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.

Giving A Shit For Science

I'm always looking for a way to advance science, and three recent articles pointed out some possibilities. Unfortunately, I'm too afraid of the water to become a dolphin snot collector, and although I would be only too happy to harvest semen from a snot otter, that involves travel. So that leaves poop donation.

It has only been recently that dolphin snot has hit the news. The promise for research breakthroughs seemed endless. Could we one day cure the heartbreak of plankton-induced asthma? Develop a new marine adhesive from porpoise boogers? Sadly, none of this is on the horizon. Dolphin scientists are excited about snot collection only because it is a good source of dolphin DNA, which has proved invaluable in the study of, uh, dolphins. Previous attempts to scavenge DNA from a dolphin involved remote techniques using a crossbow or a long pole. This worked well, as far as  it went, but only allowed researchers to study irritable dolphins, with no controls for amiability. With the new snot collection discovery, they now need only use a bucket and a boat and locate a pod of dolphins with kelp allergies, and it's DNA city.

Rush

Snot otter semen is, to my mind, even more valuable. "Snot otter" is the perfectly adorable term of endearment for the hellbender, a species of salamander that used to be common in streams in the eastern United States. The hellbender is to a regular salamander as Rush Limbaugh is to Johnny Depp, but we love them anyway. There is no higher use for snot otter ejaculate than the creation of more snot otters, and that is precisely what is being proposed. I'm certain I'm qualified. I love salamanders very much, even the rare massively ugly ones, and I think that would come across. And there are aspects of snot otter fondling that are very similar to activities I might have already perfected over the years, if I do say so myself. Snot otters are currently in steep decline, and it isn't because they finally got a good look at each other. It's no doubt due to something stupid we did, so I'd love to help. Maybe next time I'm back east I'll check on craigslist for people who want their snot otters stroked. I'll probably find some, too.

Johnny

But my contribution to science is most likely to be in the field of fecal transplants. There is a need out there for good healthy shit, and I am really full of it. I've already updated my driver's license to reflect my donor status, and in the event of a serious accident, collection should be a snap: I probably will have donated before impact. The transplant recipients are people with difficult infections, colitis, and other intractable intestinal woes. Evidently someone has discovered that if their intestines are scrubbed clean and re-injected with healthy crap, everything clears right up. I'd be tickled to give some of mine away. I can always make more. And TurboTax already has a calculator for charitable contributions to tell you what your shit is worth.

The Cawcus

It's spring, according to the birds, although otherwise it's hard to tell it from the previous four months of damp and drear. And that means we're getting ready for nest-building, and drowned peonies, and the annual ant infestation; and people will tell each other earnestly that they really didn't mind the cold all winter but this is just ridiculous, and some people will be moved to open a vein just to see some color. And soon our dominant crow population will undergo its seasonal Tourette's. I'm a fan of crows. They're sleek and smart and they don't skitter at all when you walk by, just adjust their swagger to throw you the stink-eye over their shoulder. They even use tools, such as our friend Bob Smith, who will crack their walnuts if they bring him one, and they're particularly impressive when attending a platter of possum in the middle of the road. They'll eye that Buick coming up the pike and they'll calculate the angle of compaction and they'll hop two inches to one side and let the Buick tenderize the possum, and then they're right back on it. Crows have a long association with humans and many have picked up odd jobs as spirit companions. I talk too much to attract a spirit companion, but would be happy to audition a crow as a sidekick. Except for the seasonal Tourette's, which gets on my nerves.

It's just like when a new family moves in down the way and you can't figure out where they're from, but they're not from around here; and all you know is that they're diverse and need embracing, but the best you can do is smile, because they just say "ock ock" and smile back, and all is well for a while. But they're always cooking something that smells sour and weird and drifts through the air, and then they start accumulating car parts in the back yard and sofas on the porch and before you know it there are thirty of them in there, and they keep the windows open and the weird smell comes out and all thirty of them are yelling "ock ock" all day and all night, and you're a big liberal and can't figure out any way of communicating nicely that we don't "ock" in the middle of the night in this country, and your face hurts from smiling in an inauthentic but embracing manner while you are actually thinking that your fellow shotgun-wielding countrymen might have more economy in their reasoning than you'd given them credit for. It's like that with the crows, when they're having their seasonal Tourette's.

