Red Ink Superman

This morning I went ahead and mailed in my credit card payment. It is due tomorrow and I've obviously been putting it off for some time. But, you see, I was pissed off because the bill was so huge. Not exactly unmanageable, but infuriating nonetheless, especially considering why it is owed in the first place. Last month, I incurred an emergency expense when one of Serpas' finest nailed me on St. Charles Avenue at 43 in a 35. Plus the expired brake tag. (If you know anything about the Tercel, this should not surprise.) Plus a seatbelt violation. (For a rear passenger, BTW. Who even knew that was a thing?) Anyway so that ends up being $420 on the tab. I don't like having to pay this exorbitant amount but what are you gonna do? Everyone knows traffic violations in Orleans Parish are strictly non-negotiable.

When this month's bill arrived in the mail, I was understandably pissed off. The sum of the debt and the occasion for which it occurred both greatly offended my sense of moral rectitude. In addition I found myself in the grips of a great frustration with my own inability to do anything other than capitulate to the demands of my creditor. I may see the charge as unwelcome, wasteful, perhaps even unjust but, the bank, frankly, doesn't give a shit about any of that. I'm contracted to pay them. They just want their damn money.

So I did the mature thing. I hid the bill at the bottom of a pile of mail on my dresser and left it there for weeks while kvetching impotently about the awfulness of it all. The nearer I got to the due date, the angrier I became about the crisis implicit in my possibly deciding not to pay my bill, the more I wished for an alternate reality in which I could simply hold my breath long enough to force someone else into, if not paying my bill for me, at least agreeing to stop expending government resources on frivolous pursuits. But, alas, Chief Serpas shows no sign of deviating from his current program.

My bluff was called. Of course, when I finally came to grips with that fact this morning, the crisis was already out of hand due to my childish negligence. I woke early, wrote out a check, addressed the envelope and discovered only then that I was out of stamps. Already late for work and in full panic mode, I rushed to the post office. Once there, due to a recent decision to remove the stamp vending machine, I had to wait twenty minutes in line behind fifteen customers needing to have complicated service issues resolved at two out of six possible open windows. I wish someone would find a way to fund a full postal staff somehow. Maybe if we had let the Bush tax cuts expire....

Anyway I haven't actually done any of the work involved in putting together a Congressional campaign yet. That shouldn't surprise you, of course. As you can deduce from the above story, I'm a pretty lazy and childish little shit. Which is why, if I ever get to Washington, I'm clearly Speaker material.