It feels like another of Stoppard’s jokes. They sometimes went over my head but it wouldn’t be so weird if the coin didn’t flip the same result so regularly. It’s a brief disconnection from responsibility. Flip the coin; solve issue with no intellectual strain. The Player keeps flipping and getting the same result. Slowly it becomes addictive.
- Will I walk the dog?
- Should I speak to her?
- Does She like Me?
- Will I be happy?
Why
I’m sure somewhere Roz and Guil are laughing at me. Laughing at the pure absurdity of what I’m doing. Flip, disconnect. Flip, disconnect. Flip, disconnect
- All while the coin is oscillating wildly.
And the relief comes in waves; it comes in the absence of thought, where the stray electrons quantify themselves anywhere but my head.
-Perhaps they’ve escaped? Maybe they are laughing at me too. I’m never really certain with things I can’t see.
And they’re back again! Screaming for the flip, screaming to escape again. I wonder where they went, and I wonder where they’ll go.
If it isn’t here, then I’m sure you’re happy.
The abandonment of responsibilities makes you dependent on chance. I’d float by for moths, subsisting on binary results that I would read far too deeply into. I was a hermit crab. I wore my room like it was my home. And it was with me wherever I went.
-But I didn’t go places or anywhere really.
The coin always had other ideas in mind, Stoppard too. Once bright and lustrous and gorgeous
-How beautifully it would shine in the air
the coin slowly changed its colours. Darker now, a patina of loathing and irresponsibility miring the Queen’s head, tinted shades of black through grimy fingers eagerly reaching for a thought free decision, desperate for absolution. I’m sure an alcoholics prized glasses and bottles slowly lose their lustre too. I wonder if my chance based confinement was anything like the clutches of spirit(s), or the dependency on synthetic alternatives to reality that emaciates and cripples.
I think, on some level, they are.
Stupid, Really.
The coin is a binary beast. On/off, on/off, on/off, repeated ad nauseam till some solace or comfort is achieved,
-It makes the anxiety melt away. Release.
Or until I get fed up with the answers that seem so likely to be true. Did Mr. Stoppard plant this absurdity in my head, using vitriolic skills of subversion and the beauty of wit to nullify my free will? I hope not. Every part of me screams that it’s not fair, screams that it’s stupid, and screams that I’m wasting my time.
But I still reach for the coin.
-The coin is a putrid black now, and somehow, somewhere I’m certain that player is still flipping, Roz and Guil really are dead, and Stoppard is happy.
But I’m not.