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When they become due, I don’t like them at all.
Taxes look large, be they ever so small
Taxes are debts which I venture to say,
No man or no woman is happy to pay.
I grumble about them, as most of us do.
For it seems that with taxes I never am through.
… winds shift on the tidesilent hands redraw the linesgold once freely flowednow caught in tangled bordersa weight strung ’round the world’s throat …
…
How did I become a pompous ass? I am not sure. I wasn’t raised to be arrogant, quite the opposite.
…
Sometime last year, it must have been summer, my husband and I got into quite a predicament. We were in the middle of decluttering our home when we both started to feel guilty when we saw the amount of things we had accumulated.
Yeah well, I didn’t go to Yale, I went to UConn, and pretty much flunked out of there, spent years homeless, spent years living in and out of homeless shelters, but the fact is what I learned in that journey was far, far more important than anything I could have possibly learned at UConn or Yale or gosh, Harvard. None of us had anyone hand us $300 million. I rubbed shoulders with a lot of men and women who lost it all, who had no shot at much of anything, but still, day by day, they obeyed the law, did what they could to earn some cash to keep it together for their families. Life at the bottom isn’t about honors or law school plans, it is about living simply and so near the ground one can pretty much hear the worms. Humiliation is what life is about in Trump’s world, but humility, that is the greatest lesson learned at the bottom of the pile. We are all the same, we human beings, no one is above or below. That, and try and make a friend or two along the way, you never know when you might need someone to bail you out…
I remember a time when we had political parties. They didn’t rule our everyday lives, neither was anything they did (or didn’t do) so interesting that we lost any sleep over it. We read the news and political discussion happened at the BBQ at the neighbor’s house, at work in the breakroom, or even after church.
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As if all muscles were immersed in acid. Like the moment when you step into the void on a staircase in the dark, like a fall into the depths, only inside. Like tiredness that soaks the air. Like “Run!”, but you don’t know where to go, there’s nothing you could or want to run to, and besides, you’re too weak for that. Like a deep moan between the hectic breaths, like a need to sit down now that doesn’t stop, even if you’ve been sitting down for a long time.
…
I served sausages, pastries, and mile-high cakes
later I worked in a pub, and gave out beer and liquor.
…
Everybody has already moved onto 2024 and I am still mentally stuck in 2023. I am running behind like always. I still haven’t let go of the old year, too much has happened and while not all might be worth sharing, I will do it anyway. 🙂
Growing up, I knew the best places where mushrooms grew and I could identify them. Later on, as a teenager, I even went down to the villages in Austria and sold them to the local restaurants, who paid me nicely.