Untaxed

Earning in the negative amounts seems ridiculous; yet on paper that is what I managed to do last year -- by great amounts (with "great" referring more to my scale of living than yours; I doubt it would seem great to you). The goal of the free lance writer is to earn enough in a year to need to pay taxes -- and, with any luck, to earn enough in the following year to pay those taxes.

If you have grown up on stories of writers who make two dollars their first year of writing, two hundred in their second, and then two zillion in every year afterward, it may seem a bit ridiculous, too, that a writer may still, later in life, be falling well short of the simple goal of earning enough to pay taxes -- i.e., to live on.

The story of free lance writers has been more of the struggle-to-ge-along nature than otherwise. That the ones earning living wages win not only the money but attention, too, is natural. What the public fails to hear about is the quietness of the news of all those years for all those writers when the wells are a bit dry.

Not speaking of the creative wells, of course.

And the irony is that those years are taxing that go Federally untaxed.

Cheers ...

Happy U.S. Tax Day

A happy U.S. Tax Day, to one and all. We scatter historical New Year's Days across the calendar, disguising many of them as something else; and of these holidays U.S. Tax Day must be among the last, being scheduled somewhat with the arrival of Spring. This past year, for me, of course, I knew all along that the Fisher King was dead -- to mix my mythologies of Celtic Britain and U.S. Government -- and so of course I look forward to the rejuvenation implicit in the arrival of this festive day.

I will be celebrating Tax Day by further house cleaning -- a traditional way of celebrating Spring -- and perhaps by planting hops, which in name are so perilously close to hopes that I am immediately inclined to favor the theory (hereby introduced to the world) that hopes are, indeed, the best bittering agents to add to the yeasted malt of life.

I was pacing around our small gardens, this morning, weighing the possibilities for where those new hopes should go. These viny plants like ample sun -- what hopes do not? And they need a considerable amount of upwards space to grow into -- ditto. As with our existing two vines, I may resort to a trellis system ... for what hopes will grow properly if left unsupported? Etc.

Cheers ...