Elephant and I sit across from one another at a game of connect four. We're 11 pieces into the game. Giraffe and Zebra come over from their pinball game and sit at the table.
Giraffe glances at the connect four and says to me, "You've already lost."
His statement is accurate on so many levels. I look despondently at the game. I'm numb and no longer feel like playing. Giraffe motions to an empty slot and says, "play here."
"Shhh, let her play," Elephant admonishes, "I'll play you next."
Zebra, Giraffe and Elephant all stare at the connect 4 waiting for my move. I look at the esoteric disks in their little slots and try to make sense of it all. Giant waves of discomfort flood all the real estate in my brain and spill out onto the table. They're still waiting.
"Now I just want this game to be over," says Elephant. I silently concur. "Can we talk strategy here for a second?"
"Sure," I shrug.
"Okay. Giraffe said to play there because if you play here or here then my next move will win the game. But even if you play there I'll put my next piece here and you'll be forced to block me here or here but one of the spots will be left open and I'll still win."
"Right." I say dumbly. "So the game is over."
"Essentially."
I turn the game towards Giraffe. Elephant and Giraffe release the pieces from their prisons and start a new game.
5 comments:
The newest depressing children's fable to hit the "blog o sphere" may also be the most ridiculous. "Connect Four," is a first person account by the female half of the sort-of-famous directing team behind "Four Eyed Monsters." At first, one might not realize the similarities so deeply ingrained in both the film and the story, but a closer inspection opens a zoo full of swinging self-loathing, ferocious foreboding and an empty cage of self-esteem. The heroine seems to have learned little about herself in the time between the film and this most recent written docu-drama. Or, perhaps, she has forgotten it.
As in FEM, this story begins with her playing a game she feels she is losing. Susan has metaphored her perceived inadequacies and failures into 11 red and yellow discs that sit in a plastic blue matrix.
How keen.
Life in a nutshell, right? We have only these few game pieces with which to play in an ever-shrinking world of limited possibilities. You drop one poorly planned disc and a Giraffe will point out how you, the stupid asshole, fucked up your life and then Giraffe will explain how, in two more moves, an Elephant will destroy your soul forever.
With that much weight on her shoulders our heroine cedes the game, puts a shotgun in her mouth and pulls the trigger - or not, maybe it was just inferred.
Now, I've played Connect Four many times in my life. It is a game I have enjoyed. Even when I lost, upset though I may have been, I have never given even one of those god-damned plastic discs, or an elephant, the satisfaction of taking my self-esteem.
In FEM, the struggles imposed upon the young lead were many. Her lost soul frantically tried to find its place in the universe. It is a game that she may or may not have won, but there is a hope that runs deep in that film that seems to have been drained from our current, lovely and fragile Ms. Buice. It is a desperate turn, to be sure, in a life that many of us have followed in video and print for the past few years.
Perhaps it has been there all along, this despair, but it most definitely has not consumed her entire being as committedly as it has now. Her recent blog publications have all been leading up to this most dismal opus, “Connect Four.” With each new posting we see Susan’s soul getting mired deeper in a tarpit of sadness. And it’s breaking our collective hearts.
So we’ve established Susan is sad. We know that she projects that sadness onto her games: dating, Connect Four, Ms. Pacman. But there is another similarity between her film and her blogs that should be noted as a culprit in her ennui. Her character seems to have a dependence on others to give her value. And while in a social community this is indeed something that needs tending to it should, by no means, be the reason d’etre.
Then again, it is not fully clear if the need for validation is a result of or the cause of the latest bout of melancholy. What is clear, however, is that the Susans in “Yesturday’s [sic} Account,” “Connect Four,” “Horribly Vain,” and are all screaming for reassurance from others. In “Serious Change,” she points an admonition finger at others for “making [her] sick in spirit.”
Now that I think about it, there really is nothing that can be said to pinpoint the unhappiness of Susan’s latest characters. It is a place that we have all been. Most of us are lucky enough to find our way out. Usually, that means a change of personal habits. Finding something that makes us happy independent of others. Getting yourself out is something that you can never be taught; it’s just something you have to figure out.
Inevitably, Ms. Buice will create more depressing stories. We’ll read them or watch them and cringe and weep for her character. Maybe she’ll battle a monkey for her sanity in a game disguised as Scrabble. Maybe the monkey will take her ovaries while he’s at it.
Eventually, though, Susan will play a game just for the game and maybe she’ll even win. She won’t rest all of her intelligence in a marble rook on a checkered board.
Here’s hoping that we’ll soon read a new tale about a strawberry blonde who played solitaire and didn’t cry herself to sleep after losing.
Wow, this review is so scathing, I might have to go kill myself.
Sounds like Zebra was just standing around with his head up his ass. He sounds completely oblivious. Why is he even there? For the free snacks, methinks.
what do you think of dry erase boards and applications?
See, now I took the whole thing to mean something different than marmot and brianchirls read into it. This is what I read:
Giraffe and Elephant are in a full-on, cock-stroking, ass-licking, sycophantic conspiracy together. They prefer playing each other, and Giraffe tricked the protagonist into a no-win situation, just so they could get on with his ultimately fulfilling ego-fest with Elephant.
Zebra is as tired as the protagonist of the petty, duplicitous scheming that only a very cunning, lonely fox might really enjoy for long. One of their parents will die, or they'll be homeless, or their girlfriend will kill themselves, and all that shrewd genius will just end, or not, and they'll die alone.
But then I re-read it, and realized that I had it all wrong, I'm such an idiot.
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