It’s an apocalyptic day, and it’s not done yet. We got news from downstate that Penelope will have to vacate the premises. Maude is, apparently, pretty sick and her daughter and son-in-law will be moving in to take care of her. Since I’m getting the story fourth-hand, I won’t vouch for any of it. School starts Monday, and Penelope is faced with the prospect of finding a place to live very soon. She has no way to pay for it, though, and neither do we, and there’s the problem in a nutshell. I don’t see any reasonable solution to this situation other than her dropping out of school and moving back home, and that’s not the most pleasant alternative. If things were tense before, they’re likely to be doubly so now. Maybe someone else will come up with a better answer.

I did manage to get through day four of Java, though, but that may prove to be for naught. If there’s no reasonable atmosphere in which I can study and write and attend to all the other things I have to attend to, something will have to go. That will probably be the studying and writing, and I’ll have to scramble for some hack job somewhere. That, of course, will end the entire go at a second chance, and this may well be my last opportunity.

I know, I know. You’re never too old to… fill in the blanks. People say those kinds of things, and they live whatever lives they live. Why does one person succeed when another person fails? We say it’s because of hard work, but is it? Suppose it isn’t. Suppose it’s all due to luck and the vagaries of chance. Then what? Is there any point in trying? Can you just mail it in?

You have to be in it to win it, don’t you? If you don’t even try, you’ll never succeed. There must be a thousand things that “they” say, and half the time they say those things just to justify their good fortune. Maybe more than half the time. Is there any way to know for sure?

We have to say those things, though. We have to harp on the notion that hard work is what’s required, that it takes hard work to get ahead in life, that nothing ever comes to someone who sits on the couch and watches Seinfeld reruns. Except, perhaps, for that person who sits on the couch watching Seinfeld reruns and blogs about it to a universe filled with other people sitting on the couch and doing the same thing, other people who want to talk about what they’re doing, want to share the experience with everyone else on the planet who is doing the same thing.

That sounds crazy to me, but it almost describes what I do. I take perfectly ordinary things and write about them and hope that somebody out there finds them interesting enough to read, interesting enough to pay for. At least, that’s the plan. That’s what the plan looks like today, on day 4. But the plan might soon be in need of drastic revision. At the moment, the plan is at the mercy of events, and that’s always a scary place to be.

Be the river. Be the movement. Be the wind, float with the wind.

I don’t know if anyone actually says things like this, but this is how I imagine things to be in the world of Zen. Don’t fight what’s happening; go with it. Bend like the willow. I hear things like that and I can’t help but wonder if the full version goes something like “Bend until you snap.” All things snap once they are bend beyond their bending points, so somewhere along the line you have to start offering resistance.

I haven’t plotted Henry out at all, but I did play with it a little bit in my head. Unfortunately, today wasn’t the kind of day where I could just sit with Post-It notes and sketch things out. Today was the kind of day where the bad news came early and I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to cope with it. Tomorrow, though… tomorrow will be just another day, although it has the advantage of being a week day. Week days are more predicable, less filled with onerous duties like yard work, somewhat more regimented, thanks to the parade of school kids both in the morning and the afternoon. Maybe we’ll make some actual progress tomorrow. Maybe we’ll make some progress before those sands finally run out…