“It makes me hotter than a squirrel in a wool sock.”

“What’s that?” I asked my neighbor Crandall.

“They want to raise my taxes.”

“They? Who are they?” I said.

“They are the ones who want to raise my taxes. They are them that are not us. You must have been absent every day of school that the rest of us learned something.”

My neighbor’s neighbor Still Bill burped and scratched himself in agreement. Still Bill is not the world’s laziest man, but it is his goal. He calls on his inner strength, but it never answers.

My neighbor Crandall stopped talking long enough to feed his face. Crandall has two guidelines when it comes to food. If it doesn’t taste good, he doesn’t eat it. If it tastes good, he eats too much of it. He likes to keep eating until he can no longer see the color blue.

“When we are having fun, we don’t yell, ‘They!’ We cry, ‘We!’ ‘We’ is good. ‘They’ is bad. And they want higher taxes. They’ve taxed me into twitterpation. I can’t even afford to pay attention. They’re always raising my taxes. I’m surprised I have enough money left to rattle around in that Sucrets’ can where I keep my life savings. The guy who does my taxes is Lou Pole. I need David Copperfield to do them. The only fair tax is the one someone else pays that I don’t have to pay. There are only two kinds of people who complain about excessive taxes — men and women. I get my tax bill and I make a sound like one of the Bee Gees choking on a low note.”

“A person doesn’t realize how much he has to be thankful for until he has to pay taxes on it. You should be pleased to pay taxes to be able to live in such a wonderful place,” I advised.

“Maybe so, but I could be just as happy for whole lot less money. I pay income tax, fishing license tax, gasoline tax, sales tax, property tax, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, school tax, telephone tax, vehicle registration tax, electrical tax, hidden tax, and a tax on taxes. My take-home pay never gets there. I pay taxes in my dreams. I’m not interested in paying more taxes. There was a time when I saved up for my old age; now I save up to pay my taxes. I count my blessings and write out a check in that amount to the government. Soon I’ll be sending the government all of my money and they will send me a refund whenever possible. It bothers me that they keep raising the taxes on cigarettes.”

“Why should that bother you? You don’t smoke cigarettes,” I wondered aloud.

“I know, but I’m worried that we might run out of smokers. Then who will pay all those taxes? Without smokers, the rest of us will pay more taxes. I can’t afford that. If a trip around the world cost only a dollar, I wouldn’t have enough money to get to Des Moines. I try to save money, but it doesn’t want to be saved. I threaten not to pay my electric bill, but I’d hate to sit around watching TV by candlelight. My retirement plan involves the purchase of lottery tickets. No politician understands me. People playing polo don’t care that it costs me $1,000 to push a shopping cart a mile at Grocery Gary’s Mediocremarket. High taxes are going to make it difficult for Americans to maintain their obesity rates.”

“Money can’t buy happiness,” I said.

“Maybe not, but high taxes allow me to rent unhappiness. My mother thinks she will be happy once she obtains a complete set of butter knives. I wish I had been born rich instead of so incredibly handsome. I should have listened to my high school guidance counselor and become a supermodel.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“I hate plucking out my eyebrows and then drawing them back on. I tried passing the hat at the Loafers’ Club Meeting in order to raise some money to remedy my financial condition.”

“How did that work for you?” I asked.

“I didn’t get my hat back. If the government needs money, it should open a casino. If it has to tax someone, it should tax only those who have money. It would take Joe McCarthy to get the red out of my financial statement. The bottom is the only place I’ve ever been.”

“It’s the economy, stupid,” I said.

“It’s the stupid economy. Who cares about the economy? I spend all my time worrying about the econ-o-me. You know who they should tax?”

“Who?” I ask.

“Them that are they and not us.”

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.