Truesday: I'd Like To Buy Some Consonants Too
*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors
This column won’t be as painful to pretend to read as last week’s (in terms of quantity, not quallity). That last one was like that evil turd, the one which demands you wipe for fifteen minutes just to rid yourself of the proof that it existed.
Bastard just keeps on lingering out there.
But this week’s is shorter due to my responsibility to our nation's financial causes. Must drop some time on the ol’ 1040 instead. Today’s tax day, as you and your parole officer are probably, painfully aware. And I, being thoroughly disinterested in being the interest of Federal interests, am dedicating some serious effort in helping our government pay for all those supersmart bombs from ten years ago.
Bombs for bonds.
Bonds are such a cool thing. They’re like drunken text messages in that you never really remember what it was you were trying to accomplish back when you issued them. Just like that herpes-like credit card debt that you still have from college. You know, the one for which you changed addresses, and even tried misspelling your name when you got your license renewed, just to avoid hearing from those assholes? Fuck if you remember what the hell got bought on THAT card, or where you got it to begin with.
So really, it’s EXACTLY like the herpes.
And in a round-about sort of way, as I’m cursing through lettered forms with seemingly repetitive “gonna eventually catch ya lyin’” questions, I feel a bit upset that all the hard-earned cash that I’m sending Uncle Sam today is paying for bombs that were dropped in much earlier times, and in slightly different darker-skinned regions of the globe than the ones I’m "admiring" today. I didn’t have intertronetic access back in the early nineties, so I was never bombarded by the hour-by-hour repeat footage of the civilizations my future (today's) tax dollars were so smartly incinerating. I guess I just have to trust that this year’s tax pinch bought some smart destruction back when Big Bush was pushing buttons and pulling levers with his own brand of seemingly gratuitous irreverence.
However, I am somewhat comforted* in knowing all the good times I see out on the newsloop stations today are being financed by my fairytale paychecks of the future. Specifically, the future metal protection plating being planned-for today, that was desperately needed on American military vehicles five years ago, will ultimately be financed by large portions of the paychecks I’ll likely be cashing outside the rural Chinese casino in which I’m employed to mop toilets because I won’t be able to secure a job raking leaves in the continental US twenty years from now.
There’s some hyperbole in there somewhere. Probably between the words.
Even though it violates the whole point of electing officials to appoint each other into cabinets, cupboards, or whitewashed wicker etageres to facilitate the shuttling of tax dollars into undeserving hams with more gentlemanly finesse than we mere peons could imagine let alone muster, I think I’d appreciate the ability to choose where portions of my particular tax appropriations go. Perhaps a series of check-boxes with descriptions of the cause, and a running dollar tally of what cash is left for me to throw at other causes down the list. Like the way Wheel of Fortune used to work when they had that humungo-rotating-stage of god-awful “merchandise” from which the winners of individual rounds were forced to buy amazingly stupid shit. I swear I remember one lady actually shrugged-off like “oh, why the fuck not?” the purchase of some atrociously garish, taxidermist-had-a-garage-sale raccoon family forest scene, just because there was nothing else she could afford to purchase with last remnants of her precious prize money.
Does anyone pork-barrel the artistic stuffing and frozen animation of woodland creatures? Is it possible that this exists as an un-championed cause?
Perhaps someone should pick up that baton and run with it.
I think I’d be much, much, much more involved in this whole “governmental process” if I were closer to the spending of the money. And something tells me: that’s likely the reason why I’m so far removed.
For now.
*comforted by the spreading feeling of my own urine as it streams forth from my body with increasingly anxious fear of the future, providing a calming, yet fleeting sense of warmth to my quivering midsection.
