Your Zeit is in my Geist

I am nothing, I have nothing… sometimes I type.

It’s a Saturday morning, the world is cold and crusty outside, I’m picking he sleepy grains out of my eyes and sipping down a positively manly cup of coffee. All's well, I s'pose... except for that one thing. Did I tell you that the Mafia is forcing me to pay for a Lexus that I'll never get to drive?

I make about $13.00 an hour, I’m a single parent, I have no property, no savings and at this moment I have $150.00 in my pocket to feed, clothe, heat, and entertain myself (and also insulate my drafty dwelling) for the next two weeks. I’ve have to completely turn my daughter’s safe-keeping and support over to her mother and step-dad… I work 50 hours a week - last month I had to borrow money to eat. I'm behind in my doctor bills and sometimes I have to let my phone get disconnected because I can't keep up. I drive a car that might get me $500.00 if I sold it, and I live in a converted storage shed.

I wouldn't have any of these problems if it weren't for the damn mob and their pitiless greed.

What did I do to piss off the Mafia, you ask? It was a case of mistaken identity... being in the wrong place a the wrong time, but that's neither here nor there... especially with them. Every time I've talked with them there has been no interest on their part in why I 'owe' this money... just that I spend my every waking moment trying to pay it off. The consequences are never elaborated as much as simply hinted at.

If this were a movie, there would be a point where the character would have to take matters into his own hands... and the audience would be sympathetic. What would he do? You can't scare mobsters away, you can't fight them legally, and there's nowhere you can go to run. He might have a Matrix style "guns, lots of guns" moment - but then that's when the movie abruptly ends and I realize it's just me here in the world we all have to agree is 'real'... The one where shooting people and blowing up buildings is obviously not the answer.

Now replace 'Mafia' with 'IRS' and the whole thing becomes clearer.

I could heat my flat all winter with the pile of cash they've taken from me, so would the carcasses of all the lawyers who have fucked me over this. All my legal avenues have been blocked with a 'Fuck-you, pay up' sign, and all attempts to 'compromise' have been shown to be just as fake as the actual debt in the first place.

(By the way... do not EVER hire J.K.Harris & Co. to handle your tax problems unless by 'handle' you mean 'set up a payment plan and ignore you.' More on that later.)

I have a new lawyer and a new strategy... if this doesn't work, then... well... I've never seriously considered illegally changing my identity and making this star-crossed 'me' vanish like that third of my take-home pay does every month...

I've read recently of the IRS and it's quiet policy of targeting the weak. Here's a particularly egregious example.

Populations of the poor, weak or powerless have historically been leveraged against their misery to boost the powerful. Republic or dictatorship, this pattern repeats itself and finds new niches to hide in. Whatever ideology holds the loyalties of the masses, no matter how protected they think they are by their politics or their religion, they will be exploited by the cynical, the powerful and the greedy. Today it continues with little change. Then, we were sharecropping under the thumb of some feudal lord as we feared hunger and death, now we're forced to pay through the nose for health care by those who wish they were feudal lords.

What revolution has ever been undertaken by humans where this was not the issue at its heart? All my avenues of escape... all of them... have destitution or prison at their end. With every passing month conventional morality looks more and more cartoonish against the play of all this.

And now that I've written myself into a corner... I'm gonna go smoke a joint on a street corner at one in the afternoon in Salt Lake City. My rebellion will no doubt bring a new shift in the paradigm, a new zeit in the geist...

I'll write later if I'm not in jail.