For those of us whose reactions to the entrenchment of adulthood range from ongoing obliviousness to absolute negation, life provides numerous handy indicators that we're staving off the inevitable at our own peril.
Some of these indicators are single landmark events, like the first time you need to rent a car and can't because you don't have a credit card, or your first boss who can't double as your drug dealer. There are plenty of 'em, and they're different for different people, but they always give you the feeling of being in a very large meeting that's gone surprisingly well until the guy at the podium suddenly switches over to a foreign language you've never heard before, but that everyone else in the room seems to understand perfectly.
Others occur repeatedly, often at regular intervals. They're like little State of the Union Addresses, only they're on the subject of how your life is progressing, and they're not criminally boring because they're all about you, or rather, about existence in general and your relationship to it. Stuff like Christmas parties. Or friends from high school having kids. Or the annual performance review at the job you just took to cover the rent for a few months, five years ago.
Or tax time.
Winter in general, and the end of the year in particular, may be the poets' favored time for personal stock-taking, but it's tax time – perhaps not-so-coincidentally dropped into spring, that season of reawakening – that usually (and occasionally jarringly) provides a barometer reading for what's widely thought of as A Life.
For years, it didn't change. Nobody really talked about taxes, until the one friend most on the ball mentioned in late February that the refund check had come in; this news basically served to remind the rest of us that we should maybe start thinking about contacting the various employers who'd engaged our services during the past year, and let them know the address they had on file for us was two apartments behind. Eventually, we would either send in our 1040-EZs just before the April deadline or, positive we hadn't earned enough money to actually owe anything, blow it off.
Then, it did change. I'd be standing around with a group of friends at a bar in March, and when somebody mentioned that the refund check had come in, it would touch off a round of conversation about how somebody had had to pay taxes that year, instead of getting a refund. There'd be knowing, sympathetic nods, followed by one-upsmanship over amounts owed because of property or savings or whatever.
Every year, the tax-time conversation got weirder. Friends stopped talking about whether or not they were going to file and started talking about deductions and homesteaders' exemptions and qualifications cutoffs. I was the guy in the meeting who didn't speak the new language. And finally, I was the only person in the group who hadn't filed by early March, who found the concept of filing over the phone novel, who didn't know where his W-2 was. They looked at me like I was crazy:
"You haven't filed yet?"
"Hey," I said, a little defensively, "aren't you the guy who didn't file at all for, like, eight years?"
"That was five years ago. You know I've got a degree in accounting, right?"
"No. I didn't. I thought you tended bar and played X-Box about seven hours a day."
Apparently, tending bar and playing X-Box seven hours a day, and doing one's taxes in a timely and savvy manner, aren't mutually exclusive concepts. Thanks to highly evolved toys, the creative-class workplace, canny marketing and periodicals like Maxim, my generation – particularly the men – has become amazingly adept at reconciling youthful lifestyle accoutrements with the responsibilities of adulthood.
I hadn't noticed; I was too busy indulging the former to acknowledge the latter, except to get briefly and vaguely worried every year around tax time.
So eventually, after a decade of dealing with tax time the same way I had as a 17-year-old working at Burger King, I was audited. I can't recommend it. An audit lies somewhere between a tequila-bottle hangover and a Chlamydia test on the Harrell Pleasurable Occurrences Scale, and is unsurpassed at making a grown man re-experience the sensation he had when he was four and at the mall, and looked up to discover the skirt he was clinging to didn't have his mother in it.
In the wake of that unfortunate business, I decided that tax time would no longer be a stressful annual reminder of my inability to grow up, but rather a welcome annual celebration of my success as an adult. Unfortunately, that was last year, my first year filing as a homeowner, and the new, more complicated forms once again sent me back to pre-adolescence; I ended up paying a prominent website to kick me out of its system four times as I took too long searching my "file" (read: a red plastic Coke crate under my desk) for the information it wanted. Then it told me I owed more than I had in my checking account. Plus, I had to pay extra to speed my return through because, well, it was getting pretty close to the wire.
This year, however, I will grow up. I will not allow tax time to become a mirror in which my reflection appears to be wearing Peter Pan's clothes, holding a comic book in one hand and a half-empty Mickey's Big Mouth in the other. I will engage the services of an accountant, as adults do, and the accountant will render tax time's daunting intricacies and inescapable sense of maturity, for me, familiar and wholly mundane.
Provided I can find one at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, that is.
SCOTT.HARRELL@WEEKLYPLANET.COM
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2005.