I Blame Freud, Ford, Mom, And The DOD

[Topic for this cycle: Location, Location, Location]

Home, Sweet Home

Lately I begin to wonder if I might be stuck forever in my present location, unable to sell and unwilling to walk away from a home of twenty years. Disabled by the economy to buy before I've sold, and without a feckin' clue where to go from here. It's a situation that recalls the first joke I learned as a child: "If we had some eggs, we could have bacon and eggs, if we had some bacon."

Once upon a time, families lived within a buggy ride, at most, from each other because they had an undiluted awareness of the necessity of those primary ties. They probably did not want to be in each other's back pockets at all times, but they knew intimately and intuitively the cycles of need and longing for family that we all experience, and they were practical. Then, as a nation, we graduated from an agrarian society where we worked for ourselves and each other to a mechanized industrial society--first the precursors and then the progeny of Ford's assembly lines--where nobody really had our backs anymore.

Ford's Mother's couch, lovingly recreated to
his specifications to satisfy his yearnings for home.

In the same era, Freud introduced the family as the source of all our neuroses, a concept that took a generation to reach blanket acceptance in the US, to color all our thoughts about who we are and what could be wrong with us. And world wars taught us that our lives and our closest ties were subject to disruption at the command of our national leaders, lawmakers and the ironically named Department of Defense.

Freud's London Couch from Wisdom Quarterly

 Since then, we have all watched helplessly as the pursuit of education and a living wage has pulled our loved ones and ourselves all over the continent. Right up to 2008, Americans thought nothing of relocating to gain a promotion and then doing it again in two years for the next promotion. As a military family, we moved, bought houses, sold houses from one end of America to the other, averaging a move every three years whether we needed to or not and we thought nothing of it. It was adventure. We simply took to the roads and the airways to maintain our ties to family, to the extent we still had them. Whether at the whim of corporations or the military or whatever, we all moved and moved and moved again, a nation in constant motion.

I marvel to realize that I actually believed that I got along with my mother best when I lived in Alaska and she still lived at home in NC. I thought I needed to get away. From a perfectly nice lady, if a tad intrusive...very informed, fun, interesting, adored my kids...a good mother by almost any measure. Thanks to Freud and an out-of-town educational immersion in all things Freudian, I learned to focus negatively and almost exclusively on my mother's intrusiveness. When I met my husband, not the least of his many charms was that he had joined the Air Force and was seeing the world. I was so moved!--until retirement twenty years ago, when we bought what we thought of as a temporary house, where we've lived ever since. From here, we've watched our children move and move and move.

Shockingly, almost instantly, in 2008 the revealed whimsies of the big investment banks brought all our moving to a screeching halt. As if someone on the playground had yelled, "FREEZE!" We found ourselves frozen far from each other, unable to sell and buy, unable to take the time off for long driving trips (or, in my case, unable to tolerate them physically), and increasingly unable to afford airline prices. I speak for myself, here, and for at least two generations of middle class Americans. Many of us found ourselves longing for and needing family just when we could no longer get to them readily.

Now all those Twentieth Century ideals and philosophies of loyalty to the corporation, mobility in the service of self-interest, Freudian splitting of generations, and the never-ending demands of war begin to mean exactly squat-all to us. Those cultural icons are presently starting to smell, as all dying things do. And we are caught in the throes of massive cultural change and international recession, immobilized and puzzled at our loneliness. We are physically grounded, but psychologically and emotionally displaced.

Designs By Mom

For my part, I couldn't be more confused. I want to sell my house, but, when people ask me where I'm going, I feel stupid saying I don't know. Should I move to Nashville to be closer to my son? Will my daughter's Navy family be mandated to stay in San Diego or will they head toward Norfolk? Should I shoot for some spot somewhere in between Some Place and Some Place Else? Should I stay put in this All Sphincters Red State just because I know where my doctors are and how to get to Steinmart? Kind friends say try Tucson, try Wilmington, and I love them for it. Other kind friends wonder why we'd ever leave this spot. And we wonder if, in terms of our abilities to cope with stress, we might have just shot past our window for moving at all.

