Elder Advice - Thinking Inside the Box - Week 31
I spoke with Canada Revenue Agency this week and they are allowing me to write 2020 off as a total loss.
Friday’s provincial announcement that Ontario is back to Phase 2 and square 1 in the continuing chaos that is COVID makes it pretty clear there is no hope for even a modest brightening of the outlook for the last calendar quarter.
This year has been one damn thing after another. It's like being a health inspector at a mob-owned restaurant, who keeps finding fingers in the linguini.
I really need a distraction, and not just to take my mind off the fact that Lisa is reading a book ominously titled “The Widow.” Which I am hoping is not a “How to”.
Thinking nationally, I thought to focus on the fact that Canada’s deficit and debt has been declared "unsustainable" by the Parliamentary Budget Office.
But surely, there is something less depressing to ponder.
Thinking internationally, I toyed briefly with the fact that Trump received over $100,000 worth of taxpayer funded health care for a condition he barely acknowledges. Lucky for him that other US taxpayers came up with $ 99,250 of it.
But surely, that ridiculous waste of skin already takes up far too much of our focus and energy.
In the end, the winning distraction this week for me – as it is for anyone who went to any high school dance in the 70s - was the U.S. Supreme Court decision not to hear the copyright dispute over Led Zeppelin’s 1971 “Stairway to Heaven”. Leaving intact a lower court decision that “Stairway” does not infringe Spirit’s 1968 instrumental track, “Taurus.” Nice to know that, for Plant and Page, everything still turns to gold.
Elder Advice? I was too hard on distractions in an earlier Elder Advice. We all need them sometimes.
Which reminds me: Harrison and Sarah’s wedding. It’s a year away but, as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes always said: “You can never start too early”. I have to get them something borrowed and something blue.
Given the way 2020 is turning out, I was thinking a mortgage and varicose veins.