Notes from the Carnivale: Just a Roustabout

When someone else holds all the power, your methods of revolt are few.

In fact, sometimes it is best not to revolt at all.

I read once, I don't recall where or in what context, about trees and barbed wire. Some trees that grow up along a fence line (osage oranges, for instance, which are known in Missouri as hedge apple trees), patiently standing still and growing around the wire. Decades later there's a tree with wire that goes in one side and goes out the other. Then there are other trees that rub up against that wire and let the wire scar the bark, and then the bark grows around the scar, and around the next year's bark scar, and so on until it is gnarled and deformed around that wire.

The tree can't do anything about the wire, and of course, trees don't choose which way they'll interact with it.

I can't do anything about Management right now. But I can choose--let them scar me or I can grow around them.

One day, and this is one of the hidden fruits of stability, that fence will come down and I'll still be there, marking where it once was. Management will eventually screw up big enough and be forced out. Or they will use the Carnivale as a stepping stone to something bigger. Maybe something in radio. Or war profiteering. I don't know. Something bigger.

So I'm currently taking the high road. I've got work assigned to me and I'm going to do it. Because it comes back to this: I am just a roustabout, even though I tend to be one of the leaders, informally, more of a whip than a leader. I am just a roustabout. Without the Carnivale, I'm an unemployed manual worker. I need to take some care. Do what I can, say what I need to say, be who I am, but never stoop into the gutter.