Listen to this. Tourism has been picking up locally this week and we had two--count 'em!--scheduled house showings all of a sudden--one for yesterday and one for May 1st. The storms that now regularly try to stamp out the South were threatening again yesterday, and ya'll know how I am about tornadoes. I'd been watching the news about my old sweet home in Alabama and grieving for beautiful Birmingham. I could make that Wundermap on weatherunderground.com prophesy in lurid color. So we called the realtor's scheduler and cancelled that first showing, which was set for just about the time all hell was due to break loose. We asked optimistically that the viewing be re-scheduled for the next day.

Thompson living room, Birmingham, AL, strangely untouched by the
tornado, despite extensive damage to nearby rooms in the house.

Somehow--by black magic, perhaps--the storm surrounded us, loomed at us, huffed and puffed but never actually threatened to blow our house down. Our little town might have had a teflon canopy. When we called the viewers to follow up on the re-schedule, we were told that they had settled on another house in our neighborhood! While I was preparing for tornadoes! What kind of people look at houses in the middle of killer storms? This house is used to careful people, thoughtful and prudent people, not impulsive vacationers who pay no attention to the news. Kismet? Karma? Shit happens? An unconscious resistance to change? Undeserved luck?

I blame Freud.

In a State!

If it's true that as Maine goes, so goes the nation, I think it's time to toss some underwear into the old handbasket.

It used to be that the South had dibs on outlandish politicians. Now that crazy has gone viral, whoever is in charge of The Crazy Rankings is going to have a tough job. Heck, it's hard to even know what IS crazy any longer. One doesn't even know where to start...!

How about Maine and Gov. Paul LePage?

You may recognize Gov. LePage's name because he removed a labor mural from a Maine Department of Labor office because it depicted... um... labor. (He was overruled--it's going back up.) Or maybe you heard when he wanted to relax some of the state environmental laws and chose to have the chemical industry write them for him.

The History of Map Making

[a poetess' take on "Location, Location, Location..."]

How simple navigation was
back in the day when all the known world
could be contained on a disc of clay
impressed with images to show
our house and the neighbor's field,
the river before it flooded,
and the smoking mountain on the horizon;
guardian dragons forbade us to roam beyond.
We always knew just where we stood.

Then measurements were made and
all around the land was round;
Eratosthenes observed the shadow of the sun
and was the first to tell how many football fields
it took to gird the world. Sailors journeyed
far across the sea, failed to be consumed
by monsters, and so, the horizon
disappeared.

Today the moon and stars are charted --
and beyond, destinations pinpointed,
never to be reached. Yet sometimes
I don't know just where I'm headed,
even though I've been around;
left my backyard, even been to hell and back.
But there, off in the distance, I see dragons
and they just won't let me pass.

Image: OnlineWebLibrary

The Wind Began To Switch...

GLINDA

She brings you good news. Or haven't you heard?
When she fell out of Kansas, a miracle occurred.

DOROTHY 
It really was no miracle. What happened was
just this: The wind began to switch -- the house to pitch
And suddenly the hinges started to unhitch.
Just then, the witch -- to satisfy an itch --
Went flying on her broomstick thumbing for a hitch.

When Dorothy and Toto landed in Munchkinland squarely on top of the Wicked Witch of the East, the Munchkins naturally were curious as to how she happened to navigate her house to make such a strategic landing. Good Witch Glinda calls it a miracle but Dorothy explains that it was just happenstance due to a switching wind and the Wicked Witch's unfortunate decision to take her broomstick out for a spin at that precise moment. Last Saturday, the wind in Raleigh definitely switched but I was lucky and my house didn't pitch and no witches were harmed.

One Special, Hold the Henna, Please

Location, location, location, and this little building in the middle of a big cement island at a busy intersection makes me smile whenever I see it.

YASS! This is, indeed, a strange spot and it sends the imagination into overdrive. I can't help but think of advertising slogans which may apply here.

"Does she or doesn't she? " Maybe it isn't only her hairdresser who knows for sure. That's a pretty darned big window.

Brylcream says "a little dab'll do you" and that good, because there's no room for big dabs.

When women entreat Calgon to "take me away," is this be the location they have in mind?

Suppose making one feel special inside that small building takes some time... is there an inside facility for... um... squeezing the Charmin, should the need arise?

Our ever-sassy hen, Ima June Pullet, wants to know if they have a drive-thru window.

Streetwise with Streetview

 [Current topic:  Location, Location, Location!]

