There’s This Syndrome Going Around, But It Only Affects Imposters
My wife says I’ve been leaning too heavily into the wore down working man persona, lately. Not in my written work, mind you. She doesn’t bother to read that shit. Just in how I comport myself during the natural course of my everyday life, hobbling around like a broke dick and bitching about how I’m only able to see the winter sunshine in ten-minute increments from my break table perch. Apparently, my mewling is really starting to work her nerves. She claims no one else likes it, either. She must be talking about her friends in management, because my co-workers on the factory floor, all they want to talk about is how Hydra Hydraulics is slowly crushing their will to live.
Wore down working man… I don’t know how else to act.
Is it an act?
Can I just shake off the sixty-six-hour work week and portray a normal person who isn’t exhausted all the time?
I bristle at the thought of defining myself by my employment status. I’ve never been the type to list my job on my social media page. One, it just seems like asking for trouble for someone with opinions left of center. For another, who gives a shit where I work? I don’t and I spend half my goddam life there.
At the same time, hasn’t my favorite Rush song always been “Working Man”? Even back when I was a thirteen-year-old idiot playing Dungeons and Dragons in a friend’s basement, having never even worked a four hour shift at McDonald’s, let alone a twelve plus hour shift at that cesspool of a chrome shop on top of a mountain in rural Alabama, I related to that Rush song more than any other.
I suppose I was playing at the wore down working man persona even then, bicycling my dumb Polack ass up and down Hohman Avenue, slinging the Hammond Times at screen doors, coming home after a hard thirty minute bike ride on my BMX, cracking open one of my mom’s Miller High Life cans, and putting on Rush Archives on the record player, thinking, damn, life’s a grind, rolling up and rubber banding forty newspapers. It was hard enough work to send a man of thirteen into an early grave.
I knew manual labor wasn’t for me. I wonder why I pursued such a life so earnestly.
I’d love to retire from the factory game and become a “full time writer.” Becoming a full-time writer for me, though, would amount to wasting the better part of my days watching god awful, low budget horror movies on Tubi, then, maybe, frantically writing a Polish Hammer column on Sunday nights. I know this about myself. I’m a time-wasting procrastinator from way back. Back when I supervised assembly and worked a relaxing four day week, I pissed away an entire afternoon watching a televised Dungeons and Dragons campaign playing on some obscure Amazon Prime channel. And I don’t even like Dungeons and Dragons. Not anymore. I think Quentin Tarantino’s favorite actor, Matthew Lillard, might have been playing one of the games, though I could have just dreamt that. I was drifting in and out of sleep the way I often do when I find myself lying prone.
I think that to become a full-time writer I would have to enjoy the process of writing more than I do. Then again, I despise the act of chroming cylinders and I do that shit every waking moment if my working man persona is to be believed. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just hampered by a preventative attitude.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing. There are moments when the words flow through me, every word perfectly precise, a purely telepathic symbiosis between my creative spirit and the word hording craftsman residing inside my mind. Then there are the far more prevalent days when I’m scarcely able to construct a sentence. Pronounce, this is shit. Sweat out another sentence and remain unsurprised by the utter lack of improvement. The telepathic link is broken. I become a retard shuffling Scrabble tiles. My fingers trip over the keys. I wonder, does it matter? How many people are going to read this? And of the readers who read the first paragraph, how many will read until the bitter end of the essay, the story, the poem?
Maybe I’m only playing at being a writer. If I’m not writing, that would mean I’m nothing more than a factory worker, and not a very skilled one at that.
I read constantly, but am I only playing at being a reader? How much do I truly retain? Of the thousands of books on the surrounding shelves, the hundreds and hundreds of books I’ve read all the way through, what do I remember? What authors could I quote from memory without the assistance of Google? Hell, I don’t think I could quote from anything I’d ever written. Were I pressed to write a review of any book I’ve read recently, could I present anything other than a vague notion whether I liked the book or not and a recap riddled with errors? So am I only playing at being a reader after all these years stretching back to my adolescence?
Maybe I’m just being too hard on myself.
We all suffer from imposter syndrome from time to time, right?
My problem is, going back to the working man persona, I’d love to switch jobs. I just don’t know how to do anything else. Somehow, I got through fifty years of life without learning jack shit. Twenty four of those years, I wasted within the toxic confines of Hydra Hydraulics. I’ve managed to remain blissfully untouched by practical knowledge and a skill set needed to perform as a productive employee. I’ve mostly faked it. I’ve made it this far, making a fairly comfortable living, by the grace of managerial incompetence snowballed by my can-do attitude. I’m considered the company chrome expert though I know little about the process. (I actually have a book on hard chrome plating that I’ve never bothered to read). My lack of knowledge is generally unrecognized since management refuses to listen to a word I say, anyway, because a) they know better than anybody, and b) any improvement I mention would likely cost the company money they do not wish to spend.
In the end, if you sat me down and questioned me for details how I do my job, I’d react the same way I would if I had to analyze the collection of Wallace Stevens poems I read last year. I recall no details, but I’m fairly certain I hate it.
So, where does that leave me?
I love money and don’t want to go without it.
I hate my job but don’t know what else I could do for a living.
My wife has no sympathy for me.
It was as tough writing this column as it will be for you to read it.
I’m reading King Sorrow by Joe Hill. I like it. Just don’t ask me what it’s about two months from now.
Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow.
Or, at least, act better. After my twelve-hour shift.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
