I was asked what an earlier version of this meme meant. Usually my memes are pretty obvious, even the ones with second meanings are only very shallowly hidden. I briefly considered doing what Beckett did about the meaning of the play and the characters: He claimed that he knew nothing more than was in the script.

This is obviously a reference to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which makes the two men  Estragon (Gogo) left and Vladimir (Didi) right. On day 2, Gogo complained that his leg had become infected from the kick he’d received on day 1. Beckett never said that the men were rough sleepers, but Gogo said he’d slept in a ditch the night before day 1 and also referenced that his clothes were rags. Many productions have dressed both men appropriately for the production’s time & place as rough sleepers.

I mostly work making collages of found art. My starting point is a one line joke then I go looking for freely usable art that works with the joke. I’d had “Day <<Some number>>, still no Godot. DEATH steps in.” in my mind for a few years and decided it was time to use it. Once I knew what I wanted to make I needed to find freely reusable images for the trees, Gogo & Didi. Open Clip Art to the rescue. The amputee image was perfect for GoGo while using the other image for Didi was balanced. The trees were a lucky find, there’s a graveyard in the background! DEATH is actually cut out of a photograph of me, wearing the “DEATH suit” performing stand-up. I can’t explain why, but I see the DEATH in this meme as being closer to the DEATH in my The Grin Reaper plays than to the one in my stand-up.

Waiting for Godot covered two days with the promise at the end of each day that Godot would come on the following day. However on day 1 the trees are bare, on day 2 they have leaves suggesting a longer delay than one night. At the end of the play I was left with the impression that Godot would never appear. The fact that I have numbered the day 12,345 has very little meaning. I wanted an obviously meaningless number that made this day well separated from the days of the play, but plausibly within the lifetimes of the characters. 1234 days is a little less than 3 years, 4 months. I felt more separation would be good. My first choice of 123,456 days turned out to be 338 years, far too long. 12,345 days is a little less than 34 years. A bit of a stretch but if we accept the men could be centenarians, it’s plausible. The 33 year delay would have made them even more decrepit and could explain what had happened to Gogo’s foot.

I now had all the elements to make an image matching the text and I did, but it lacked something. After a bit of pondering I added the observer as a giant face watching from behind the tree. Yes, it’s one of the cartoons representing me I often use in my memes, but for reasons I can’t explain I don’t feel it is representing me this time. I really don’t know who or what it represents. It could be Beckett, It could be Godot, it could be a deity, it could even be HR (A demon from The Grin Reaper universe) or just an ordinary bystander. Which brings me to a parallel to what Samuel Beckett said about the play. Maybe he was telling the truth?

Afterword: This is the image I chose for the watcher. I’ve cut it off below the waist & removed the microphone stand. The tree hides most of the torso & Didi hides the mic. Interestingly enough, unlike the other 350 odd cartoons of me I’ve collected, I no longer have the original of it, just 3 GIMP files last edited in 2024 I can import into new pictures when I want to use it. Unlike most other GIMP Layers, it’s just called “Pasted Layer” in the image file editor.