Artists have always enjoyed traveling the world to find new places for inspiration.  I'm not one of them, unfortunately. 

I'm a white-knuckle flyer and I love my own bed (and bathroom) too much.  Our six cats and one decrepit Toy Fox Terrier need me. 

And did I mention the 60 hummingbirds who come to our feeders every day?

So it was a real joy to discover the website Virtual Paintout, created by artist Bill Guffey.  Each month he chooses some spot in the world where artists can meet and paint or draw and then submit their artwork to the site. 

But it's all done virtually by way of Google's "Streetview"---which enables you to virtually drive or walk around cities almost anywhere in the world.

Here are a few of my past entries.  These are all scenes and people as they appeared on Streetview.

Click on images for enlarged view.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go let my little dog out.

Mexico City

Mexico City

Corsica

Sausalito, California

New York City

New York City  (the "Out-of-Towners")

Belfast, Northern Ireland

What did Dorothy know, anyhow?

[More on the topic of: Location, Location, Location]

When I go back to my hometown of York, PA, I can literally take a trip down Memory Lane. But the street seems horribly misnamed today, because hardly a thing along said street is the same as it was when I lived in that town.

There really is no place like home, since "home" doesn't seem to exist for me anymore. The notion of going "home" for the holidays leaves me feeling off-kilter, since my father allowed my childhood home to literally fall down around him. There are new owners now who've reportedly built something from the ruins, but other than peeking from the safe distance of Google Street View, I really can't bring myself to go by the old place.

For a number of years my own efforts to put down roots were tentative at best -- during one five year time period I moved a total of seven times! My mother and step-father, meanwhile, retired to Florida and occupied a series of homes in the 20 years they spent there. None of those places were "home" to me.

Now my mother, widowed, is living in my "new" hometown, and we have shared a house for almost 7 years. Most of the time it feels like I'm living in her home, but I'm slowly beginning to accept that I'm growing new roots here, rather than looking for the first opportunity to move somewhere more cosmopolitan. And I am feeling less of an obligation and more of a desire to stay put and make this place truly my home. There's no denying that I also want my daughter to never feel as I so often did: that there was no "home" to go home to.

Nevertheless, I've adopted the turtle - or maybe tortoise - as my personal totem. I like that turtles are "at home" wherever they go. The unhurried pace at which they travel through life suits me just fine. And a tough outer shell is a quality I'd like to cultivate for myself, too -- along with the willingness to stick my neck out more often.

I can't stand to wear turtleneck sweaters, though. Do you think that will pose a problem?

Unprepared

[The topic for this cycle: Location, Location, Location. No irony intended]

(The Weather Channel, April 16, 2011, North Carolina map)

A helluva storm blew through the South on April 15th and 16th, stomping my old stomping grounds--and Ms. Henny Red's hometown--on the 16th with three tornadoes at once in one locale. Henny's internet and land line phone are still down, but her cell phone is working. She asked me to tell you all that she and her loved ones are safe and unscathed. She's learned how lucky they were. Prediction: some severe weather stories coming up right here from our Henny.

(AP Photo/The Fayetteville Observer, James Robinson)

Raleigh wasn't alone. This storm stalked across the South from Tulsa to Gloucester Court House. Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia all saw devastation, with as many as 44 dead at this early count, with 80 wounded. Arkansas reported hail measured at four inches in diameter on April 15th.

Convection profile over Raleigh (The Weather Channel, April 16th, 2011)

Henny went to her sister's house, where they hunkered down in a hallway. And, yes, she says the report that a tornado sounds like a freight train is true. And the hop-scotching destruction, true. Her sister's house had some relatively minor roof damage, but a block or so away, houses were crushed whole. She says that all her personal experience with tornado warnings over the years had led her to expect the usual: a sighting somewhere reported in the news, some pictures in the newspaper, maybe a power outage. Not whole houses disappearing. Not colleges closing for the semester. Not lives permanently re-directed in a single, random moment. She'd heard of such things, but she wasn't prepared for it.



According to KTLA in Arkansas, in a two day period, there were 241 tornadoes reported, with 50 confirmed.

I had a heads up on this storm. My son phoned Friday from Nashville to say a neighbor's giant trampoline had been blown into the side of his house--seemed major at the time and possibly avoidable. I made a bee-line to my next door neighbor's to beg him to turn his kids' trampoline sail-side down.


