The Silence of Tax Preparation Time

You can smell it on the Internet. Suddenly it's very quiet, except for the far-distant clicking of keyboards, the muffled swearwords and the sound of papers being shuffled.

Tax prep time. This is the time when the wheat is separated from the chaff: Those who did their taxes weeks ago from those who are pulling off most of their body hair in an attempt to somehow make sense of those numbers. This is the time when partnerships fall into severe bickering, when the seeds of divorce sprout, when the horrible numbers come back to us in our fevered dreams, when they whisper into our ears in traffic, when all files and drawers and cupboards are turned inside out by the last-minute people among us.

And all this is the lot of the mostly lucky ones, the ones who have enough income to necessitate all the accounting.

Added later: I figured out my hourly pay for writing on politics (not on this blog but elsewhere). Then I sobbed.