and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

I thought real hard - you know, good thoughts - as I prepared for the annual party parade that is tax season. I shouldn't complain since I've never had a bad experience unless you count getting a refund as bad (I do, it means the gov'ment has been using my money for free, goddamnit).. but this was about having a good experience. Usually, the whole ordeal bugs me in with it's pseudo-exactness; as if straight lines and columns and numbered forms make for answers that always come out the same - but they don't. A lot of us, tons even, hang between the tax code, inbetween the floors of the giant skyscraper that is the tax table. Sure, you might make $30,100 to $30,150 or $55,450 to $55,500 and therefore owe the amount you will find to the right of these numbers in the table.. or you might make $55,501.23 but figure your taxes at $55,499 due to the rounding off of cents. Then, you're at a cross-roads. You made an amount of money that places you in one bracket but your calculations put you in a different bracket. What's the difference? Oh, nothing drastic. $8 more or less but that's not the point. It's completely legal and to the point of the tax law, but it puts you in a sort of 5th dimension, split between two truths, thinning your existence out among multiple versions of the same world - like those dudes that secretly maintain two families, the "salesman" who is on the road half the time.

I don't want to be on the road half the time and I don't want to live on the 13th floor of a giant building whose floors are each a row in the U.S. tax table. I don't want to live on the existentially vague 13th floor. I don't want to be somewhere that nobody thinks about but secretly exists. It makes me grey and transparent like smudged graphite on a piece of paper, the white of the Mead stock shining through the almost metallic-looking flakes of black carbon. I don't want to be a glass of clear chocolate milk whose confused about his own identity.

When I fill out my taxes the numbers go in exactly, to the 100th decimal point. Every cent scribbled down regardless of whether the IRS finds it more annoying to calculate or not. I am, each year, a person of an exact amount of created wealth and therefore, each year, I am a person living in a distinct row of the U.S. tax table (given life on the border between two, I would choose the lower). Nevermind that they pigeon-hole us into these brackets, nevermind that they average me together with those who made as much as $49 more or $49 less. Nevermind that, to them, I am not even a number but a range of numbers - a vagary, an estimation. To the Internal Revenue Service I represent an inexactness, the idea of which is both trying and ironically appropriate given the loopy crazyness that is tax law in the United States.

Is it any surprise, in the end, that the IRS finds those poorer (and therefore, arguably, less likely to be able to pay) to the ones which it must keep better and better track of? If you make less than $3000 then they force you into smaller pigeon-holes, each tax table row comprising a mere $25 range with which to wiggle, and fall further to the depths, the dregs, the very bottom of the barrel, and you find that those who make $5 to $15 or $15 to $25 are watched so closely as to be mice, eyed by the great eagle Uncle Sam - not a 50 nor 25 dollar division is seen here, but 10 - 10 - for those who've just peeked their eyes above the standard-deduction wall.

Imagine! If you will, the trial of an orphan, an audit, a tribulation for the measly bum. His taxes - he filed - when added together, the total came to a paltry sum; $4.99, his Adjusted Gross Income read, but what was gross and ugly were the pocks upon Sam, the great eagle's head. "But $5," the horn-rimmed lady grumbled, "is what we have figured. That means you owe us," and then the ground rumbled. "Oh no, oh dear," the bum was at a lose. "What now, what's near," he imagined the cost. And then from on high, atop his tax thrown, the tax king did stop and throw down this as a moan: "One Dollar is what you owe the U.S. Government! Pay now and forever and if not be sent, to the dark and dingy cells of our prisons, now be gone and be quiet until I see you next tax season!"