[This was written in the 80’s, hence “carriage returns” meaning typewriter carriage returns, i.e. the start of a new line of text.]   

Readers are begged to excuse any inaccuracies in today’s text since I am typing with my left index finger only, my right one now solely engaged in monitoring the pulse of the community.

     It is not such a bad system.  Signals travel up my right arm and down my left, occasionally looping through the brain for a dash of thought or bourbon, the latter sipped through a straw during carriage returns.  I would not normally suffer the inconvenience of a straw but since I have just filled out a blue pamphlet entitled “Philadelphia Business Privilege Tax,” I am trying, in the interests of my short-term equanimity, to induce in myself a sublime and temporary coma.

     I know that most of you don’t have much truck with the city business taxes.  I don’t want to bore you with it, and I want to get back to the pulse of the community, but you may be interested in knowing that the business privilege tax (BPT) arrives every year as part of a two-volume set, the other being the “Philadelphia Net Profits Tax” or NPT.  This is less poetically titled but sports a subtler color: a pale hospital green calculated to relax the businessman so that he may bring a calm demeanor to his economic ruin.

     Both slim volumes open with the sentence: “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state.”  No, pardon me, here it is here: “The format of this booklet has been changed in an attempt to make it as “user friendly” as possible.”  Why, when I read a sentence like that, in bureaucratic passive voice with (already!) two qualifying curlicues and a buzzword unresisted, why do I fear they are not up to the task they set for themselves?

     Why, too, if they are so keen on friendliness, did they not think to revise some of the numbers in addition to the format, numbers like 6.5% BPT abd 4.96% NPT, numbers that when combined, scheduled back and forth, credited against each other and rescheduled in a process that could withstand more streamlining than they thought necessary, come to – for me – about 8%?

     This is friendly?

     But I want to get back to the pulse of the community as demonstrated by Farley here who sits to my right and whgo has just come in from the rain where she has been rebagging garbage that was strewn about by our local slash-and-strew man.  Her hair is wet now, and she has little traces of someone else’s cat food and stuff on her hands and if I read her right, she will rise and walk slowly to the sink with her hands in the air like a surgeon.  She will wash slowly and then she will turn calmly to me and say, “I understand Haddonfield is nice.”

     This pretty much sums up the pulse of the community from where I sit, but I don’t want to encourage this view or promote it as my own.  Things are going to get better!  That’s what I want to say.

     Someone at a party the other day said, well, maybe some of these people who are leaving the city are just as well gone.  And I thought, well, maybe he’s right.  Maybe this is a kind of strengthening purge.  If you’re the type of scaredy-cat who ups and moves every time a prankster puts a cinder block through your back window and then joins you in the bedroom, well, who needs you anyway?

     What I want to say to this community is this:  Have heart.  You are a little depressed now maybe because you had to replace your back windows and wash strange cat food off your hands and then you had to write a check to the city for your taxes and then another one to your child’s private school.  Checks with commas in them.  You tend to see these things negatively.  You tend to blame them on the city.  You forget that things could be even worse.

     You forget the positive things and I would be happy to list them for you someday when I’ve had fewer carriage returns.

     What I want to say is we’re going to weather this dip in the curve and in a couple of years we’ll look back on it as a time when we lost our perspective and mixed our metaphors, when we tested the mettle of our former fettle.  People who left will look at us and envy the civilized sparkle of city living.  And remind me to tell that to the people in the suburbs again in a month or so.  Tax time is not a good time to try to reach them since they tend then, a lot of them to be on vacation in Europe.