Nothing to be Done


Wherein Our Heroine tries her Hand at a bit of Drama.
I followed a friend's link to a Slashdot thread today, and two things occurred to me. First of all, while I spent way too much time skimming through the contents of this "conversation," the people who produced everything printed there spent much more time writing it. I know I have too much time on my hands, but it led me to wonder if these people sleep, if they have jobs, if they have relationships. Probably they have jobs....

Second of all, it struck me that had Samuel Beckett lived in the Internet age, he may not have been able to write his masterpiece, "Waiting for Godot," because too many people would have accused him of cheap rip-offs of online threads. Reading a thread is like watching a tennis match between two well-matched but mediocre players, with an occasional brass band sent straight through center court at random intervals. Multiple people coming to the same conclusions and posting in swift succession, sudden flaming anger at a post three screens down the page (and in this short-attention span world, already forgotten) and red herrings dragged across the central topic create strange repetition, random leaps in content and self-contradictory reasoning that is remarkably similar to the famous tragicomedy.

So, with apologies to Samuel Beckett, here is my reimagining of "Waiting for Godot - the Slashdot Conversation"

[A country road, a tree. Estragon sits on a low mound, trying to remove his boot. Vladimir enters, pulls off his tinfoil hat, looks inside and knocks it on the crown, as if to make something fall out.]

Estragon: [Giving up on the boot] Nothing to be done.

Vladimir: I've come to the same conclusion myself.

Estragon: So why are you here again?

Vladimir: I had to return: Godot is tracing my movements through the cunning placement of a chip in my head - or is it in my money?

Estragon: [Suddenly angry] You fool! You know that processed cheese is the only thing they trace.

Vladimir: Your spelling is atrocious.

Estragon: Off topic! Off topic!!
[He attacks Vladimir. Vladimir weeps, stops, pulls off his tinfoil hat and looks inside, shaking it to see if anything will fall out.]

Vladimir: Nothing to be done.

Estragon: It's 1:35 in the morning and we've been here for days. We have no life. We should go.

Vladimir: We can't!

Estragon: Why not?

Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.

Estragon: Ah! I had forgotten. Shall we go?

Vladimir: Yes, let's go.
[They do not move].

Curtain
Posted: Wednesday - March 03, 2004 at 07:43 AM         | |

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