolutionize the intellectual world to such a profound degree that the rest of us are just going to have to buy a big picture of him and go home and look at it and whack off.

But then, out loud, I said, "Yeah, I don’t really watch TV either."

I made this bet with the devil about which one of us could corrupt goodness, thwart charity and sow the seeds of chaos upon the earth the fastest, and now I’m sitting here with six fingers on each hand and teeth growing out of my ass, and I’m thinking, Wow, that really wasn’t a good bet.

There is pornography under my sink. I have no idea how it got there. It is not mine, it is not my roommate’s; apparently, it came with the house. I’m afraid to throw it out, because if I do so, the garbage man will either see it and think I am some sort of pervert or see it and want to be my friend. I am prepared for neither possibility. So now it’s just sitting under the sink, doubtlessly giving the roaches bad ideas. This is a bad thing. Frankly, the roaches don’t need any additional encouragement to have sex. The last thing I need is five thousand of them sitting in my bathroom, reading free pornography and craving "anal action". The way I see it, the roaches are already disgusting enough.

Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to waaaaaiiiiiiiiigh!

Jim Morrison, American poet.

Back when I was freelancing, my grandpa happened to overhear me complaining about how I spent twelve hours writing and researching a newpaper article and only got paid thirty bucks for it. He said to me, "Boy, when I was your age, thirty bucks was a hell of a lot of money. Back then, the nickel arcade cost three cents, if somebody said ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ you’d have to write them an annotated twelve-page essay just so they’d get their money’s worth, and hack writers like you were a dime for fourteen." Let me give you a little advice. If you’re ever in a fight with my grandpa, go for the hip.

When I was a kid some guys in my neighborhood tied me up in an old Navy trunk and threw me into the river as a joke. I learned something from that day, and since then I’ve lived my life with one simple purpose: To never be tied up in an old Navy trunk and thrown into the river again.

You ever wonder why Gilligan didn’t just grab the professor and say, "For God’s sake, just build a fucking raft!"? No? Well maybe that’s why I’m a high school graduate.

All of the kids in my family learned that painful lesson early on. Like the bright blue spots of the arrow poison frog or the blood-red hourglass of the black widow spider, my uncle’s urine-stained golf pants and tie-dyed Smith & Wesson t-shirt were nature’s way of saying, "Do Not Touch."

The homeless wear tattered rags and they’re frequently soaked in alcohol, so they burn quicker and hotter than almost any other kind of fuel. The Ford Motor Company has already developed a car that runs entirely off of forgotten war veterans. It is this kind of can-do thinking and a willingness to reduce humor to cheap shock value that will make America great again.

Dear Mr. Brooks:

We here at the Children’s Television Workshop appreciate your list of suggestions for changes to Sesame Street. Although we would like nothing better than to completely redesign our award-winning and universally loved children’s television program based on your untested and seemingly arbitrary opinions, we regret to inform you that we will not be implementing your changes. Most notably, the name of Cookie Monster will definitely not be changed to "Cock Gobbler."

Ahm mm m mm m m mmm. Ahm m m mmmm mm m.

(Pause.)

See? I’m Cookie Monster, gobbling cock. Cock Gobbler, you know? What the hell has happened to theater in this country?

My father always said that honesty was the best policy. As usual, he was lying. That joke is a lot funnier if you grew up hearing other lies, like "I love you, son," and "Don’t come any closer; it’s loaded."

The ducks came out of the river and sat on the sidewalk today, and when I tried to walk through them all the drakes flared their wings and quacked menacingly at me. So I said to them, "So, arrogant ducks, you seek to match strength with Man? For all your evolutionary specialization, all your hollow bone structures and aerodynamically correct cell development, you are still no match for I whose species has bent nature to the unyielding will of science! Man has usurped evolution and made himself liege of the court of natural selection. So quiver, ducks, and yield the sidewalk, for you face the master of the atom!"

In an unrelated observation, I’m still not dating much.

(Flashlight off.)

The dark. I’ll bet dollars for doughnuts that everyone in this room is afraid of the dark. I’ll take the same bet out to the lobby, and through the front doors and down the well-lit streets to the big wide world, and I guarantee that every last person out there for you and me to ask is afraid of the dark. Anyone who says differently is either lying or blind.

We’re afraid of the dark because when we can’t see ourselves we don’t know where our hands are. Try this: Put your hand up in front of your face and move it toward you slowly until your palm touches the end of your nose. Every single time it’ll touch a half second before or after you expect it to.

I walk around in my room in the dark and I have to follow my hands. They catch on the metal corner of my desk, they nick themselves on the edge of my plastic hamper, and they drag their knuckles across the serrated knives in my sink. In the morning, I wake up with a thousand little cuts on the of my hands, and those cuts make a road map of exactly where I went the day before in the dark.

(Please count to ten, then bring up the lights. Thanks.)

"Crack Your Neck" IS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AND MAY NOT BE DOWNLOADED, TRANSMITTED, PRINTED OR PERFORMED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

"Crack Your Neck" debuted October 24, 1997.

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