Back in the Salad Days just after college & for the next three years I woke each morning and mounted my bike and dealt with nothing but the immediacy of the next job given me by my dispatcher. Being a bike messenger in boston wasn’t always easy, but I was good at it and it certainly was a retreat from thinking about things the way my old college classmates were as they began careers, made car payments or mortgages and generally turned into functioning adults in society.
The really brutal winter days were actually the ones that made this retreat from what I had deamed the “fake” reality constructed by the rest of society and insurance companies the most complete, as survival took center stage and there were no considerations to be made beyond dressing properly, keeping my machine running smoothly, getting enough calories to stoke the fire and keep moving, and not getting sqashed by a car or running over a meandering pedestrian.
It was during the spring thaw, especially approaching April 15th, that the broader reality of living in a society with laws, cultural norms, and TAXES came roaring back. I dealt with this reality the way any idiot with no money in his early 20’s (or Willie Nelson) is liable to do no matter what kind of degree he graduated college with does, I ignored it.
I ignored it, and it grew, and it has constantly threatened to smash through the locked cupboard in the back of my mind and into reality to smash up everything that I might have been trying to build in my life. I knew it would happen eventually, and my highly developed sense of irony knew it would happen just when so many things that I have been trying to grow like my business, my relationships, and a future with some sort of security were at their most delicate so the destruction would be as complete as possible.
I hate being right, the levy has broken, the LEVY has been put on my bank accounts. I’d been so busy trying to keep the IRS at bay that I got flanked by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and I am defeated. FUCK
