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“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot.
T.S., as his drinking buddies called him, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 so he knows his calendar. As April 2009 slips over the horizon into the dust bin of history, let us consider how right T.S. was about the drawbacks of April by considering the events of the past month. America and the known Universe went from the emotional high of watching the UNC Tar Heels whup the Jello Instant Pudding out of Michigan State in basketball directly into sports purgatory.
The frenzy that was March Madness abruptly fell off a cliff into the ether of no college hoops until November. We were suddenly and without warning shoved into T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” It is obvious that T.S. was writing about the end of the college basketball season when he wrote “The Waste Land.” Sometimes those Nobel Laureates know what they are writing about.
Let us consider some of the other sad events of April 2009. On a slightly less cosmic scale, one of America’s first break out porn stars crossed over the great divide into the land of the dead porn stars. Marilyn Chambers, star of “Behind the Green Door” and cover girl on the Ivory Snow box back in the early 1970s went on to meet the Great Director in the sky. They took Marilyn off the Ivory Snow detergent box as soon as her blue movie came out, but they can never take Marilyn out of the little room behind the curtain at the video stores in America.
{mosimage}As Marilyn left us, Income Tax Day occurred to the horror of most Americans. Two days before Tax Day I had been out on the usual walk and gotten caught in a long cold rain on the trek to Barnes & Nobles. I arrived at the store looking and smelling like a wet dog. I went over and sat alone on the Group W bench in my cold wet clothes and nursed a cup of coffee as I began incubating a cold. Pollen, like Spring, was in the air. The combination of a cold and world class allergies created the perfect foundation for Tax Day.
Until you have a crushing headache combined with a head full of pollen while you are completing your tax forms you cannot say that you have truly lived. Time stands still when you are doing your taxes with a cold. It is a truly Zen experience of being in each moment. To mangle the late great William Blake, doing taxes with a headache is “To see a world in a grain of sand/ to hold infinity in a palm calculator/ and eternity in an hour.”
You will experience eternity in each second looking for a particular tax form which you will not find.
I dropped off my tax information at the accountant’s office who had me leave her two blank checks. She inquired politely as to what was the maximum in my checking account that she could use to write the checks to the IRS and the N.C. Revenue Department. In other words, Mr. Late- Bringing-In-Your-Tax-Information, we are going to wipe you out when we send in your tax extension. Maybe next year you’ll get your information in on time.
At the end of April I spent almost four hours in my dentist’s chair of horror enjoying the dental hijinx that accompany a double crown procedure. Having two crowns installed does not in fact double your pleasure or double your fun.
The only good thing that happened in April was that Rick Perry, the wildman Governor of Texas, began openly flirting with Texas seceding from the Union. Way to go Rick! Dissolve the Union! If Rick chickens out on his secession threat I think that the USA should secede from Texas. Texans have been running the country the last eight years. Look at how that worked out. President W. left us with a crushed economy, two endless wars and an ugly international reputation for waterboarding. Former Texas Congressman Tom DeLay ran the U.S. House of Representatives and is currently waiting for his corruption trial. Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm masterminded financial deregulation and announced that Americans were a nation of whiners and we were only in a mental not a financial recession. If Texas won’t secede from the Union then America should secede from Texas.
Please secede Texas. As T.S. wrote, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.”
Older Than Spring Time
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