Just Cut Me

It's tax time. I stand before my computer with an expensive plastic disc and inhale deeply, composing myself. The computer rips the disc from my hand and stares at me as though it were King Arthur and I was just an old stone with a hole in it.

The tax software is designed to be soothing. It's chatty. Hey there! We're just going to ask you a few questions. Let's get started!

All righty then.

First we need to know a little about your living arrangements. Did Mary and David live together?

I don't know that it's any of your business, but yes.

Do you have any straddles to report?

Now you're getting personal.

Oh, I've seen this movie before. The prosecutor approaches the lady on the witness stand and smiles:

"Hello there, Mrs. Crabtree. Are you comfortable? Would you like a pillow? A little tea, perhaps?"

Mrs. Crabtree says some tea would be nice. Tea is provided.

"Mrs. Crabtree, tell me--if you had it to do over, do you think you could beat your previous time for rendering Mr. Crabtree through the garbage disposal using only Drano and a lemon zester?"

Same dude works for TurboTax. He starts out cheerful. Let's talk a little about your investment income!

Okay. We can try that.

Do you have any unearned capital-loss carryover limitations dividend consolidation peremptories as reported to you on a form 5129-C, AK-47, or PA 6-5000? Do not include passive debt spackling from any foreign source.

Shit.

I have no freaking idea what the answers to some of the questions are. At first I try real hard to answer them correctly. After a while I choose whichever answer doesn't lead me down a rabbit hole. If I say "yes," I get a bunch more questions I can't answer. If I say "no," we magically move onto a different topic. I begin saying "no" a lot.

It's not the paying of taxes that I mind. My government does a lot of things with our money that I'm not crazy about, but in general I'm okay with the system. I like the idea that we're all banding together to do things we couldn't accomplish as individuals. If I see a ballot measure that proposes to use public money to create an interpretive nature and history trail for underserved kids staffed by trained counselors in bunny suits and featuring a free lunch dispensary, petting zoo, and interactive educational kiosks powered by a solar array, I'm all sign me up! So it's not the taxes. I just want them to slice me open with a quick knife and take the money. I don't see why I have to get a tattoo needle and ink in all the little perforation lines and arrows on myself for the knife entry point.

I switch over to State Tax for the relief of it. State Tax is easy. With State Tax it's just me, my income, and the big knife. I squint at the form. It says:

"Line 22. Do not complete Line 22."

Whuh? Should I start Line 22 and then stop short of filling it in? If I were going to put something on Line 22, and promise to pull out at the last second, what would it be?

Dave had wisely gone out on one of his marathon walks. Three hours in I texted him that it was not yet safe to return home.

A few hours later he comes home anyway. By now I am past the anger stage that comes right after the feeling-stupid stage, and have edged past bargaining and into depression, characterized by snuffling and whimpering. "I need a beer," I say. A beer is produced on the spot. Dave monitors its disappearance over the next minute and has a second ready to go. It seems to help.

Because now, I don't care if I got the answers right. If they wanted the right answers, they'd have asked different questions. They could have asked me why leaves turn color in the fall, and I'd be all over that. I'm throwing myself on the mercy of the court. I did the best I could. Go ahead and audit me if you're so damn smart. Maybe y'all owe ME money.

Owe, The Humanity

I hate working on my taxes. I'm fine with paying them. Here's how I think it should go down: I tell the IRS how much money I have and they tell me how much of a slice they want out of it, and we're done. We make the deal, and you won't hear me whining about it on some reactionary blog where people clutch their pennies to their chests as though it was their very freedom. I also hate paying someone to do something I could theoretically do myself. Theoretically, for instance, I could clean my own house. I totally theoretically could. Anyway, I don't have an accountant.

So I signed on with the fancy tax software that I picked up for practically free from the dude down the alley a few years back. The next year I thought I might try it one more time, even though it cost a little more, not that I needed it or anything, and by now they've got me but good. I'd pay anything for it, and they seem to be aware of that.

They sort of lull you into the whole process by asking some nice easy questions at the beginning, just to get you to relax. They want your name, your spouse's name, a brief description of yourselves, real chummy-like, and then once you've dropped your guard, they lower the boom.

"Do any of the following utterly incomprehensible situations apply to you?" A list follows.

Well, I'm not sure. Yes? Maybe? Is "maybe" an option? No? All right, I'll drop a "yes" into the little form. Pandora's box flies open. When did you acquire this asset? What was your cost basis? Did you ever settle with Guido or are you still hiding in your house with the lights out? Eventually I end up skulking back through the labyrinth of forms till I can get to the screen where I can check the "no" box and that makes everything go away. Solved.

Working in this manner, I end up whacking my way through the brush to the end of the questions with relief but no real self-assurance, and then the software chirps "you're almost finished! Now let's check for errors."

