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How to turn a lovely spring day into a waking nightmare

By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Monday, April 6, 2009

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As I sit at my computer this morning, there are red roses blooming outside my window. A bee moves industriously from bloom to bloom, and I can hear the drone of his wings – the windows are open to let in the soft, cool air, washed by a recent rain. The baby birds in the top of the tall yucca are yelling for their mom and dad, who never rest from their routine of going for food, bringing it back to feed their young, and leaving for more food. In the distance, a dog barks.

I wonder how long it will be before the bee stumbles through the open window and stings me. I imagine the horde of hungry mosquitoes the recent rain created, following the bee through the window to suck me dry. I wish the birds and that stupid dog would shut up.

I’m working on our tax return.

There’s nothing like a tax return to color every aspect of your life – a dreary mud color, that stinks.

I know many people filed their returns as early as possible this year, some in January, the minute they got their W-2s.

Those were the people who expected to get money back.

Both my children have filed their returns. It took them about a half-hour. They’ve already spent the money they were refunded.

It’s not so easy when you have a small business. You have to have many, many forms. You have to read them all. You have to read the instructions that come with them, in order to decipher the messages encrypted in the forms. Sometimes you have to go to the IRS website and find more reading material, to help you break the codes in the instructions.

Then you have to gather together all the records that you put away all year, feeling virtuous for thinking ahead to tax time.

The first problem is, you can’t remember where you put them all. The second problem is, whatever you saved, you won’t need. You’ll only need the stuff you didn’t save, never got or have never, ever heard of. Some of the stuff the forms instruct you to attach are things that you suspect don’t really exist. They’re just collections of unrelated words strung together to cause you to suffer a psychotic break.

A day spent working on our tax return is like an eternity in some hell where the fire has been replaced by piles of papers, none of which are the right ones and all of which are written in some ancient tongue that hasn’t been spoken for centuries.

Then, when you’ve fought all day with the stuff and only want to cry and rock back and forth and babble incoherently – you have to pay.

This sense of terrible, terrible injustice is far greater than that I feel in the line at the supermarket, while I wait endlessly for the privilege of giving them a whole bunch of money, then having to wrestle all the stuff out and into the car, drive it home, and wrestle it all out of the car and into the shelves. It seems like after I give them that much money, they ought to send someone home with me to carry it in and put it away.

There is hope, however. I just checked my e-mail and found I have a missive from “Barrister Cheng Weng,” who represents someone with the same last name as mine (the name isn’t specified in the e-mail) who was killed in a tragic tsunami in Sumatra and left me $19 million. All he needs is my personal and banking information, so he can transfer the funds.

It must be OK - the Prince of Nigeria isn’t mentioned once.

I’ll just ask Barrister Cheng Weng to contact the IRS about my surprise inheritance – they can take what I owe them for last year out of the $19 million.

If there’s any left, I think I’ll buy myself an ice cream.

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