fooling myself, maybe part one of a series.

i pay taxes. more to the point, i suckle at the bosom of society in more ways than i desire. with paying taxes, or suckling, money is taken from me before i ever see it (technically) and put to use to keep the government on top of doing such magnanomous things as.....paving the road a mile over from mine, digging up the ditches in front of my home on a regular basis, making sure the children i don't have can eat lunch at school if their parents blew it all on booze the previous weekend, and keeping people on welfare on welfare.

now let me preface the rest of this with one thought - i'm not saying welfare is bad. it very much comes in handy for many needy people. but like anything else, it can be and is abused.

i can make it through suckling by telling myself that MY taxes go towards only the BEST of intentions. i help support the welfare recipients who truly NEED the money. i assist in paving my neighbor's road because sometimes they come visit and i'd like them to have a nice drive out to my place (until they get to my pothole infested obstacle course of a gravel pit). i keep dudes in business who eventually make it out to plow me out so i can make it to work and make more money so i can continue suckling my way to heaven.

i do my part, according to the sucklee (local, state, federal governments - or the evil trinity if you will), to maintain an active and productive role in the rotation of the planet.

so how am i fooling myself? there's no magic formula where i can call up the evil triune and ask that my money goes only to causes i deem worthy. hell, i'm probably single-handedly funding stem cell research in this state AND some underhanded evil triune agenda to make sure my friggin' road NEVER gets paved. there's a big pile of cash sitting in someone's lap drawer only miles from me that used to be mine. now it belongs to the dudes and dudettes that decided i live too far out in the country and am too ignorant to assist in making decisions about issues that directly involve me even though i spend 1/3 of my life IN the city that got my money. poor money.

i figure the only things i can think to do to remedy this horrible situation are a) move out of the country with my wife, dog, cat, and hammock, or b) keep living the lie that's gotten me this far. probably "b", 'cause there's no way the dog and cat can be in the confines of a car long enough to reach the border.

we're such sheep sometimes, you know? i realize many good things come from taxes. many more than i mentioned. but my point is i really, really don't like my money being lumped in to a big barrel where anyone in government can come along and say that i'm, in essence, supporting some "thing" that the cosmic christ would thump me on the head for doing. i do enough of that on my own.

yeah, pretty sure this is gonna be a series.