By Saturday noon, the Weather Service was startling us silly with loud alarms and warnings to take shelter under a table, in the lowest, centermost area of our house.

Here's irony. The For Sale sign that lives eternally in my front yard has a flyer box with a brochure touting the openness of my house, the light, the windows, windows, windows. Turns out, the safest place in my house is a tiny bathroom that barely provides sitting room for one person. No tables. If you push in a few big cushions from the screened porch for padding, it's standing room only.

While growing up in Greensboro, NC, and attending colleges in the Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), I suffered a recurrent nightmare: tornadoes ringed the horizon and my job was to protect the women, shoo them to prepared shelter, save them from the storms. Not a man in sight to help out. The primary emotional component was helplessness. That dream began with puberty and stalked my nights right into my thirties. Which might explain why I chose a women's college after high school. In graduate school, my shrink-in-training friends had a Freudian field day with my head, and  ya'll can testify that I'm still not quite right to this day.

So there I was squashed in the teensy bathroom on Saturday afternoon. New batteries in the flashlight, check. Candles and lighter, check. Cell phone all charged up, check. Weather radio blaring ear-splitting alarms in a space the size of a utility closet, check. Incipient panic attack, check. Tornadoes spotted mere miles away. No other women around for me to save, but I was on the job. I'd done everything the early warning system and my own worst nightmares had prepared me to do.

Dearest Husband--the retired fighter pilot whose adrenalin glands were marshaled into submission forty-five years ago --he, on the other hand, was tired from moving all the hanging baskets and bird feeders onto the screened porch. He was grumpy from the rapidly dropping barometric pressure. He wanted me to turn the damned radio off so he could take a nap.

All we wound up with at our house was strong gusts of wind. It all shot through at high speed and was gone. The weather today is so beautiful, so sparkling, so sweetly perfect, it'll take your breath.

How do you prepare for something like that?

Walk Like an Egyptian

[New blog topic for the remainder of April:  Location, Location, Location!]

ATC created by Ima June Pullet (aka TexasTrailerParkTrash)

The Uterus Song

(With thanks to Maineiac @ http://miraclemama.wordpress.com/)

Canine calculations...

(Some more thoughts re: the Tax Man Cometh!)

I spent all day Saturday tending to a household member who was sick as a dog. And sick as only a dog can be sick. Scooter Pie, the geriatric dachshund (the vet's terminology, not mine!) who owns me, had me quite worried. The poor thing was obviously in discomfort, and unable to keep any food or water down. Even more worrisome, she didn't sleep at all during the day. Those of you who share quarters with dogs -- particularly aged ones -- will understand that this is quite out of the ordinary.

As I was on the verge of putting my shoes on to take Scooter to the emergency vet, my daughter phoned. While she and I talked, Scooter finally fell asleep. Simultaneously relieved and alarmed, I poked the dog every hour or so to make sure she hadn't lapsed into a coma. Five hours later, she woke up and was her usual goofy self, rolling around on the floor and barking to be played with. The mysterious malady passed as quickly as it came, and Scooter has been fine ever since.

Worrisome though the dog's illness was, it pains me to admit having some uncharitable thoughts as she suffered. She'd been to the vet's for a dental cleaning two days -- and $420 -- earlier. I doubted that I'd be entitled to even a partial refund if Scooter hadn't pulled through. And I'd just spent another $200 in December for "standard" care. Barring unusual circumstances (like last summer's wisdom tooth extraction), I don't even spend that much per annum on my human kid's care!

So, I thought, why can't I claim Scooter Pie as a dependent on my income tax refund?

As it turns out, the IRS does have a provision for claiming veterinary and other expenses. Of course there's a catch: Scooter Pie would have to be a service dog. Arguably she does perform a multitude of services for the household. She is an auxiliary doorbell, a backup alarm clock, a combination vacuum-cleaner and dust mop. She guards the birdfeeder against invading squirrels. She is an excellent therapist, one who never interrupts while I'm talking or asks me why do I think I feel a particular way. And she helps to reduce our energy usage -- I don't need an electric heating pad when Scooter Pie is nestled next to my aching knee.

