Even though there’s no crisis, the Boss has decided to go into panic mode. He wants both checking accounts, the one for The Company and the one for The Kennel, to be at particular levels as of December 31. Since The Kennel owes money to The Company for construction work that it did there, and since The Company has a mountain of bills due the first week in January, and plenty of money to pay them, it shouldn’t be hard to get everything situated the way he wants it. Everything is going to work out fine. I know what needs to be done, and I know how to do it.

So why the panic? Oh, no particular reason. If there’s no crisis, one must be created. The Boss sends out what-if scenarios like so many flying monkeys, and he needs to know that I’m not sleeping in the poppy field. After about eight phone calls this morning, I finally had to confess to him that I wasn’t functioning at full capacity today, having slightly overcaffeinated myself after dinner last night, and having been awakened at 4:30 am by a phone call from nobody. I asked him if he wouldn’t let me please do something easy today, and then we could talk about doomsday tomorrow. He was reluctant to let it go but finally agreed.

In fact, he left his office altogether, bent on firing the lawyer who’s been working on his will. “He did exactly what I asked him not to do,” he told me. “He gave me twenty pages of boilerplate that I have no intention of reading.” At least he didn’t ask me to read it. He thinks that out there somewhere are people he can bribe or bully into doing pretty much anything he doesn’t feel like doing. That’s just the way he is.

Sometimes it’s nice for me, like when he tells me not to worry about some detail, because he’ll get somebody to “handle it.” When that means doing something different from the way a government agency demands that it be done, I’m happy to leave things in his hands, because at least I know the consequences will fall on his shoulders and no one else’s. Either that, or he actually will bully a bureaucrat into rewriting the rules, just for him. That’s been known to happen, too.

Today, though, he wasn’t telling me not to worry. He was trying to tell me to panic, and I wasn’t having it. That would have sent him reeling if he hadn’t had another mission of destruction to attend to with his lawyer. It always helps to divert him to a different crisis. Obviously, it doesn’t have to be a real one, because he creates them wherever he goes.

Then this afternoon Tim called and asked me why his dad was saying, in almost the same breath, that we had no money and that we had too much money. I told him to consider the source, and we both had a laugh. I assured him that unless there was a real crisis looming out there somewhere, I didn’t know of anything on the horizon that I couldn’t handle. I think we both felt better after this chat. I even got him to promise to bring more gravel for my driveway, and to haul off the old dead copy machine that’s still sitting in my living room like the monolith from 2001. Which is pretty much how long it’s been sitting there, come to think of it.