The Comings and Goings of Every Tide

Oh, I had thought of getting my thesaurus a good dusting off and making some of you readers work for your clarity, but the truth is that I've nothing critical or insightful to say after two weeks with a summer cold that would not abate, beginning shortly after my simultaneous celebrations of age, my 61st birthday and my  26th year of sobriety, my mind is rusty, crusty and mushy all at once. What is thought of isn't fresh, quick or crisp, in any case, and a quite a bit of air let of the tire that is my metaphorical ego; what I would be a sweet rant or a rapid essay outlining the contradictions inherent in some insanely trivial pop cultural matter is instead just a murmur of words, a rattle of syllables before the   brain begins to shut down again, for the night, delving into the dreams of tinfoil nostalgia and the kind of dread only the snoring and inert can experience. In stead of the rant, here is bit of prose wandering, a poem maybe, or maybe not, but certainly a kind of writing the demonstrates the quality of this flu ravaged stew we bemusedly refer to as a mature mind and personality to boot. Hope you find something to appreciate.-tb

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THE COMINGS AND GOINGS OF EVERY TIDE

Picture if you will,  full lips wrapped around a pipe denying it's smoky plume, 

Shredded dresses priced as high gear, the possibilities of  wide ties  and thick lapels

and belt buckles the size of home base coming together in an historical turn,

a sartorial demand.

It frightens me to think of these things, nervousness inhabits the veins the blood attempt to pulse through with something resembling a life. Better to be attending an elevated Mass, a refuge from in some hamlet where there are only phone books and want ads, admonishing the earth of slow down, to stay in place, to give a break on the gravity which costs nothing at all and costs us everything to defy as we ease ourselves between mountain ranges \and large bodies of water.

The whole thing sinks, against better judgment, my clenched and shaking fist, acres and acres of  prime land  boast the late bloom of architectural tyranny, coyotes, rodents, families  that have crossed the border seeking work flee the drying cement and are  crushed halfway across  the Interstate as police and

Television station helicopters chase one car full of guys who might or might]   not have done something someone a hundred years ago didn't like when the music

became too much like sex and men and women couldn't help but notice what there was to see beyond the archeology of clothes.  Meanwhile, meanwhile, in all the mean time

that never lightens up to what each hour means it's time for,  whole populations huddle in corners and vote amongst themselves for better dreams, visions from windows overlooking a coast line  where they can live with the comings and goings of every tide and slap of wave against  a white pier.

got a letter from the IRS

I got a letter from the today IRS saying I owe them money from last year. Stunned by this, I rooted around for my return and my W2s  and other paperwork together,  and tried to make sense of  this rude how do you do. I  remembered filing everything that was given to me by my various employers for  2010, and yet here is they are, giving me numbers on particular lines in the   1040EZ form where they said I presented erroneous information. 

Now what? 

I didn't have a stiff drink, although the thought occurred to me; I remembered that I  tried doing that many times before, over and over, over many years, and all those things that I wanted to make go away went away for only a little while. When I woke up, or emerged from the  bog, as it were, there was three things for certain, a hangover, more wreckage from previous night's events I barely remembered, and those boogieman I tried to dissolve with a string of stiff drinks. I gave myself over to the IRS .

So I surrendered the whole game and gave them a call, waited a half hour on the phone, got a representative finally, he brought my return, did some work with a pencil, and said my return was correct, discovered the source of the problem, and told me what to write back in response. the upshot is that i don't owe them anything from last year. i didn't need to call suicide prevention nor change my sobriety date. I won't go into the insanely banal error on my part which caused the IRS computer to kick out a change in my 2010 return with the message that I owed them,but I will  offer this one tax tip: make sure you enter the various amounts of income on the right lines so designated. Don't lose two hours of a perfectly beautiful afternoon fretting more than a guitar assembly line.

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