The Lighter (?) Side of Federal Taxes

Nothing like some laughter over either death or taxes…

Pilgrim on a Long, Long Journey

Are there people who do their own taxes? Do some take their chances with software programs as opposed to professional tax preparers? I just save tax records.

I go with my long departed father’s advice here, “Don’t make a federal case out of it.” I do so by telling my accountant of 43 years, “Don’t take any chances and live long enough to accompany me if I am audited.

I figure if I get audited Robert Mueller will show up at the house at 4 a.m. with a swat team, having given instructions to shoot first and talk later. While I am cuffed and hanging from a house beam, the team will find every tax record dating back to 1975, which I have by virtue of my OCD. (Since writing this over a year ago, I ditched what were unneccesary tax records, as 45 years of records seemed a tad…

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Fiction and Non-fiction?

“An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.” V. S. Naipaul, the late Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Trinidadian heritage, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I wrote and published three books of memoirs. They were at some level non-chronological autobiographies. My closest relatives maintained different impressions of several incidents. Our memory function is imperfect, just as we are.

I have written the first draft of a novelette, a fiction that is memory-based, off and on. Off and on is a critical phrase because the spirit of the events deep down is best communicated when compounded with fiction. I see the soul as combining the conscious and subconscious minds. I think that good fiction is something from our subconscious, emerging from our soul.

V. S. Naipaul, I get it. I suspect many of you do as well.