I’ve got them all fooled. In my life I’ve held several jobs. At each interview, at each performance review, I’ve convinced them I’m a good employee. They think I’m a professor, or whatever the job happened to be before that. In reality, I’m the trickster.
I’m the individual who can’t be categorized. You see, I’ve been a writer since I was a kid living on a pittance of an allowance and whatever I could earn from a summer job in a small, economically depressed town. In my time off I was writing.
Some day, I knew, someone would recognize my talent. I would be paid for my stories and novels. Nobody would know who I was—least of all my employers. That dream refuses to die, despite the decades and the reams of unpublished material that coat my study. Dutifully I trudge off to work.
On a winter not unlike this one, I recall working for an employer whose employee handbook stated that the office would be closed for inclement when public schools were closed. Then, in a city that never sleeps, the schools closed. The next week during a wind chill advisory a memo came around, should the weather get bad we’ll remain open, no matter what the public schools do. January is the month of the trickster.
As a child I experienced mild frostbite waiting for a school bus that never came one winter day. The snow crunched underfoot and the wind felt like absolute zero. I trudged the mile home, unable to feel hands or feet. The damage was permanent as I’m still horribly sensitive to cold.
Employers don’t know, however, that they’ve hired the trickster. My stories, apart from pure imagination, are populated with the employers who didn’t care about people. In my trickster mind they’ve been mashed and blended and poured into a die of the heartless bureaucrat. They pay no mind to the weather as long as they have a warm ride to work.
Decades of writing have never led to a penny on my part. I write because I’m compelled, not because I received some special training from a workshop where anyone might be taught how to flash credentials in exchange for publication. No, tricksters don’t play by the rules.
Published or not, I am a writer. Those who think differently do not know the trickster.
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