All that aside, I know I really can't put a price on the real value of having a dog: unconditional love. But then again, if Leona Helmsley's hairy heir, Trouble, doesn't have to pay income taxes, why should I?

Image Credit:

http://www.superstock.com/stock-photos-images

My Unmentionable Body Part Path To Prosperity

[Topic for this cycle: The Tax Man Cometh]

Click To Incorporate

It's rare in blogging that we have the opportunity to pull three big news stories together into one semi-coherent whole. Since I am accomplished at semi-coherency, I'd be remiss if I failed to bring you this post--even if it means I have to talk about unmentionable body parts, horse piss, big government and tax deductions all at the same time.

Throw in a little squeamish self-disclosure and blogging doesn't get any better. Let's use a chronological approach.

From The Rachel Maddow Show last night, this clip featuring Florida State Representative Scott Randolph. In response to the Florida legislature's unbelievable eighteen anti-choice bills presented in 2011 so far, Randolph confronted the state house with its small government for corporation/big government for the common woman hypocrisy.

The Florida ACLU's Incorporate My Uterus site (link to image above) offers an excellent incentive to incorporate:

Businesses get special treatment these days. If lawmakers and other politicians see your uterus and your body as a business, maybe they’ll work to get government out of the uterus regulation business as they do for every other company

Fast forward to today's WSJ and this article on Doug Stives, a New Jersey CPA, college professor, and self-proclaimed "Most Tax-Efficient Man In America," who offers lessons in incorporating your own consulting firm to avoid taxes and maximize income.

From the companion WSJ article,

Doug Stives, a CPA from Red Bank, N.J., went skiing in Utah.

"I always dreamed of coming here for peak conditions," he said in mid-March between runs at Snowbasin Resort.

The trip is among the many perks that have accrued from his decision, in 2006, to become, in effect, The Most Tax-Efficient Man in America. The experiment has led to a new career, frequent travel and obsessive documentation of expenses, such as a $6 hot dog he recently bought in the Philadelphia airport.

You're with me so far, right? Tax breaks for body parts; at last, an equal-opportunity shot at the good life for middle and lower-class women and their families. All you've got to do is incorporate your womb and keep careful records. Don't forget the hot dogs. Check.

And onward to this late-breaking change of tone on the breast cancer-hormone replacement therapy link from the NYTimes :

In a finding that challenges the conventional wisdom about the risks of some hormones used in menopause, a major government study has found that years after using estrogen-only therapy, certain women had a markedly reduced risk of breast cancer and heart attack.

The research, part of the landmark Women’s Health Initiative study, is likely to surprise women and their doctors, who for years have heard frightening news about the risks of hormone therapy. But most of those fears are related to the use of a combination of two hormones, estrogen and progestin, which are prescribed to relieve hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause, and have been shown to increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer.

The new findings, reported Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, come from 10,739 women in the Women’s Health Initiative study who had previously had a hysterectomy, the surgical removal of the uterus. Nationwide, about one-third of women in their 50s have had a hysterectomy. (my emphasis)

 The estrogen-only group was not given progestin, which is prescribed only to protect the uterus from the harmful effects of estrogen. Although all the women in the estrogen study stopped using the treatment in 2004, the investigators have continued to monitor their health, as is typical in large clinical trials.

The most surprising new finding relates to breast cancer. The women with hysterectomies who used estrogen alone had a 23 percent lower risk for breast cancer compared with those who had taken a placebo. This is in stark contrast to the higher risk of breast cancer shown in the estrogen-progestin part of the trial.

“The decreased risk of breast cancer in this group is something we totally didn’t expect when we started the W.H.I. hormone therapy trials,” said Andrea Z. LaCroix, the study’s lead author and a professor of epidemiology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

There's some news in there about non-effects for heart disease, colon cancer, etc., so please be a good info consumer and read the whole thing. It's probably the first good news I've heard in weeks, but what's that got to do with tax deductions? Well, first of all, one third of us over fifty can't participate in the uterus incorporation tax deduction! Somebody needs to inform the ACLU, because that's what they're for.  Don't link away; I did that part for us already.

