So here he was, a middle-aged man staring at the inane brightness of the screen before him.
The online job application read, in part:
“Describe, in your own words, why you are
ideally suited for this position.”
What could he say? He wasn’t ideally suited for this position.
Did he even know what the ideal job for him would be?
The gently buffered term “career change” kept haunting him,
with its connotations of obsolescence and dispensable skills.
He remembered signing a drawing he had done an eternity ago,
of a warrior in his chariot, and dating it: October,1977.
He started to fill in the required field, another awkward exercise in pragmatic reinvention, filing down the edges of the round hole
so the square peg might pass inspection, undetected.
He stopped, X’d out the browser, and picked up his drawing marker.
1977.
He put down the marker and watched it roll slowly across the desk. He clicked on the browser icon, hoping the cookies had saved the information he had input on the last page.
He didn’t have the words to condense his life
all over again.
Grafictional 