Top Ten Things To Imagine Happening To Nicolas Cage As He's On His Way To A Dentist Appointment He Has Postponed For Three Years
A small orange cat begins to follow Nicolas Cage, who is convinced the cat thinks he is Matt Damon. He doesn’t know if he should feel afraid or slightly more confident.
By Megan Boyle
1. A 5’5”, 182-pound, 43-year-old man wearing khaki shorts and a UCLA sweatshirt runs to Nicolas Cage in a manner he will spend the rest of the night describing to his slightly bored but equally boring date as “ambushing.” No one else is on the street and Nicolas Cage is unable to avoid the man, who wants a picture with his “brand new Droid.” As the man, who actually seems to be vibrating and hovering in an almost hummingbird-like way, adjusts his stance for the third attempt at a picture his crotch lightly brushes Nicolas Cage’s upper thigh, causing his face to shift from “bemused resignation” to, strangely, “serene bliss,” for what will become the man’s inaugural Facebook profile picture.
2. After concluding that he has no idea what a “buttery nipple” is and barely allowing enough time for a thorough survey of how alone he is on the street, Nicolas Cage vigorously adjusts his penis in his pants while making what he considers “sexy” noises with his mouth.
3. Nicolas Cage sees John Malkovich approaching and knows they are both aware of having at least five casual conversations with each other, though their most recent took on a somber note when Nicolas Cage, after eight shots of Bacardi 151, loudly joked about Malkovich’s recent success in “that jewel thief movie” past the point of everyone in earshot (Malkovich included) first politely and then disdainfully ignoring and eventually backing away from him. Until today, Nicolas Cage has consoled himself by thinking Malkovich had to have been drunk too, and has even tentatively entertained the fantasy of eating a bi-monthly Saturday brunch with him someday. Now, as Malkovich nears, his vision seemingly restricted to the narrow trajectory ahead of him, Nicolas Cage feels an actual molecular decrease in the likelihood of ever eating brunch with Malkovich and, oddly enough, ever eating a brunch-like food again. Malkovich passes, making a sound Nicolas Cage first interprets as “humming the chorus of Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All,’” and then realizes is actually “half-muttering the word ‘nanotechnology’ at a clearly agitated speed.”
4. A small orange cat begins to follow Nicolas Cage, who is convinced the cat thinks he is Matt Damon. He doesn’t know if he should feel afraid or slightly more confident.
5. Nicolas Cage bumps and cuts his toe on a raised portion of a sidewalk and screams in a way that in a period of no greater than seven seconds, makes four people inside a restaurant a block away feel mysteriously reminded of the final battle scene in the movie Glory for no discernible reason, briefly revel in how their emotions were genuinely invested in the movie by the ending (perhaps reaching peak emotional involvement right before the battle when Matthew Broderick lets his horse run free on the beach and the sky is very blue), vaguely consider that something in their environment is bizarrely evocative of that final scene, and then finally recognize that they did hear an actual scream, perhaps a block away from them. Meanwhile, Nicolas Cage will have used his scream to seamlessly launch into a racist tirade that he has been saving for an opportunity to go viral. Unable to sustain the levels of conviction present during his rehearsals in front of the mirror and also unable to stop speaking completely, he closes the tirade with a few directionless expletives and, finally, his accidental premier of a new ethnic slur: “spigget” – the only word captured by the one camera phone filming.
6. Even though Nicolas Cage knows there is a 67% chance he will be at least ten minutes late to his dental appointment, his passive curiosity about whether Pringles still manufactures snack-sizes of the “Pizza-licious” flavor has now turned to obsession. He knows his dentist will be able to detect the orangey-red remnants of chips in his teeth, but saliva is generating under the rear-sides of his tongue and he is approaching a deli where he is certain he’s purchased the snack-sizes. After significantly less deliberation than he’d ever publicly admit, he buys one small tube and eats it in a greedy, hoarding, shameful way, barely tasting the chips at all. When the dentist’s office calls him 26 minutes later, his phone is on silent and he is lying on his bed next to two full-sized, crumb-less tubes of “Pizza-licious” Pringles.
7. While having low-level, barely detectable thoughts about himself in his surroundings that he will never remember (he guesses on his better days that these thoughts might serve some future purpose, but it’s much more common for him to attribute them to his background feelings of worthlessness in a way that, when asked, he can never clearly define), Nicolas Cage finds himself accidentally glaring at a Walgreens sign, and for nearly one minute sincerely considers the possibility that it could be responsible for every problem in his life, including his current state of oral hygiene.
8. A 2002 PT Cruiser loudly playing Tina Turner’s “I Don’t Want to Fight,” a song that frequently becomes stuck in Nicolas Cage’s head (often seemingly against his will), pulls up to him at a stop light. Nicolas Cage has gone as little as 15 seconds and as long as three days without realizing certain melodic segments from “I Don’t Want to Fight” are playing on a loop in his head and upon realization, intends to purge his brain of the song by looking it up on YouTube, but lacks the motivation to ever follow through. Delighted to recognize the sounds emitting from the now driving away PT Cruiser, Nicolas Cage gives himself permission to triumphantly chase after it, experimenting with flailing his arms around a little.
9. In an attempt to feel less bored with himself, Nicolas Cage feeds quarters to a stranger’s flashing parking meter. He fumbles with the coins and starts to feel distinctly like a character in a Pixar animation short, suddenly having a very hard time resisting the urge to say “bo bo bo-bo-bo” in whimsical tones to the meter and “tickle” it with the quarters. As his fingers are poised in a “pre-sprinkling” action above the meter’s head, a 48 year old woman who is clearly just using her motorized wheelchair as a luxury item openly ogles his ass, becoming so transfixed by the visual phenomena in front of her that she starts to wonder what the appeal of an ass is anyway (i.e. “what even is an ass, what am I doing, why do I care about anything”), until she sees she is within six inches of the ass and brakes abruptly. Nicolas Cage senses something behind him and perhaps as a deeply-rooted defense mechanism designed to intimidate predators, reflexively blurts “bo bo bo-bo-bo,” feeling as if someone has made him cough, and then turns and watches the woman rapidly scoot away.
10. A small alien spacecraft hovers outside Nicolas Cage’s dentist’s office. The aliens all slightly resemble Nicolas Cage. They have known he would be here at this time, and have come to ask him to be their emperor. However, after talking with him for less than two minutes, they silently and unanimously conclude that he’s not right for the job, and awkwardly leave by telling him they “just wanted to say hi” and that they “don’t want to make him late for his appointment.” 
