leaf springs

Spring has sprung
the grass is griz
I wonder where
the flowers is

A verse from my oh-so-literary childhood that you won't find in Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Poetry, but growing up in the middle of the middle class in the middle of suburbs in the middle of the midwest in the middle of the twentieth century, that was a poem. Not exactly Leaves of Grass either, but who knew about Whitman then?

It's another kind of spring and another kind of leaf that's on my mind today. Hank the ten-year-old truck has developed a shake in the right-front wheel and a rattle in the rear end that concerns me while I roll down the road. The technician at Goodyear informed me this morning that the vibration is worn ball joints in the front end, and the clanking noise is a broken leaf spring bracket in the back.

Needless to say, this was not the news I was hoping to hear, but what are you gonna do? I want this truck to last awhile longer, and if you drive a used vehicle, that's what you get. So I told him to fix just the leaf springs for now. For five hundred bucks I'll have four wheels on the road again by the end of the day. When I picked up the truck, the new brackets looked just fine and the rattle was gone, but parts and labor sure add up.

Today happens to be tax day in Amerika. Maybe it should be a national holiday, as election day should be, to give people some time and incentive to do their civic duty, but then the banks and post offices would have to close, and that part of the process would shut down, so never mind. Because Gven and I - mostly Gven - made more money from self-employment this year, instead of getting a refund we owe Uncle Sam, uh, five hundred bucks.

Slate noted this morning:

In the NYT op-ed page, Richard Conniff says that the word tax has become one of the most reviled words in the English language and needs a change. Instead of calling them 'taxes', we should call them 'dues'. The word tax has "punitive overtones … as if wage-earners have done something wrong by their labors." But dues "is rooted in social obligation and duty."

Mr. Coniff has a point there. We're just paying our dues every April 15, for the privilege of membership in this big - very big - nonvoluntary, institutional, coercive social club qua military nation-state, doing our part to support the good work done on our behalf. Paying dues means we belong, we've done our part, we've earned something, and we have a stake in the union. Gosh, I feel so much better now.

It's not really our money anyway, regardless of what the tax revolt crowd says. I don't hear Grover Norquist clamoring to "starve the beast" when the beast is spending our dues starting and fighting perpetual wars for profit. It's not my money, I just get to look at it for a minute, if at all.

The U.S. Treasury prints the money and lets us use some of it. The Federal Reserve rations it out to the big city banks, which allow you and me to deposit our hard-earned wages from our benevolent employers, who send a check from their bank to our bank, from which we electronically transfer it to other banks to pay our bills.

Today also happens to be the end of the first pay period of the new annual pay scale, when this year's so-called merit increase goes into effect, so the net amount at the bottom of the electronic check is a little more than it was last year - hoo-rah! This is a freaking harmonic convergence of leafy green growth. The invisible hand of the marketplace just tightened its stranglehold.

Let me be clear about this: I am glad the net amount on my paycheck is larger. I have plans, ideas, and designs on what to do with that additional pocket change, just as I have plans, ideas, and designs on the so-called stimulus package that I'm told will arrive some time soon. Maybe Gven and I will use our stimulus package to pay the IRS what we owe for making too much self-employed money last year. Then we'll just have to make a little more next year to buy Hank some new ball joints. Isn't this exciting?

Speaking of language, doesn't stimulus package sound just a little pornographic? I bet if I googled "stimulus package" my benevolent company computer would block the search, thereby protecting my tender eyes from whatever dangerous and harmful content might come forth from an innocent inquiry, thus preventing me from finding out how to increase the size of my stimulus package.