On WILLIAMSON’S WAY an extended episode of “The New Norm L”, where the ultimate everyman Norman Light tries to become just one person instead, a life coach, but somehow can’t help sounding a little confused.
Show Excerpts: The New Norm L
Norman Light approached the spot from the wings, to warm applause and cheering. He paused a moment, hands behind his back and his head tilted to the right. He took as his text an allusion to magic itself.
“If a man can pull a rabbit out of a hat,” asked Norman rhetorically, “does a rabbit then pull an easter egg out of itself? This was how I would ask for life advice from my nanny, prior to a long pause and a smack on the head from nanny.
“That was my real, private life when I wasn’t becoming other people. You see, due to my having a frequently absent mother and father (They’d phone in sick from work), I learned most of my life lessons from my nanny Pat, an actress who looked after me in her down time. I was talking about scrapbooking the other night. Well, my nanny was into scrapbooking and she kept an album that had the backs of her friend’s heads. Amongst them were “Loser”, “Idiot”, “Prima Donna”, and “Fats”.
“Those are their names??” I asked. “No, that’s what I call them behind their backs,” she replied.
“But Nanny, doesn’t going behind someone’s back technically put you in front of them?” I asked. “Aren’t you really saying you’re in front of their back?”
“’That’s balderdash’”, she replied, pointing to a picture in the scrapbook referring to a marathon for the follically challenged.
“’Have you noticed, Norman, that when people rotate a finger near their head it means ‘Crazy’ but when they rotate it away from their head it means ‘No big deal’? Therefore, to not be crazy is a matter of perspective. Therefore, keep your fingers and therefore hands well away from yourself, only watch out you don’t do unintentional Frankenstein impressions. The Frankenstein monster, incidentally, walked like that because his body was a combination of dead Olympic high divers, so what the monster was really looking for all that time was a swimming pool with a diving board. In fact, had he merely phoned a swimming pool emporium, as indeed did Dracula and the Wolfman, he might have noticed its prohibitive costs. Of course with Dracula he always called at night when they were closed anyway, and as for the Wolfman he wasn’t crazy about always having to scour his swimming pool with a net to get all the hair out. Speaking of crazy, there’s no reason to assume, just because you see one person run after another with a net, that the person being chased is crazy and the person with the net is with a sanitarium. In most cases the person with the net is chasing someone under the belief that they’re not a human being but a dirty pool needing cleaning. Hence the expression ‘That’s dirty pool’ meaning something unpleasant and surprising.”
The bedroom radio woke May Long with this particular soundbite from Norman’s talk at the Hollywood Bowl.
“They’re actually giving Norman a second night at the Hollywood Bowl, and he’s actually going to give a completely new speech,” she marveled.
“Yes, May, I actually heard it,” muttered Klaus Kohl.
“Here we thought he was toast after not doing a confusion of characters anymore, suffering from character impotence, and…now he’s put his own completely confused mind on display, and they…”
“…Pay for it,” Klaus finished her sentence.
“We thought we were all finished. Now we stand to be even bigger than before!!”
“We?” asked Klaus.
May ignored Klaus’s succinct plea for a qualifier. She went on. “He merely makes the statement that life used to be in black and white, and nobody disputes it.”
Klaus shrugged.
“Only because nobody can prove it wasn’t,” he said. “May, why exactly are we worried?”
“Same reason anybody is. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. We need to think this through. Is there coffee?”
“I’ll make some,” said Klaus and he rolled out of bed.
***
He’d tell me these things and I’d just retire to the guest bedroom. Eyes glued to the TV.
Okay for some, perhaps, but I personally didn’t care for looking at a pair of strange eyeballs pasted to a shut-off monitor in a lonely room.
***
If you’re bad you go to hell. But, hell appears to be many things. Are we sure we don’t mean hells? Why should I, for example, who’s maybe committed the sin of selfishness, have to share a space with a murderer? And does that mean he’d kill me and I wouldn’t notice?
And while we’re talking about it, how could I be killed if I’m already dead? There’s supposedly that thing of damnation without relief, meaning that you’re screaming in pain or whatever and it doesn’t stop. What if your life is already like that? And can you in fact be conscious of no relief? In all logic, hell can’t be one place, it has to be a tiered thing. Enough tiers to fill an ocean, I’m sure.
Only thing is, there’s no water in hell. But what if you’re a dead plumber? Isn’t a flood your hell then? You get a flood you can’t burn! Even boiling water would have to eventually cool and you could do a lot worse than be in hell with a bunch of damned plumbers. Specifically the ones who charge too much…and I did know a plumber who charged too much. Every time he told a dirty joke, he would charge me through the wall. He claimed this was how he would build me a new bathroom. Naturally I asked him how knocking a hole in the wall gives me a new bathroom. “We’re men,” he said, “If we can go to the bathroom standing up, we can certainly go to the bathroom sideways. Once you can poop through a hole in the wall sideways it’s smooth sailing.”
This was clearly a man with a unique take on nautical craft. I couldn’t say for sure if, for example, the voyages of Magellan were a success due to the captain having a poop through a hole in a wall first, as a way of ensuring good luck on his voyage.
Rather like having rabbits’ feet or christening ships. Of course christening ships by hitting them with rabbits smacks of animal cruelty. So Magellan would have had to rely on rabbits’ feet to navigate. Which he didn’t. Magellan already HAD feet like a rabbit, which meant he could hop at great heights around the poopdeck at will. One bound took him up to the crow’s nest, in which he could check on weather conditions and then jump back down and report his findings…to himself.
But, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, the trouble with being an explorer with rabbits’ feet was you could bounce around not just your own deck but other people’s. Studies show that Magellan had SUCH powerful rabbits’ feet that he managed to bounce off his deck and onto the decks of passing ships, meaning he also sailed the Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria consecutively, spending about 2.5 minutes bouncing from one to the other.
Of course, there are those who dispute the authenticity of Magellan interrupting Christopher Columbus’ voyages via bouncing from ship to ship thanks to his incredibly powerful rabbits’ feet. They even claim it’s a hoax. A hoax, incidentally, derives from the short form of hooker, plus an ax, therefore a hoax is what prostitutes used in self-defence, or to build brothels. It is rumoured that early brothels were built from the remains of male siblings, or brothers, who reneged on promises to pay for sex. But prostitutes through history have always denied this. Those who are not madams used to say, ‘I am not my brothel’s keeper.’
***
Paranoia is a really unfortunate state, and oddly enough it’s not just the egotists who think everyone’s out to get them, it’s also the insecure among us. My dresser Klaus used to be insecure. He became more steady once I hammered his shirtsleeves to a chair and his shoes to the floor. He walked into the room nude watching me do this handiwork to his clothes and realized I wouldn’t stop nailing his clothes to things if he didn’t quit calling me weird.
He soon quit, quit being my dresser that is, but would later call me, on the phone, shouting, “Weird!” and hanging up.
***
Featuring: “Storytelling – The New Norm L, Part 9”.