Crows vocalize in a number of ways, most of them raucous, but I don't mind. It suits them. They are even able to mimic human speech if they've got the notion. Sometimes they all yammer away when they're gathering in a tree or taking off again, and then they settle down. But once a year they all go off at once and all day long for weeks on end, and it's just like listening to O'Reilly when he's got some poor academic on the show who thought he might be able to slide a point in edgewise--you know they aren't listening to each other. If they were mimicking people it would be all hey hey hey hey dude dude hey hey hey hey hey. Might as well teach trees to bark. I swear.

Fangs A Lot

They found a new fossil critter, size of a dog, they say, a saber-toothed vegetarian dinosaur. They know it's a vegetarian because it has good vegetable-grinding teeth in the upper jaw, and although they did not find the lower jaw, they expect it matched up. Otherwise, evolutionarily speaking, it wouldn't make any sense at all. It would be like having the top teeth trying to prevent abortions while the bottom teeth cut off funding for the biggest provider of birth control. Totally nutty. The saber teeth are unusual in a plant-eater but not unknown; there are saber-toothed musk deer out there to this day, although they just look confused, like a stringy, wan kid with a death tattoo. This new fossil has really big saber teeth, so the theory is that they used them to fend off rival saber-toothed vegetarians. Or they grew them to impress the ladies. To my mind, this ignores the facts. The facts being that vegetables are wily and treacherous and any animal that can go in for the quick kill is money ahead.

Vegetables are sneaky. Many of them lurk underground. Some are openly cruciferous. Asparagus spears stand erect like a field of punji sticks. We're always on our guard here. I try to stay away from the vegetables as much as possible until they are well and truly subdued, and that's why I married a big strong man, so he can not only bring home the goods but dispatch them before they can do any harm. He stabs the potatoes before they go in the oven. He cuts little crosses in the bottoms of the Brussels sprouts, which not only softens them up but protects us from their vampire ways. Squashes are disemboweled and their guts strewn on the compost pile as a warning to others. Corn is sheared off, like everything else that grows on ears.

It's a dangerous world out there, a world where you can, with all diligence, tie a tiny tomato plant to a stake in the spring; and then you turn your back on it and suddenly it's a rampaging gang of a vine, sending out platoons right and left and threatening the landscape. They're a menace, tomatoes. Last year we did not let our guard down and kept things under control, harvesting our first tomato in mid-October and our second just before Thanksgiving. It wasn't easy. First we had to gin up the whole industrial revolution, suck out all the coal and oil and burn it all up, and rassle our entire climate to its knees. It took everything we had in the way of resources, ingenuity, short-sightedness and greed. We might have been better off going with the saber teeth.

Curses! Soiled Again

Recently, in a post, I mused about the old manual typewriters I grew up with, and, as I'm sure it did for many of you, it put me in mind of my sex education. Not the segment of it I got from the gutter as God, and certainly, Mom intended, which was fascinating, far-fetched and turned out to be true, but the part I got from Mom. I was nine years old and she was typing out my application for summer camp. She could navigate those forms like nobody's business, barely pausing to readjust the paper so that the typing fit precisely in the little boxes. Her fingers were a blur, and then suddenly she stopped dead, turned to me and said, Mary, do you know what menstruation is?

Well, no. But I could tell by her expression that I probably should, and that I wasn't going to like it.

She then gave me an entirely inadequate explanation that was no explanation at all--just a description, really, and no making sense of the thing. It sounded like a perfectly horrible prospect with no real purpose (and that is, indeed, what it turned out to be), and when she finished with do you understand? I lied and said "yes," hoping it would end the lesson, and it did. She whipped back around to the typewriter, typed three letters in the box, and then rolled down to the next box.

Sisters, post- and pre-puberty: note levels of joy.

There you have it: Part One of my sex education. Let's review. I cannot remember exactly how she transmitted the key information about the bleeding into the underwear region. It had to have been some delicate phrasing; we went years (nine years, at that point) without referring to anything between anyone's legs. Or anything that ever happened or might sometime happen in that neighborhood. Even the phrases "number one" and "number two" were strictly street terminology. We used "piddle," when necessary, and that's as far as it went.

So however she put it, my memory went into the self-cleaning cycle right away, and the words are lost to history. I got the gist. Some day soon some dreadful new hygiene issue would develop in my underwear, and it was completely natural and expected, and when  it happened I should come to her for Part Two, additional information and supplies. Why this revolting development should occur, as well as where babies came from and even came out of, were details I was expected to scrounge elsewhere.

