what a difference a day makes.
you spend months feeling bleak
about one rather obscure subject.
sure, you try to meet it head on,
this possible obstacle, this threat,
but then there’s bureaucracy. and
what is bureaucracy but time you
do not have, time you may not
have, thanks in particular to
the one obstacle that i’m now
suggesting you ask me about
again tomorrow. as if it were
yesterday. somehow, you get
through the bureaucracy in such
a way that you get to the important
meeting, be it with a doctor, with the
executive board or the boss, be it with
your mother or your teacher or the college
admission council, the president, the opposing
faction’s leader, the subversive agent and you
rendezvous, everything comes to a head. what
had up until now been simply theory, if not utter
paranoia—whatever the case nothing was based
in facts because this is an obstacle that requires
collaboration or consultation in order to get the
minimum facts and develop a plan. so, this
meeting, one in a series you might be able to
count on your hands that you’ll have in this
lifetime, it is set into the calendar, it is awaited,
every day more anxiously than the next, you
move your lips and write your lists in mock
presentation of this, the problem about which
you’ve called for help, every day you do this,
realizing you cannot perfect anything because
the entire reason for the meeting is you do not
have the capacity to handle this particular problem
by yourself, that by yourself, this problem would be
insurmountable and with no help at all would lead
to your ultimate demise by death or irretrievable
misfortune or indefinite cancellation. your meeting
occurs. you go through the big movement required
to get through it and, with the help of a collaborateur,
you’ve now come up with a fairly fail-proof plan to get
over or around this impediment. to survive. will this
plan work? all signs would point in that direction. but
i cannot be entirely sure. no plan is perfect. but you’ve
done the best that can be done about it. and so you
hit the mark on every goalpost, and get through it.
if you do. so, sure, it could be that the most
difficult part is over. until the next time you
bump into one of these doozies that require
pulling out all of the stops, that require
additional humans, experts in necessary
fields, people who know the odds, know
how to work with idiots like yourself in
order to offer the best chance at moving
on to the next bit problem. so once that
meeting is over, the rest is the easy part,
right? i do not know the answer to that
question. perhaps i might know if you
were to ask me again tomorrow.
