Feeling Taxed

It’s tax season and time to get involved in a full-fledged revolution. Months ago, I sent an e-mail to the ACLU asking them to represent me in a class-action lawsuit against the government for discriminatory tax policies. To my chagrin and astonishment, I haven’t heard from them. I just don’t understand why the entire middle class should continue to work like rats on wheels to fund free college tuition, etc. for the children of a growing population of people who are here illegally or to subsidize a government that regularly throws our hard-earned money down $1000 toilets. Therefore, tomorrow I am going to a Fair Tax Rally with friend, Jill, in downtown Atlanta. As a rule, I keep politics out of my blog rantings, but this adventure has potential hilarity written all over it.

I don’t have any poster board so I found an old Christmas box and wrote my original pithy saying on it: Middle-class taxation funds the nation! And we’re sick of it!” I showed it to my son. He said, “No good can come of this.” I don’t think he was referring to the cause, but rather to my involvement . . . in anything.

I asked my sister, Jennifer, to go, but she was too exhausted from her “relaxing” weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains with Pit Bull Extraordinaire sister, Lynn (details later). She did make the helpful suggestion that Jill and I duct tape ourselves to something to make a political impact. I suggested that we duct tape ourselves to the master of ceremonies—Senator Saxby Chambliss. (Let’s face it; if you’re still alive after grammar school with a name like that, you must have something going for you.) I liked the idea of doing a dumb-and-dumber routine in which we duct taped ourselves to one another and shouted, “Yeah, what are you going to do about it?!” However, that routine would quickly lose its luster after being deserted in a questionably safe part of Atlanta (which is all of it) unable to extricate ourselves from the visual joke.

Jill suggested that she was reluctant to speak publicly,so if called upon by the media [yeah, that's going to happen] she would make hand gestures as though she were a deaf mute, and I could interpret for her. I told her if she did so, I would yell, "She says she has a gun! Get down! She's also strapped with explosives!"

When I told Jack (who is once again out of town) of our plans, he thought I was “pulling his leg” about our mission–-knowing me as the agoraphobic that I have come to be. However, deep down I knew that I must return to the city that was the ludicrous locale of many of my memorable memories. I attended college at Georgia State University, one of the coldest, harshest harbingers of city education that has ever existed in the universe and beyond. The last time I set foot there was to turn in a requisite dozen thick copies, a total of approximately eighty pounds, of my Master’s thesis, the result of enough years work to earn me three doctorates. (I was working and had a small child, but I finally completed it.)

Typical of the school’s caring nature, when I arrived soaked in my own perspiration to turn in my thesis on pornography, the cyborg in charge robotically informed me that I had to turn in my imminently deadlined copies to a different building. It was blocks away and in the ninety-plus-degree heat, I found myself trudging like the Cat-in-the-Hat, balancing parcels into the dregs of the city. Finally, to avoid a cult of nasty characters, I cut through an alley. There I squinted, panting heavily and leaning against a brick wall with my sweat-soaked stinking body grasping boxes filled with my pornography thesis copies in a dark environment along with a one-legged man in a wheelchair downing the last swill from a vodka bottle. Close to a heat stroke I dizzily thought “Yes, this is your perfect ending: found dead of heart failure with a one-legged alcoholic, buried amongst the flying pages of a pornography thesis with your name typed on every leaf.”

Miraculously, I actually survived this scene and found my location marginally ahead of deadline, though I know my odor painfully offended some elevator patrons. I came home with a bottle of champagne to celebrate, as my alley partner left me no choice but to find my own beverage. Jack asked, “What are we celebrating?”

So tomorrow, I will return to the scene of my almost tragi-comedic death. I might not make a difference in the world, but this time when I return to the venue of my torture, I swear that God as my witness, I will smell much better.