The morning was sultry, or at least that was how Bob felt every time he woke up to see that the height of the teepee in his whitey-tighties was larger than normal. He believed this because he couldn’t be bothered to understand the science behind the phenomenon of nocturnal penile tumescence, or as the dudebros, soccer moms and essentially everyone else called it: morning wood. Bob gleefully giggled in a giddily gregarious and gloriously goofy way for precisely 38 minutes, at which point he woke up, went to the bathroom, urinated and had his giggles (along with his manhood) deflated.
“All was not lost,” Bob thought to himself as he put a robe on and meandered his way out of his bedroom and into the hallway. He noticed an absurd amount of sticky notes of varying colors and size littering his hallway. They were arranged, seemingly, in a deliberate fashion. Almost as if to represent the level design of a classic pixel based platformer video game, perhaps Mighty Bomb Jack or Bonk’s Adventure. The sticky notes all had writing on them, but Bob did not notice the words contained within. He has issues with focus, brushing his teeth regularly, separating colors from lights in his laundry and the rules that govern the board game “Sorry.” Don’t ask.
Proceeding forward to the Living Room, which Bob always called the “Great Room,” even though it was small, cluttered and did not prominently feature a raised ceiling, he slipped on an indeterminate number of empty glass Coke bottles – one of which was a classic Hutchinson bottle from the late 1890s, worth nearly $4,000. Unfortunately, it was only worth sweeping into a dustbin now, as Bob had shattered it into 4,000 pieces, a few of which were stuck in the bottom of his left bare foot. He would normally be freaking out about the blood gushing from his injured heel, but was perhaps too distracted by the fact that he had hit his head, in a harder than average fashion, on an unopened box of 1978 Three’s Company Trading cards. He had hung on to that pathetic sealed box of Jack Tripper and friends in the hopes that it would be worth a ton of money after 30 years or more. The cards are not worth a lot of money at all, in fact, they seem to only be worth exactly one concussion. “Thank you sir! May I please have another?” Bob shouted at the top of his lungs before blacking out for a little siesta.
1 hour, 27 minutes, 34 seconds, and 13 nanoseconds later, Bob arose, like the Phoenix of a dullard beautifully transforming into a nincompoop. “What in the funky penicillin is going on in this house?” Bob exclaimed. “I just cleaned up yesterday, which entailed 3 minutes of pick up, 2 minutes of dusting, a dropped duece which took longer than I care to disclose and at least 10 hours of Netflix binge watching. I love H20: Just Add Water, Australian mermaids really are the best mermaids. That’s besides the point, why is there still crap lying around? I dedicated a minimum of 180 seconds to the clean up effort, that’s at least 13 dog years, and yet nothing has changed.
There are still tchotchkes and moderately meaningless ephemera everywhere! Do I really need the underwear that Ben Affleck wore on the film Daredevil? And why are they sewed on to the head rest of my comfy chair? Over here! I have an assorted collection of Treasure Trolls from the floor to the walls, to the sweat dripping off my dolls. Maybe that’s not sweat, maybe that’s condensation from my AC unit that I never fixed, but that’s irrelevant. Why is my foot on fire?” Bob mused as he looked down at his bleeding and glass ridden left foot. The freak out mentioned before was now happening in full effect, which included running, screaming, tripping and ultimately face planting into the wall of his hallway.
5 minutes, 2 hours, 45 nanoseconds, and 23 seconds later, Bob awoke. More subdued this time, likely due to the blood loss and the 2 X blunt force trauma to his head. A sticky note was affixed to his forehead, but he still did not notice it, the pain in his head had finally been eclipsed by the pain in his foot. Being sensible, even if just for a New York minute, Bob pulled the glass segments from his pulpy mess of a paw whilst squeaking, “yip!” each time a sliver came out of his flesh. Now properly bandaged, Bob limped to the kitchen for a glass of Yoo-hoo. As Bob tilted his glass of chocolatey goodness, his eyes rolled up and finally noticed the sticky note stuck to his furled brow. He grabbed the note and read the inscription, “File taxes April 15th, dummy.” Bob glanced up at the cat meme calendar on the wall and noticed that it was April, and that all of the boxes through the 14th had an “X” marked in them. Indeed, today was apparently April 15th, the date that all Americans know as: Tax day. “Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Bob shouted from the hilltops, or at least from the top of his breakfast table, as he sloshed his drink all over the room.
