Finally got around to doing my taxes for this year.

Sort of. Almost. Kinda. Grr.

I don’t feel like going through the whole sordid sequence of events and I am pretty sure you would not enjoy reading it either.

Suffice it to say that I am now locked out of my Canadian Revenue account because it rejected my completely accurate information three times (after telling me I had five chances, BTW) and now I am going to have to call them up and turn on my nonthreatening charm and get them to open my account again so I can actually file the damned return and be done with it.

At least the return itself is done. Turbotax once more helped me with that. I have used them every year since 2010 or so. And they do it for free if you are a “no taxable income” type like myself.

This year, they also nagged me constantly to sign up for one of their paid services,  and I was a little tempted by their “plus” service because it was only ten bucks and had all kinds of benefits like being able to consult a “tax expert” via online chat to ask questions and importing all my info from last year and so forth.

But nope. I am just too damned cheap to do that. Pay money to avoid a little bit extra effort? You have no idea who you are dealing with, pal.

But thanks, because I will now positively enjoy doing the extra work because now I will feel like I am earning that money. Or, looked at another way, I will enjoy the thought of saving the money through the whole process.

Then again, if there wasn’t a tax return check of $75 on the line, I probably wouldn’t bother filing at all. I figure that’s why that standard deduction is there, to give poor people like me a reason to do our taxes.

It used to be the only way to make sure the GST cheques kept coming too, but that is automatic now. So it’s really just the $75.

Otherwise, why bother? I have the world’s most boring tax return. I have one source of income, my disability cheques from the BC government, and I qualify for absolutely no form of deduction whatsoever.

Not that it mattesr because I have no taxable income to deduct from in the first place.

So I am pretty sure that the Canadian Revenue Agency could live without my incredibly small amount of tax info. Call me for the next Census, we’ll talk.

But I needs me that sweet, sweet cash.

Speaking of cash, this is a GST cheque month, which is nice. It’s usually somewhere in the vague vicinity of $100, plus or minus twenty bucks. I will most likely just stick that on my credit card, which is my equivalent of a savings account.

I have a savings account too, but I can’t buy stuff off Amazon with it.

I am not looking forward to making that phone call. I meanm who wants to tell a completely stranger that they fucked up? My life is humiliating enough already.

But sadly, I have gotten pretty good at it due to a lifetime of fucking things up. It’s a constant theme in my life. I am always forgetting something important or making a mess or saying something appalling, bizarre, or just plain weird.

It’s probably due to my being such a space case. A head in the clouds dreamer whose internal processes take up so much of his mental resources that there is precious little left for paying attention to like, reality and stuff.

And I don’t think I could change that. I will always be a very deep and thoughtful fellow whose head is full of ideas and information and emotions and all kinds of complex mental processes always ticking away in the background.

And all of it constantly being compressed by the massive gravity well at the center of my mind until everything extraneous has been squeezed out of it and all that is left is the high density neutronium that is my model of the world.

Sounds impressive when I put it like that. And it’s an accurate depiction of what is going on in my head most of the time. It’s bedlam in here, except that all the noise and craziness produces a high quality end product that I can then use to fuel my creativity and my insights and my politics and, most importantly. my morality.

But it makes it hard to concentrate on the here and now for very long. I am ready to disappear back into my head like a startled squirrel at the slightest provocation and without any thought as to how that will impact the actual situation I am in.

That’s the conscious mind’s problem, I guess.

SO I never know exactly how much brain I will have at my disposal at any moment. My life history contains thousands of moments when I was in the middle of doing something important, something involving others, when my mind suddenly emptied and I could barely remember where I was or what I was doing.

It’s rather stressful.

I call it “losing the thread”, but that doesn’t really cover the totality of the experience. Getting behind on the conversation and missing an important piece of information without which the conversation makes no sense is one thing.

Having your working and short term memory go totally blank and then having to deduce where you are and what is going on is quite another.

Right now, the most likely theory to explain this is that my social anxiety triggers this memory dump when it tries to retract from the situation into the world of my mind.

Another possibility is that I have such aggressive and demanding inner processes going on in my mind that there is nothing stopping them from shoving my conscious mind out of the way and emptying my mind when they need more resources.

And it’s also possible that I have something wrong with my brain on a hardware level. It’s happened all my life. I can’t discount that possibility.

Not more than ten percent, anyhow.

Bottom line is that I am all kinds of fucked up, including some previous unknown to science., and it’s a wonder I can get anything done.

I suppose I should cut myself a whole lot of slack for that.

But I am too fucked up to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.