Bay Weekly’s Antidotes to Taxes

(On fending off death, we’re still working)

I don’t like to say the word. But it’s on everybody’s lips, the second and perennial half of the pair of certain fates that await each of us. The reckoning is worse this year because in preparing to give Caesar his due on April 15, we’ll have to confront our personal share of world economic collapse.

We probably won’t get much relief from calculating how much losing our jobs saves us on taxes.

Also limited is the satisfaction I get by imagining Maryland’s taxman, comptroller Peter Franchot, dressed in the garb of his partner in inevitability, the Grim Reaper. Still, I’m suggesting that he appear in that guise on his website www.marylandtaxes.com — ideally, at work, too — for the month from the Ides of March to Tax Day. Lately, he’s been flashing photos of himself with the Cat in the Hat to soften his image. But skip paying your taxes, and don’t expect any pussycat to come collect.

You will get a bit of relief, however, in the pages of Bay Weekly.

For one thing, we’ve pledged to write more stories on the creative ways people find to sustain themselves — and about how they let the problems of daily life go for challenges of other sorts. You’ll find that kind of good news — and meet people who give you models of hope and confidence — in a couple of stories in this week’s paper.

Plus, of course, Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology, which plucks from your stars weekly ways to make the best of yourself and any mess in which you find yourself. As Richard Nixon used to say in the days before Watergate, Now more than ever.

We’re demanding good humor from all our writers. We don’t want to hear any more bad news, we’re telling them, unless you make us laugh about it. That’s the model of News of the Weird. Read it and weep from laughing every week in Bay Weekly.

Now that Bay Weekly’s occasional humorist Allen Delaney is out of work, he’s promising lots of stories — starting with one for April Fool’s Day.

Another helping of relief you’ll find right now in our pages: Free things to do each day of the week.

I’ve always been impressed by the volume of free ways to learn and have fun for you and the family corralled in 8 Days a Week, Bay Weekly’s regional calendar of events. This week, just for fun, we counted them. The total: 49 or 50, depending on who was doing the count. (Many more activities cost under $5.)

The news was so good that I wanted to make sure you saw it. So I’ve asked calendar editor Diana Beechener and calendar designer Betsy Kehne to make those events stand out. Starting this week ~ free ~ is highlighted in bold face so you’ll see it — and feel its value — at a glance.

Enjoy free good times, and maybe you’ll save enough money to pay your taxes. Certainly, you’ll have a bit more money in your pocket, and we hope you’ll spend it with Bay Weekly advertisers!