Bob did not walk, he ran through the living room, across the hallway and back to his bedroom. En route, he finally noticed the 3,876 sticky notes that all said the exact same thing, “File taxes April 15th, dummy.” The sticky notes swirled across his mind, leaving him briefly unhinged as if he were the victim in an Alfred Hitchcock film. Regaining his composure, he flung his robe into the deepest darkest corner of the room as he desperately attempted to get dressed. He had to visit the Tax Man at the local Big Box Rip-Off Store to make sure that he filed his taxes. Bob was acutely afraid of missing the deadline for submitting his taxes and was even more afraid of being hounded by the I.R.S., although this was likely because he believed that I.R.S. stood for Internal Rectum Searchers. After settling on a snazzy little fashion combo which included a Baja hoodie, an ancient pair of light up L.A. Gear shoes and his favorite elastic strapped Bugle Boy pants, Bob left his home (incident free for a refreshing change of pace) with his tax forms and documentation and headed off to see the Tax Man.
Upon reaching the Big Box Rip-Off Store, Bob bit his lip and did not voice his ever present content for the blatant commercialism that it represented. This worked out great for everybody, because truthfully, Bob didn’t even know what blatant commercialism was or why he was against it, he just knew that much like Groucho Marx always said, “whatever it is, I’m against it!” Nearing the point of verbal diarrhea as well as losing a grip on the self control necessary to stop himself from making an absolute idiot of himself in public, he luckily found the Tax Man and presented his documents to begin the filing.
The Tax Man was of a somber disposition. The type of person that looked as if they had never been happy a day in their whole life. 8 minutes, 57 seconds and 9 nanoseconds was the absolute maximum amount of time the Tax Man had been able to sustain happiness. As such, the Tax Man’s threshold for stupidity was much lower than the average well adjusted human type being. His dress attire was even more tragic, looking similar to David Byrne in his oversized suit from “Stop Making Sense,” except it wouldn’t appear that the Tax Man was trying to make a statement with his clothes. Sadly, the only statement to be made was that the Tax Man was a dour husk of a person like entity.
The Tax Man briefly glanced at the documents that Bob presented and then chicken pecked a few keys on he PC in front of him. “Based on the type of documents you have here, I highly recommend that we set you up for a 1040EZ form,” The Tax Man said.
Bob interjected with, “Why is it easy?”
“The 1040EZ form is a simple form that skips asking questions about itemized deductions, financial assets, and other such complex issues which you don’t seem to have,” the Tax Man replied.
“I’m not complex!” Bob snarled, outraged at the mere thought. “I’ll have you know that I’m sinceriously complex. Just yesterday I was playing golf with the Dalai Lama, during a rainstorm, using whiffle balls, while Bengal tigers acted as our caddies. While not all of that actually happened it is at least basic proof that I am a higher evolved monkey. You think just because you are allowed to look at all of our financial records that you can look down on us. Well I will not stand for this! I will continue to sit in this chair until I have a beard that would make the members of ZZ Top blush. I will become the national spokesperson for Depends for Men. That’s right, this is a poop out. I will sit here, in my own stench for the rights of every man, woman, child, marsupial, bouncy house and pet rock that has to file taxes. I will protest this inequity and scooch this chair all the way to Washington DC if I have to. And when I get there, anal investigations by the I.R.S. be damned, I will tell the world about my dream, and Alf will be my Vice President, and the world will be introduced to my version of…”
Bob would have continued on his rant except that he was once more unconscious. Apparently, the Tax Man had tolerated as much nonsense as he could. In fact, he had attempted to calm Bob down the entire time, yet couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Resorting to one his baser instincts, the Tax Man grabbed a three ring hole punch and whacked Bob upon the back of his head with the vigor of Sammy Sosa swinging a corked bat while at the height of his performance enhancing drug days. The Tax Man smiled and thought, “Tax Consulting has been berry, berry good to me.” Knocking Bob out was no big thing, he had been punching his own ticket all day.
Bob woke up much later (I’m too exhausted at this point to remember the exact amount of time spent snoozing), in his car with tax documents in hand a check for $123.54, along with a receipt for services rendered by the Tax Man. Bob was about to fire up the rage in his belly to go yell at the Tax consultant, but decided against it. He had filed his taxes, and his anus was safe from probing for at least on more full zodiac. He thought about driving home, but wasn’t sure he remembered how. Shrugging his shoulders, Bob looked at his newly minted check and a sly grin crawled across his lips. “All’s well that ends well,” he though to himself quitely. Bob was content, which was a rare Pokémon. Quite possibly the rarest of them all. This was our cue to leave folks – and with that we slowly drift away from Bob, as he slowly slips into La-La Land. Goodnight Bob, and Godspeed old chap.
The end
