What are the odds. Three weeks back, I wrote a column questioning the wisdom of hiring 100,000 more IRS agents with deformed skulls and sharpened teeth then handing them a Diamond Lane Fast Pass to tear down the Mongolian Steppes to rape, loot and pillage willy nilly.
Dear Mr. SCV:
Cripes! Thx so much for the heads up!!
W. Nilly
Stevenson Ranch
So. I visit my post office box this week. There waiting for me is a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. Without detail, they claim not only do I owe them $1,300 for the tax year of 2017, but that it’s due in a scant couple of weeks. If memory serves, I only made $1,299 in 2017, so it was a good year in that I got to take home a dollar.
There was no accompanying note, like: “John. You can’t deduct ‘FOOD’ under ‘MEDICAL’ because, as you put it, ‘If I don’t eat, I get sick.’”
Or: “You voted for Trump, didn’t you? See? This is how it starts…”
Or: “Please hurry and remit balance as there’s this college kid who’s waiting to use the money for his senior year as a Curiously Androgynous & Chubby Pole Dancing Major.”
Call me paranoid, but I found the timing, well — curious.
Dear Mr. SCV:
I’m a 20-something who identifies as an S.B.F. (Still Breast Feeding) who lives in his parents’ basement in Valencia but please don’t tell anyone because we’re not supposed to have basements. Do you have any literature (with art?) about how to become a Curiously Androgynous Pole Dancer? I’m already chubby, if that helps.
Big Fan Of Your Work,
Diega de la Verga
While I have no pole dancing brochures handy, you can order them online via the SCV Democratic Party/Goat Boinkers Anonymous headquarters website. I would throw in a phone number that in reality is the private cell to some highly regarded SCV mover & shaker, Diegita, but, I’ve been warned several times by Signal Corporate to please don’t. Anywho. Where were we? Ah, yes. The IRS is picking on me. Funny, ain’t it? I pen a column making fun of the Tax Man. A few days go by. I make less money than a panhandling New Delhi untouchable and the IRS wants 99.986% of my take-home.
Sort of makes you wonder what’s coming down the road. Will the FBI be making one of their now infamous and regular pre-dawn raids? Ninja-clad agents rappelling from my roof, going “Hut-hut-hut-hut-hut-hut!!!” The front door getting kicked in, smoke bombs crashing through windows, children from next door being dragged first into the guest bedroom then out in that I have no kids of my own at home. Some single-digit-IQ fed yells through a bullhorn: “Throw out your top-secret presidential papers and come out with your hands up!”
Blinking from the Agent Orange they sprayed, I point out that I am not nor have I ever been the president. The FBI goon shouts: “Then you have no business having presidential papers!! SHOOT TO KILL!!! HE’S A HATER!!!!”
Did a column a few years back, wondering why the Environmental Protection Agency needed to keep a large inventory of pistol silencers. The EPA? Pistol silencers? Of course, they’ll tell you they’re the EPA and like it says on the door decals, they’re protecting the environment and nothing gets holier than that, ergo, they’re doing The Lord’s work by silently planting six slugs in the back of your noggin without disturbing the Oregonian Speckled Penile Owl.
I’ve spent my life in this sterile occasional riparian community of Santa Clarita, throwing pies at the faraway shadows of imbeciles. Usually, all that happens is some sobbing stuffed shirt shows up at HQ to have a secret heart-to-heart with my Signal betters on why, for the Good Of Civilization, my thoughts must be reined in. I poke fun at a mailman and the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t start selling me stamps with no adhesive in retribution. The Forest Service doesn’t accidentally start a brush fire in my dining room. The Department of Education doesn’t break into The Signal’s massive computer banks and start adding unwanted adverbs. Very often.
I never tire of pointing out that the current president of the United States has the mental acumen of a cheese slice bubbling on a hot sidewalk and the morals of a booger. But that doesn’t mean Joe Biden goes on national television with a horror movie red backdrop, call me a traitor and vow to stamp out my kind.
Am I paranoid? Or is the government attempting to curb a rascal’s tongue?
I’m guessing the following was innocent mechanical error. But, a couple months back, I went to the post office to pick up my check. There it was, waiting for me in my box, torn in half. Bless my publisher’s wonderful sense of humor, when I told him, he noted it was simply to correct a lifetime of overpayments. Har. Dee. Har har har…
Eeesh. I suppose as we slip into the cesspool of a growing totalitarian and Orwellian state, his light-hearted and wry one-liner sure beats a snide and nasty letter to the editor.
Dear Mr. SCV:
You’re lucky. We contracted hysterical blindness after being wrestled to the ground by the Federal Railroad Commission and forced to take a ninth COVID shot. In the butt.
Call us some time,
LaVerne de la Verga
Diega’s Mom & President, SCV La Leche League
Writing a column critical of the IRS? Getting audited a few days later? It’s probably nothing. Coincidence. It does raise an interesting question, though.
If the government were to go rogue — who would you call?
Ghostbusters?
Along with 100-plus major writing awards, John Boston has been named both Best Humorous and Best Serious newspaper columnist in North America, several times. Visit his bookstore, johnbostonbooks.com. Buy stuff. Tell others…