So the day it happened, I went and told Mom, and she smiled and promised to "fix me up" and went to her closet, where she had a sanitary napkin all rigged up on a brand new belt for me, and--aiming for levity--she told me to come to her with any questions because she was an expert. It was excruciating. I took the item into the bathroom with me and never asked her another thing. This was just one more horrible aspect of getting older, among many that were surfacing at the time.

The next day at school I did have a momentary lift and the sense of having joined the maturity club when I asked to be marked down for a "sponge bath" in gym, but that was it for high points. Everything else about the situation sucked. The napkin felt like a mattress before it got compressed into an inadequate narrow log, and the act of walking tended to make it migrate to the rear where it wasn't really needed, and away from where it was. I developed the tactic of nonchalantly backing into the corner of a desk, as if resting, to reposition the thing, a solution that needed repeating every thirty steps or so. Various innovations improved the situation over the years, but there was really no shining it up.

In the seventies it became fashionable to celebrate anything related to being female. Restrictive underwear was discarded, sometimes publicly, pronouns were redeployed, vibrator sales were humming, and, in some quarters, it was considered liberating to celebrate one's menses as the source of some kind of mythic goddess power. Drape yourself in purple, doll up your shrine, maybe do a taste test.

I was no prude. There's photos to prove it. I tried, but you can't polish a turd into a pearl. My friend Linda, who is a mother and in whose life there was at least some point to this disgusting event, once hiked with me on beautiful Mt. Hood. Not that it wasn't a splendid day with much to be excited about, but I was startled to see her chatting away on the trail with her hand down her pants. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm checking to see if I started my period," she said.

"With your finger?"

Linda pulled it out and examined it. "What," she said, "you haven't gone digital yet?"

The entire revolting process lurched and skidded to a halt a few years ago for me. It was forty years of pointlessness and laundry. Nothing changed my initial impression of it when I was nine. I guess Mom did a good job communicating after all.

Diapers Of Doom

Archival Photo

If anything will bring down this great country, it will be our inability to see past the next election cycle. We are doomed if we settle for short-term solutions to long-term problems. Thank God Texas is still producing Gomers who can see the big picture. No wait. Gohmert. Louie Gohmert. He is so far ahead of the curve he might actually be around the bend.

Here is a man who gets right to the heart of an issue. When he observed that some of his constituents were hopping mad about his opposition to health care reform, he concluded that congressmen should not be expected to take heat without being allowed to pack it, too, right there in the Capitol building. He's not only not going to listen to you, he's willing to put a cap in your ass, and trust me, he's already run it by Jesus. Jesus is cool with that.

His whole website reeks of common sense. To wit: "So if you are oriented sexually toward children or toward animals or corpses, or shoes, or whatever, that's okay." Don't be fooled. He means it's NOT okay, and I agree. That's why I always wear socks.

Or, in his most ringing statement: "It is high time the people of our country started deserving better." Amen, brother, we're already a quarter past rightful and they probably won't even seat us at entitled until intermission. More inspiring words have seldom been inflicted. It's a true call to reaction.

And best of all, thanks to Rep. Gohmert, we have been alerted to the threat of terror babies. Terror babies are those babies dropped in the U.S.A. via the international terrorist maternal missile system, consisting of visiting women with full-term pregnancies concealed beneath their burkas, who snatch up U.S. citizenship for their infants and whisk them back to their home countries to be schooled in mayhem with exploding training pants. There they remain until they come of age and are ready to be sent back to America as citizens and wreak havoc. Terror babies can be spotted by their garlic burps, suspicious diaper bulges and beards. Now that we're on to them, we can take them out, thanks to Louie. He'll see those infants past the threat of abortion, but once they've hit air, they're fair game.

Asked by an interviewer what evidence he had of this dastardly plot, Mr. Gohmert sighed, letting his bandolier out a notch. "Two things. One, you're a Nazi. Two, terror baby purveyors are very sneaky," he confided. "And this is a very sneaky plan. That's your proof right there."

And, America, he's right. It's almost unbelievably sneaky, but there already is a precedent for the degree of foresight required to launch the terror baby plan. One need look no further than the brilliant ploy by Kenyan agents who,  in 1959, managed to plant an African newborn in Hawaii, where people are distracted by falling pineapples and rogue chickens, and raise it up to be the President fifty years later. Most people in those days would not have placed much money on a black child accomplishing such a thing, but Eisenhower-era Kenyans took the long view, which is precisely what is lacking in modern America. We can't even get a bullet train built.

