It’s that time of year again. Time to sort out that large box of receipts and records and get everything ready for tax time. Fortunately, there’s not a lot different about 2023 from 2022 other than my income seems to have gone down in all of my income streams. I’ll spend a couple of evenings over the next week or so chasing various pieces of paper that have gone astray, enter numbers gleaned from all sorts of forms in my little spread sheet and then pack it all up in an accordion file and drop it off at my accountant’s office and cross my fingers that I’ll actually get a refund this year. I seem to bop up and down between a couple of different tax brackets and when I go up, I owe, and when I go down, Uncle Sam owes me.
I don’t mind paying taxes. I recognize them as being necessary to a functioning society where a pooling of resources allows for much bigger projects than we could possibly do on our own. I’m a fan of functional schools, public libraries, paved roads, working healthcare infrastructure and all of the other myriad things that tax dollars allow to happen. I’m not a complete socialist. I think the profit motive is healthy but that I do believe that there are certain segments of the economy in which capitalism either does not belong or should be heavily regulated in the public interest. This includes such things as education, health care, utilities, military, and corrections. Putting profits ahead of people in such areas tends to create more problems than it solves.
The next few weeks are about catch up in various areas of life. I have the car tune up, my annual eye appointment, and a diagnosis and repair on my home entertainment system all scheduled for the next few days. This latter is necessary as, all of a sudden, the dialogue channel is dropping out on some streaming services. The music and sound effects are there but otherwise it’s silent movie time. Fortunately, it’s not all of them so I can find something to watch when I’m in the mood. I haven’t really been watching a lot of TV the last few months. An occasional film but none of the streaming series I’ve tried has really grabbed and held my attention. Maybe I should go back and revisit something I haven’t seen for a decade or more, like Six Feet Under (which still has the best finale of any series ever).
I checked my sales figures. The Accidental Plague Diaries continues to sell a few copies here and there. I’m thinking there might be a decent market in another couple of years when the children of the pandemic – those who were in elementary school at the time and too young to fully comprehend what was happening age into middle and high school and might want some sort of relatively readable chronicle of what the heck happened and why. I have a couple of readings and signings coming up the next couple of months and I need to get off my butt and really start working on the new book. I just haven’t had the energy. And I’ll have to do it around my performance commitments for the rest of the season (a symphony concert, a play, an opera concert, a musical, and directing a Shakespeare between now and Labor Day).
Covid seems to be waning again locally. There are still cases popping up here and there but far fewer than earlier this winter. I wonder if that’s because we’re far enough out from holiday gatherings for those increased contacts to still be making a difference. The local hospital numbers are fairly low and I haven’t heard of a lot of deaths. I have heard of continued issues with Long Covid wreaking havoc in some peoples lives and that fact alone is enough to keep me caught up with vaccinations. There was some data showing that vaccinations had some mild associations with myelopathy and myocarditis – something around one in a hundred thousand. Given that the disease itself caused this about one in a hundred, I’ll err on the side of the vaccine.
Speaking of vaccines, there’s an outbreak of measles in Florida. There’s nothing that unusual about an occasional outbreak in this country. It’s one of the most contagious viruses known to humans so, if it gets into an unvaccinated population (recent immigrants, Christian Scientists) it spreads rapidly,. It’s so contagious that you have to have over a 95% vaccination rate to keep it contained through herd immunity. Florida, thanks to various antivaccine beliefs on both left and right, only has about a 90% vaccination rate so it’s going to continue to spread. It could be contained with a vaccination campaign and keeping unvaccinated children at home from the affected school but DeSantis’ hand picked surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, is busy ignoring over a century of science carefully collected on how to deal with a measles outbreak and pushing the opposite. I suppose those who are trying to out Trump Trump won’t be happy until there’s a line of children in iron lungs again. Measles is not a benign illness. It kills roughly 1/1,000 children it infects and causes serious complications in another 5/1,000. That doesn’t seem like that high a number but what if it’s your child who suffers permanent brain damage or dies. If a child dies in Florida in the current outbreak, will the parents have a case for wrongful death against the public health system for wantonly disregarding the known science?
Usually my jaw drops at the political news out of Texas and Florida which seem to be trying to race each other to see which can be crueler more completely to their marginalized populations. Alabama, of course, leap frogged over both of them with its rather unbelievable ruling that a frozen embryo was indeed a person. I can’t completely blame the Alabama Supreme Court on this one (although Tom Parker, the chief justice is a seven mountains dominionist). The legislature created and the population passed an Alabama constitutional amendment that clearly stares that unborn potential lives such as embryos are humans for purposes of law and the court decision merely pointed out what was already clear in the not very well thought out amendment that was pushed through by prolife forces. Just one more example of why politicians should not be practicing medicine. The Alabama legislature, with egg on its face, as well as in the petri dish, is desperately trying to back pedal on this one as it has caused serious issues for their rich white campaign funders as it basically prevents IVF and other advanced fertility treatments from happening as any mistreatment of an embryo could be construed as child abuse, or if the embryo is rendered non-viable manslaughter or murder. Perhaps the legislature will be a bit more hesitant to pass poorly worded laws about very complicated subjects in the future. Naaaah…
I’m jonesing for some KFC. Better head off to the egg section of the supermarket.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 