They locate some.

"In 2009, you reported interest income from the First Amalgamated Opaque Securities, Wealth Transferal And Small Arms Sales Corporation. We don't see anything about that this year. Would you like to delete the First Amalgamated Opaque Securities, Wealth Transferal And Small Arms Sales Corporation?"

Yeah, I sorta would. I don't rightly remember that outfit. I don't see any 1099s here. Could I just delete it? Will something blow up? Something's going to blow up, isn't it? At this point I need to walk away and consult the beer refrigerator, and after giving it about twelve ounces of thought, I decide to click the "yes" button. I do so while wincing, with my shoulders crunched up to my ears. Nothing happens.

Now I have the "all clear" signal from my fancy tax software, which wants to know if I want to shoot this whole business through the tubes to the IRS. Here comes the most crucial part of the tax preparation process: dithering.

I do not, as yet, have that sheen of confidence that I have really and truly answered all the questions right. Some of my answers may have been a little evasive, like the little shrug I used to give Mom when she wanted to know if anyone could explain the presence of glue and toothpicks on the good table. It is only prudent to wait a few days before sending this turkey flapping into the air. Something may occur to me, after all.

Nothing ever does, because I quit thinking about it. After the night terrors have subsided for a good three or four days, I go back to the software and click that last "yes" button. And off she goes.

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

Caesar's Cut

I hate doing my taxes. It's not the actual tax. I'm a big gooey liberal, and I can't wait for elections so I can vote for more places to send my money. Yours, too! I'll pass a parks levy and a library levy and a school levy and I'll drive my Chevy to the levy and pitch in a trunkful of cash. Send an agent over here with my bill and I'll fire off a check. Just don't make me do them.

When TurboTax first came out, I bought a copy for about twelve dollars and cranked it up. That took a while; my old PC got all belchy over that sort of thing and gassed on all morning, installing drivers and putters and I don't know what-all. There'd be a visual for the installation progress that looked like someone pushing a crayon through a capillary. It was intolerable to watch. I'd have to go away and start drinking and hope that when I came back I would find no error window or hear an orchestral chord of doom. It was always dicey. But then when everything settled down, I started feeding it data, and TurboTax methodically sent everything where it was supposed to go. It was just like what your body does automatically when you put a sandwich in it: without your even thinking about it, it sends a bit to the organs and a bit to the muscles and slabs a big old Schedule D on your rear end on its way out, and calls it a day. It was brilliant.

Then the program asked me if I wanted to print out my return. Sure! And all the worksheets for my records? Why not? I hit the button. When I saw Worksheet CXL.VI, Rendering Unto Caesar, I was alarmed, but did not know how to stop the printer, and it pooped out paper by the ream for twenty minutes, while I flapped frantically around it like Lucy Ricardo.

The next year I bought the TurboTax for twenty-five dollars and it only took about eight tries, two hours and four beers to get it installed, and it even found all my previous year's data and sucked that in. Brilliant. There were a few hitches here and there, but I was a happy customer. Good thing, too, because now I had become dependent on this software that knew where all my stuff was.

The third year TurboTax ($55) detected that I was not the simple soul I had made myself out to be, and started asking probing questions. Do you have any passive activity loss carryovers from a prior year? Well, I don't rightly know, Turb, but let me ask you this: in Flaubert's classic novel Mme. Bovary, is Emma a sophisticated aristocrat born by mistake into a bourgeois prison, or is she simply a middle-class girl obsessed with a richer life?

Turb doesn't have a sense of humor.

This year, I bought the TurboTax ($1,436) and introduced it to my new iMac ($5,333,000), which slurped the disc into the screen somewhere. I have no idea where it went, or how it was planning to find last year's data from there. Last I saw my data, they'd been incinerated inside the smoking hulk of a haunted Dell, with Windows Vista used as an accelerant. I let 'er rip and got up to hunt down some beer but only got halfway to the refrigerator when an encouraging beep sounded, with overtones of a celestial choir, and there was my software installed and my data located and everything ready to roar. Sadly, I have become even less simple. New questions arose. Did the decedent of the IRA of which you are a beneficiary turn 70-1/2 in 2008? Turb, honey? Do you know what "decedent" means? It means "no longer turning."

There was more. I decided I had a business--writing is a business, albeit not the kind in which you make money--so it had lots of questions. Do I have a home office? I thought I did, but in order to take tax advantage of that, I needed to know the square footage of my house and how much I'd spent to keep it warm, lit and relatively free of garbage. Then it was a simple matter of determining what 36/2750ths of the total of my utility bills, property tax and insurance is. And just like that, my home office turned back into a guest bedroom.

I still don't know what a cost basis is, but I do know I don't want the worksheets, I know how to say "stop that" to the printer, and I can't wait for the spring primary. I'm going to buy us a new park.