My taxing Uncle

Every January my mind turns from joyful gift strapping and family evergreen burning rituals to genuine terror. Oh sure those holiday bills now due add a few buckets of blood to the night sweats, but the real fear is that my tax-happy Uncle is lurking in April with his freshly sharpened fangs and an insatiable hunger in his wallet. Yeah Valentines Day and Easter might provide a little milk chocolate relief from the heartburn as long as you don’t mind getting shot by arrows from a little nekkid peanut butter bunny – uh … or something like that?

What makes ‘Unkey’ Sam so taxing this year is H&R Block is running this overly happy advert with a glowing and smiling tax preparer lady telling me how she loves to sift through my complicated steamy bedpan mess of a tax headache. Where did they drum this girl up from –  Chucky Cheese, a prison, or mental institution? Only if this tax preppie is a Morlock, Vampire, or a rat would she have an excuse to be so far away from enLIGHTenment.  Nobody; not even stupid people who get back big refunds, can actually be THAT happy about worming their way into piles of tax road apples.

Yeah I get the fact that the tax addict on TV has a fun job of telling me anything she wants to and I have to believe it no matter how little sense the lies make. The last time I was lucky enough to have that much fun my daughter was only five years old. Yep, I proved to her, until she started driving in high school, that she could operate the car’s wipers, windows and lights by simply barking at them in morse code.

So that dark shadow hanging over me and my 8 foot wide interstate estate is not just another eighteen wheeler parked on the overpass. No it’s time for me to accept that my Uncle Sam is a morbidly obese hungry HUNGRY hippo and I’m just one more fleeting mid-day treat to eat and bleat about paying my ‘fair share’. Well I have news for you dear Uncle, your excessive appetite is rapidly making you an unwelcomed guest at my park bench covered with the Slim Jim pickings and Spam scraps of celebrations past. We’ve all read this book before in high school and I remember the ending  well – when it comes to fat succulent pigs like the ‘Sam-man’,2 legs are JUST AS GOOD as 4 legs when they are covered in goo on the BBQ … or something like that.