Imagine a car. Doesn’t really matter what kind of car; a blue Ford Focus, say. Now, imagine this car hurtling down the interstate at the exact moment of a full solar eclipse. Imagine the person in the driver’s seat knitting.
Imagine that at the instant of totality, a truck in the oncoming lane has a blowout and skids across the road. Imagine that it swerves into our blue Ford Focus. Imagine that just as the vehicles touch, a meteorite comes flying down from space and crashes through the roof of the Focus.
Imagine that the meteorite startles the knitter so much that she throws her hands up in the air. Imagine her knitting needle soaring in a graceful arc across the car, until it finally comes to rest underneath the driver’s brake pedal. Imagine that this prevents the driver from braking, which would surely have doomed her, and her passenger, and the unfortunate truck driver who’s wrestling to control his careening eighteen-wheeler in sudden and unexpected darkness. Imagine instead that the car hops up on two wheels and blasts past the truck, averting by mere inches the space that scant milliseconds later will be occupied by thousands of pounds of roaring steel.
Got it? Okay, good. Hold that image in mind; we’ll be coming back to it in a minute.
I’m being audited by the IRS. They say they have never received my 2006 tax return. Those of you who know me will know that I tend to be a bit, err…
Hmm. What’s a charitable word here? “Scattered.” Yes, scattered is charitable.
I tend to be a bit scattered about keeping track of things like paperwork, and taxes, and all this other ordinary sundry stuff that makes up two-thirds of a life that’s two-thirds not worth living. You know, the part that’s totally divorced from the other one-third that’s made of win and awesome, and involves rope and rubber gloves and KY and…
But I digress.
Anyway, the IRS says that it didn’t receive my 2006 tax return, even though they cashed the check. They’re asking me to provide copies of my return to show that, yes, I did in fact file the damn thing.
In a miraculous confluence of events as bizarre and unlikely as the near-tragedy with our knitter in the imaginary blue Ford Focus, I actually found my 2006 tax return.
Yes, you read that right. Not only did I make a copy of it before I filed it–that itself a near-miracle of the kind more normally heralded by angels–but I put that copy in a filing box, and then after I moved I even remembered where that box was.
So you see, boys and girls, I have actually put my hands on my 2006 tax return.
Unfuckingbelievable. Somebody’s watching out for me, and given my habits and predilections, I’m pretty sure it’s probably not an angel. In titling this entry, I lied.
