Practical Joker
Now that's art.
In my college days, I could get out of writing term papers by playing one professor against the other in a battle of practical jokes. They loved a good laugh more than they liked reading twenty pages on Chaucer, so they'd take me aside and quietly say, "Look, do this and you dont have to write the term final." Who would turn down that kind of offer, right?
Over the years, the jokes have become more daring, more expansive. I once fooled everyone who worked in a particular building downtown that the whole building had been moved in the middle of the night. Desks, chairs, file cabinets, air conditioning ducts... all of it, gone, leaving a parking lot in its wake. That took months to plan, but the look on everyone's faces when they knew they'd been fooled... made it all worth while, I tell ya.
Then they became so elaborate that they were no longer simple jokes, but actual performance art. I got hired by NBC one year to fool the entire nation into thinking we had our first female president. Not quite as effective as Welles' work, but still... I was pretty proud of it. Then I started freelancing as a mis-information technology specialist -- a really fancy way of saying a practical joker. Companies would hire me so I could prepare campaigns that would fool their competition into thinking they were going to do one thing when in actuality they were going to do another. Sometimes I'd find myself working both sides of the fence and, for a laugh, I'd do something neither expected -- then they'd figure it out, and we'd all have a big laugh over drinks. I was a real master of my trade, the king of practical jokers. And I loved every second of it.
Fun times.
But now I've decided it's time to return to smaller scale projects. It's still performance art with real flair, but it's more personal, more... me. And every trick still requires the massive amount of prep and research so it can be just as daring and outrageous as its predecessor. No matter how small it may seem, it's been studied.
Well, till now, anyway.
I dont know why this particular one went wrong, but it did. I thought I'd taken all the right safeguards, but it seems I apparently forgot one or two.
At least the bleeding's stopped. That's a good thing, I guess.
Right?
