Tax Season Hats

It begins quietly, with envelopes that say IMPORTANT TAX DOCUMENTS and go straight into a drawer. For about six weeks nothing happens. Then there is a single evening — everybody has had this evening — that involves a laptop, a shoebox or a folder called something like 'stuff', and the slow discovery that the version of you who filed things last March was not a serious person. The season has its own complete vocabulary, and that is what makes it good material: the extension, the refund, the write-off, the accountant who knows things you do not. None of it needs explaining. Everyone who has ever filed can reconstruct an entire story from two words on a hat, which is the most efficient thing a piece of text can do. Nothing here takes a political position. There is no argument about rates, no slogan, nothing that would start something at a dinner table. The joke is procedural and universal: a deadline exists, it is known about for months, and it is nevertheless met at speed, in the dark, by a person who cannot find a receipt.