Presenting the blog: 28% better than death!

mjames — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:58:16 +0000

I swear, this blog won’t be all about me. There are, frankly, hundreds and hundreds of great blogs out there and this isn’t one of them. Maybe it will be great one day, or more likely just tolerable, but not yet. I’m still trying to figure out how to post an entry without having to email the web tech guy every 17 seconds. It would also be nice to get words to appear in that thought bubble over there to the right above my floating head. Theoretically, that will be where you can see my Twitter* status. No idea why you’d want to see that here, but then again, I’m not sure why you’d want to see it on Twitter either.

*I have been Twittering for exactly two days now. Here it is. It’s going well, in the sense that no one who actually knows how to Twitter has made fun of me yet. (Just for the record, this asterisk aside is dedicated to Joe Posnanski, one of my favorite sportswriters who also happens to have a great blog. I’d give you the link, but you might not come back. He loves putting little asides into his blog posts and even came up with a word for them … “Pozerisk (PAHZ-tur-isk), noun. An aside that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything but is thrown into the middle of the story because the author thinks it’s funny.” That sounds about right.)

So this is Blog No. 1. The Original. Ten years from now, people will say, “I wonder what Matt James’ first blog post was about,” and someone else will say, “Who?”

No, hopefully it will not go that way at all. Hopefully, readers will flock here by the millions some day, and inevitably they’ll wonder where it all started, what that very first blog was about. The answer will be … TAXES! It’s one of the two guarantees in life, right? Right there with your mother wishing out loud at family functions that you’d just meet a nice girl. Oh, and death. Almost forgot death. I bring up taxes, not only because it’s April 14 – 36 hours, people! Beat the holiday rush! — but also because I got this piece of paper in the mail yesterday from my accountant:

: It looks like there will be no extravagances for the rest of April. Like toothpaste.

***

You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that this blog will not be all about me. I have a fairly boring life. Seriously boring. It gets worse as I get older. My belt and shoes match almost every day now. That’s how bad it’s gotten. But that’s fine. That’s why I got into sportswriting in the first place, so I could write about other people. Also, the pole vault and home runs* and fist fights and death and loud cars and crazy love and bull riders. And the best part about this blog is it doesn’t have to be about any of those things. I’m not sure what it’ll be about, actually. Music. Stand-up comedians. Food. Babies. Pets. My fear of babies and pets. Medical breakthroughs. The state of New Hampshire. Bad driving. TV shows. Yeah, great, TV shows. No one’s ever thought to blog about TV shows.

*Favorite home run I’ve seen in person: Bo Jackson hits a long fly ball into the right field corner at Royals Stadium. Jose Canseco, syringes falling out of his pockets, chases it. The ball and Jose hit in the corner about the same time and the ball goes careening out. Bo gets an inside-the-park home run and luckily, Mr. Canseco does not fall on any of the needles.

Today, it’s about taxes. The bill came yesterday. It’s a stinger. As you can see, something went drastically wrong, there must have been a mix-up, because I owe $1,676 to the federal government. That’s two digits more than anyone could have seen coming. I could buy my way out of a conspiracy of some sort with that kind of money. This could be the empty checking account talking, but it seems downright un-American to charge someone that much. (This isn’t Russia. Is this Russia?) I’ve been paying taxes ALL YEAR LONG! I assume I checked a box incorrectly, or once again forgot to buy a house and get married. Maybe they’re finally charging me for taking Air Force One to prom with Leslie Spikes in 1994. It’s one of those. It seems like a lot, but I’m trying not to think of it not so much as money I owe, as much as a reimbursement that hung out with the wrong crowd and went negative.

I have friends who do pretty much the exact same job that I do, and they get enormous refunds this time of year. They are showering money on each other like Pacman Jones at the Belagio. They are building swimming pools so big they have islands in the middle with swimming pools on the islands. I can only hope that someday these people are caught cheating and arrested, dragged away from their families in the night by SWAT teams. It would at least make me feel better.

About the only good thing that occurred yesterday was me remembering to black-out my Social Security number along the bottom of the paper before I posted the picture. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if I hadn’t paid an accountant money to give me the bad news. There should definitely be a rule that if your CPA doesn’t get you a refund, then you don’t have to pay her. Or him. I’ve looked through the paperwork, tried to make sense of the “IRS e-file Signature Authorization,” as it wants to be called. No idea. “Schedule B – qualified dividends.” I might as well be reading my old Organic Chemistry text book. Not that I read it the first time.

Next year, remind me to save money for this sort of thing. Or better yet, find out if a blog is a write-off.

Matt James » Railing against The Man

Presenting the blog: 28% better than death!