Do we, even now, have what it takes to put a terror baby plan together? I submit that we do not. Our children can't hide explosives with their pants on the ground, nor can we get them to leave home.

This is big-time, long-range thinking, Mr. Gohmert. This is moon-shot material. Some day, because of people with your kind of vision, we may be able to harness the power of Uranus.

It's Only A Vapor Moon

My friend Dale, who slings English like nobody's business over at mole, recently lamented that so many people were baffled by the movements of the moon and planets. The dynamics underlying the phases of the moon are so evident to him that he believes people are being, if not deliberately obtuse, unobservant in the extreme. He makes a good point. Whatever the moon is doing, it has been doing it in a regular and predictable manner for the span of our lives, and we've all had plenty of time to absorb the rhythm of it. I think highly enough of Dale that I hate to mention I am one of those clueless people.

I asked my Daddy about it all more than once, and more than once he dragged out the flashlight and tennis ball and ping pong ball and paper and pencil and WD-40 and plunger and whatever else he thought it might take to transfer some clarity into my noggin. He succeeded every time, too. I always got it. Then I'd look up suddenly and all of it would tumble out my downhill ear. Daddy was a mathematician and amateur astronomer and there really wasn't anything in the natural world he didn't understand. His mind was a huge repository of information. Mine is more like a culvert. An awful lot of stuff has gone in, and shot right back out again.

When I was a little girl, I was pegged in the academic system early on as "gifted," mostly because I drew people with shoelaces. That could have been because I was nearsighted and short and that's where my attention was, but there you go--if you're going to be tagged with a label, it might as well be a hopeful one. Because math was a big deal in my family, I assumed that being gifted meant I was good in math. Relieved of math phobia, I took lots and lots of math and always understood it and thought it was really cool. I loved it. I loved it for the entire duration of every class, and then after that I remembered having loved it, as opposed to remembering the math.

The big science light went on for me the day, in tenth grade, I read about stomatal pores. These are paired cells on a plant's surface responsible for regulating water. They're shaped like buttocks, complete with the hole in the middle. When they swell up with water, the hole gets larger and the water can run out. When they lose water and go slack, the hole shuts down. Feel free to abandon this particular analogy if it doesn't work for you, but I thought the whole scheme was elegant. Those tiny botanical fannies got me on the road to a science degree. I loved all that too. Don't ask me about it now. My head is packed to the rafters with correctly-spelled words, jostling and forming cliques and swapping around promiscuously, and all the other stuff just passes through; it can't get a purchase with all the commotion.

I'm especially challenged by visualizing things in three dimensions, which comes up surprisingly often in life. If you hand me one of those wooden 3-D puzzles, I'll give it five minutes and end up solving it with a hammer.

Dave can't figure out where I'm going wrong with my spatial reasoning, but he gets all upset at how English is spelled. It's easy for me to spell: I hold my brain up to the light and read the words right off the roof of my cranium. But when Dave tries to explain to me how something goes together mechanically or what pieces to cut out of fabric to achieve a particular shape, he can look into my eyes and see right through them. Not to my soul, but to a little musty area where lint balls of bewilderment tumble around in a lonely, whistling wind; and he knows he's not getting through to me, so he explains it louder. My situation is tragic, really. "Gifted," my botanical fanny.

But oh, those words: words with shine and juice and rambunction. Plump ones, like "gibbous." I look up at the moon and wonder why it has that shape. I imagine rustling up my dad, maybe poking a stick in  his ashes--he wouldn't mind--and I hear him saying, "not the flashlight and the tennis ball and the ping pong ball again? Okay, one more time." And one more time, I'd understand. Almost everything strikes me as new information, a condition so close to dementia that the transition should prove seamless.

So a week ago I went out at sunset and peered into the east for the big orange moon that was supposed to show up--the biggest in eighteen years. Naturally, it wasn't there. We've had cloud cover for eighteen hundred consecutive days, and that's just since Thanksgiving. Nevertheless I squinted into the fog, right where I knew that moon was, felt it trying to press through. I like to hear unseen geese hootling through the clouds too. The list of grand things I can't see is enormous. Pretty much the whole universe.

Yesterday we had a half moon, I'm told. Was it half full, or half empty? If the moon, or the fanny cells on a nasturtium, or anything else is out there glorying away and we can't see it, or won't see it, or learned it once and forgot it, is it still magnificent? I'm going with yes.