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for the underdog--all the things that made democracy great--those ideas won't die. They will spring up somewhere and that scares dictators and dictator wannabes to death. The ideas are stronger than tyrants and they will bring down these evil bastards and posers. Their deaths won't be pretty and they will be reviled down through history. Dictators never figure this out. They never realize they're going to end up hanging from lamp posts or crumpled up dead in bunkers. If I had kids, I would tell them never to go into the dictator business.
My Disastrous Financial Crisis
Okay, it's a big emergency.
I Fedexed my taxes last year and didn't feel good about the guy who waited on me. But then I thought, what could go wrong with Fedex?
I just got a notice from the IRS that they hadn't received my 2018 taxes. Damn!
So I tried the tracking number on the internet. No result.
Then I blasted off a bunch of e-mails to my ex-hippie accountant in Eugene (do you see a trend here?) and no answer.
So now I'm remaining calm and handling this in a mature way, right? Nope. I'm freaking out. The IRS also showed the balance in my account and it's much lower than it should be.
So this will be a day of phoning the IRS, going to Fedex, trying to get in touch with my accountant, and picking up my Passport from the visa agency, which is the one thing that has gone right in my dealings with governments.
I have no doubt there will be fines to pay and hoops to jump through and paperwork to deal with. This is not how retirement is supposed to be. I should be in a deck chair with a drink with a little umbrella in it, grossing out all the young people with my Speedo .
Then I think of Jintana's family, walking for a week into town to try to find a better life and realize my problems are not that big a deal. It will get worked out one way or another.
So now, off to start a new day in Chiangmai.
Okay, I may have overreacted. But the letter sounded ominous, like there were going to be fines or time in the slammer.
I handled it the way any paranoid idiot would handle it. I fired off more e- mails to my accountant, thinking she could send in the information faster. The next morning I went to the Fedex office and asked the nice lady to see if she could