Blog Love Omega Glee: Taxes Are Taxing (17 April 2012)

Even over the sound of the television, Masani can hear the grumbling in the living room. She sighs, puts down her knitting, and goes into the dining room where Francine sits, swearing at a pile of papers on the dining room table. "Let me guess, you waited until the last minute again to fill out your income taxes?" Masani says.

Francine looks up, with an expression on her face usually only seen on decapitated heads as they roll into the basket after the guillotine blade separates them neatly from their bodies.

"And let me guess, you didn't so much wait until the last minute, as you vowed not to fund the military industrial complex this year, but then you chickened out, in my opinion wisely, so now you have to hurry up and cobble everything together so it can be postmarked by midnight? Fortunately you got a couple extra days because the 15th fell over the weekend and there was the Emancipation Day holiday in D.C. yesterday so you had until today. But now today's almost gone."

Francine grunts.

"Why don't you file online? Oh, wait, let me guess, you think by doing it on paper, the government would be too lazy to audit you later because if it's not electronic these days, they don't want anything to do with it?"

Francine nods.

"But you needed an extra form, probably because of your blog, and the little money you make from advertising? So you went and downloaded the form, but the instructions to the form don't make any sense and seem as if they were written by a non-native English speaker who doesn't know anything about taxes, nor has ever read the form the instructions are for? So you moved away from the computer in your room to down here in the dining room to spread out the tax forms on the dining room table in hopes that if you had more room to work it would all make sense, but it still doesn't?"

Francine grinds her pencil into a random piece of paper.

"You'd call for help, but you'd just wait in the limbo of voicemail hell for hours and probably get a wrong answer even if you did talk to an actual human being?"

Francine throws some papers across the table.

"So you're just going to fudge it, and figure no one will ever notice anyway, but that bugs you because it's bad enough the government bullies you into coughing up money for their wars and their rich friends running the war profiteering corporations, but it's even worse that they make the process of bullying you so confusing it amounts to a psychological operation resulting in mental torture?"

Francine sniffs a W-2.

"At this point you would gladly vote for a flat tax, even though you know it would disproportionately benefit the rich in ways a progressive income tax doesn't? You'd gladly throw out every noble attempt at making the tax code fairer for all Americans, and encouraging people to make wise decisions by giving them tax breaks if you could just have a one-page tax form easy enough to understand so you can fill it out in an hour and move on with your life, forgetting about taxes until the next year when Tax Day rolls around? Hell, if Election Day were today then you might even vote for the most repressive political candidate on the ballot if he or she promised to cut your taxes?"

Francine sobs.

"But what really makes you upset is when you see that people who work for a living are taxed at higher rates on the income their labor earned them whereas people who sit on their asses and put their money to work to make money for them by investing pay lower rates on their capital gains? So if your money makes you more money, you pay less tax than if you had to go out and make money with your sweat and toil. Income is income but since rich people write the tax code, they make a double standard since rich people love class systems?"

Francine puts her head in her hands.

"And you'd love to just hurry though everything, but if you make a mistake then they'll send the form back and your refund will be delayed or you'll get a penalty if you owe money? For example, if you accidentally put something on line 13 when it should have gone on line 12, and a monkey could figure out that you just wrote the number on the wrong line, they'll still hassle you about it and send everything back?"

Francine grabs a paper and examines it carefully.

"But what's most disturbing about taxes is that once you've gotten through everything and finished your federal forms, then the state and local forms still await, which can be even more confusing than the federal ones?"

Francine puts her head down on the table and starts softly singing a childhood lullaby to herself. Masani backs away slowly into the living room, turns off the movie she was watching, picks up her knitting, and creeps up the stairs to her room. She can hear the singing from downstairs continue as she closes her door.

And then she hears the banging, perhaps someone's head repeatedly being slammed into a table. Yes, Tax Day was here again.

Masani is glad that she finished her taxes in February. In fact, she still has the slight tinge of a twinge from then. Fortunately, the whiskey she bought with her tax refund numbs the headache most days.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel, which is available in print and as an ebook.