Squeamish self-disclosure: I'm one of those third. When my kids were four and seven, a very nice Air Force gynecologist at Langley AFB relieved me of my unmentionable body part. He was thinking cancer, so we both felt we'd come out to the good when all he wound up having to do was finesse my decision about a third child. Due to the nature of the problem, I woke up to raging menopause that couldn't safely be treated with HRT for a year. Mother Nature did not mean for woman to deal with an icing-melting hot flash while she was serving up Room Mommy cupcakes to  a classroom of kindergarten kiddies. Although, come to think of it, teachers probably have to do it all the time.

Anyway, when the doc finally gave me my script for Premarin (estrogen derived from pregnant mare's piss)--with the explicit instructions: You will need to take these the rest of your life--I could have kissed his feet. And, when they later told us all that those years of HRT were going to doom women like me, I felt cheated. I feel better now, but I'm going to miss out on those incorporatemyuterus.com deductions. Life is so unfair.

So I've decided to incorporate my Uteral Deficit. After all, there's lots more research ahead on this subject of estrogen-only HRT and no data yet on what happens when a gal who's just following instructions winds up taking it for twenty-five years. I figure I can contribute to science and take deductions on air-fare back and forth to various medical research facilities in exotic places like Seattle, New York City, Houston, and San Diego.

That way I improve my financial bottom line and make a contribution to science. If I need medical care, I can take advantage of the top facilities in the nation and bill it to Medicare. By a complicated mathematical formula familiar to Republicans, I've also figured out how my un-uterus incorporation tax deduction plan will reduce the national deficit and piss off Paul Ryan all at the same time. And blogging just doesn't get any better than that.

 "A nervous breakdown on paper.” - Rep. Emmanual Cleaver

Profit Is Their Most Important Product*

[Our topic for this cycle: The Tax Man Cometh]

We filed our taxes early this year and now I regret it. If I'd let GE go first, I might have done the whole thing differently.

All my life I've been terrified to file late or make a mistake. Back in the nineties, I started a business and had to consult an accountant who began to name all the deductions I could take: my car, of course; my office rent and furnishings and supplies; the part of my house that served as a second office; my employees. Wait, I didn't have any employees. So he told me to hire my kids. Who were thirteen and sixteen. In a solo psychotherapy practice. Righty-o, that was gonna work.

I told him I just wanted to pay my estimated quarterly taxes without any creative deduction razzle-dazzle and I wanted to pay them on time. He looked at me like I'd just fallen off the turnip truck. Apparently, nobody in town in small office practices--not the doctors, nor dentists, nor lawyers, nor any of those people I used to look up to when I was twenty--was IGNUNT enough to just pay the US Government what it owed them, much less on time. Apparently, paying taxes was for patsies.

Later, with the practice in full swing, I uncovered an unforeseen consequence of all those creative deductions and extensions: a guy could get stuck sleeping with a woman who hated his guts.**

I did a lot of marriage work, which means that, since hardly anyone ever showed up in a marital therapist's office until their lawyer made them or their wife threatened to take the Audi, I did a lot of divorce work. Usually, it was the wife who came alone. Wives go to therapists; husbands go to lawyers. It would be different in a perfect world, but then I wouldn't have been able to send my kids to private colleges.

A surprising number of those wives were married to doctors, lawyers, people who did things with teeth and gums, etc. And an equally surprising number of those wives couldn't dump the jerks they were married to because the jerks hadn't paid their taxes in ten, fifteen, twenty years. Jerks would refuse to agree to a divorce because the so-called Family Court would require them to have all their financial affairs in order so things could be divvied up fair and square.

Which meant that the wife's lawyer would have to threaten the jerk's lawyer, and so on, in ever escalating spirals, until I'd start to get worried about having to testify in a castration case. This stuff could go on for years. A couple of cases like that at the same time would put me off my feed and make it hard to sleep at night. Makes you wonder how well the jerks slept, don't it?

Hat Tip and all glory to my friend Meg of Member's Lounge, whose creation this is:

"GE, where 2010 saw them netting 5 billion dollars in profit. And paying ZERO federal income tax. April Fool’s everyone! WTF, how do they get away with that?"

*GE slogan: "Progress is our most important product." This was replaced in '03 with, "Imagination At Work. Especially In The Accounting Division."

**I never encountered a female tax jerk, but, in all fairness, maybe there will be some now that you know the IRS will let you go years without sending you to jail. This is a good time to own a business in America.