The Trickster of 2020

It’d been one of those day. Not a single thing had gone right for me in 2020, and when I say not a single thing, that is not exaggerated. My mother lost her job (was forced out by a bunch of brown noser is technically more accurate), we sank pretty low financially. I was at a stand still and  brain dead end with my novel (second draft, and only a whole lot of stress to show for it), my health was at a bad point in my life, and I had very little to look forward to at home. After I was chasing every mess at the company where I worked, and making very little headway on that front. My bedroom had a massive leak in the roof coming through the ceiling. Our chimney was missing bricks and the roof was missing shingles with holes in them. Our plumbing was backing up in the toilets and electricity outlets had failed. Every time I managed to stomp out one fire, another one would pop up somewhere else. To make it clear,  I was cleaning up every mess in my path, and more kept on appearing.

 To be serious, I was a nervous wreck, and felt like nothing was changing in my life and  was falling down serval never-ending stairs.

  So 2020 was a non-stop rock bottom to the bottom, but with time, all things must end. With gritted teeth and a lot of masks and toilet paper, we weathered our covid year, and came out the other side. My family restarted a wondrous entrepreneur career (you can check out in town). I managed to get a fresh perspective on my second book (finishing the last of my writings a few days ago), and we actually managed to squeak by on very little, and now are living okay. I even started making some headway in our new family business.

And yet I was still a nervous wreck. I still felt like I was falling down a never-ending flight of stairs.

  I couldn’t shake this feeling, but the bad was not over with us yet.

I had a dream a few months ago, when the dream fell on me. In my dream, I had come home to find my family in the setting room, sitting peacefully on the couch. The floor was in dead untidily scattered or dying animals and feces. I was aghast. “What is all this?!” I said, racing about, gathering up little mouse corpses and feces into a paper brown bag.

And that’s when I saw it. Out of nowhere, a small pink panther appeared,  with a dead rat in its mouth, which it dropped on the rug, then vanished, only to reappear few minutes later with another, and another, and another. I ran around like psycho, scrabbling to pick all the dead vermin and feces into the bag, but the pink panther (with flesh like the skin of a pink flower petal) just kept popping in and out dropping more nasty things for me to pick up.

  I woke up to the sound of my own snoring.

  It was a day later my family had heard own Syfi visitor from this unwanted guest. In my dream, I was trapped in our bedroom with our pets, while a new terrifying panther had invaded our home. This little beast was covered in somebody’s blood, and had fangs and claws made from fake keratin nails. The little brute was slobbering and jumping, hissing and slashing and doing what any panther from the underworld does in a dream. Meanwhile, my  family had grabbed a bath towel and was trying to figure out how they could catch the creature, but never with any success.

All of us had been paid a visit by a trickster god, one which seemed to have been following our foot steps across the months of 2020.

 Trickster gods have fallen out of time in the A.D. age. As with so many of the gods of antiquity, we’ve relegated tricksters to little more than fairy tales, or perhaps better know as fantasy literature and movies. We treat trickster gods as old comics, goofy clowns to the audience, harmless short-live which pass for imaginative diversion on television, computers and video games.

  This is to our extreme disadvantage. Like much that once was, we are quick to use such things as superstition, the ridiculousness of a bygone era. How could someone believe a pink panther could change shape? How many people could believe a hare could carry messages between the faeries and the world of common men?

 As long as there have been people, there have been tales of tricksters. Gods and fictional characters, they have always been with us in one form or another, since the beginning of man kind time.

 Tricksters are mischievous characters throughout folk stories and myth which have a secret knowledge or power. They use their gifts not for evil, or for kindness, but for misshift. Tricksters use their powers to play pranks, to break the rules, to make misshift to everyone they feel needs too. This somebody can be any person, even the Divine. Tricksters are the original anarchists, the practical jokers, the internet trolls of the ancient world.

One thing we must remember about a trickster is that they are not evil, per say. Tricksters can be evil by our modern definition, but more often are simply enjoying the chaos that is created by them. Not for evil, but just for chaos. They enjoy breaking the rules, causing a great knight to fall as he’ s making a speech, tricking more powerful beings into doing things they ought not.

This character is so primal to our psyche, that virtually every culture has its own particular strain of the happy troublemakers.

The famed psychologist made of saw the Trickster as one of the primal stereo type of our mind, something fundamental to all human beings.

  Anyone who belongs to a sub culture that seeks the perfect state somewhere in the past must feel very weird indeed when confronted by the figure of the trickster. He is a forerunner of the savior, and, like him, God, man, and animal at one time together. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a beastlike and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.

  Indeed, while the human species have gone out of our way as civilizations to distance ourselves from these mischievous beings, they are always with us in spirt, movies and books. We are no more able to remove them from our beliefs and symbols than our might that of the champion figure, the wise man, with a  hero inside  him/herself.