By Maurice the Goat, Financial Correspondent

The dumpster behind the H&R Block on Meridian Street smells like desperation and toner cartridges. I’ve lived here since February. I have no complaints. The humans shuffling in and out of that glass door — they have plenty.

I ate my W-2 in February. It tasted like lies. Paper lies, sure, but lies. No regrets. The government already knows what you made. The W-2 is theater. You fill out forms so the government can check your forms against their forms, and everybody pretends this is a reasonable way for adults to spend April.

It isn’t.

I’ve been eating garbage for eleven years. In that time I’ve consumed seventeen tax preparation pamphlets, four copies of TurboTax for Dummies, what I believe was a Schedule K-1 belonging to a man named Gerald, and one complete issue of Forbes magazine. It tasted exactly as smug as you’d expect.

None of it told me where my money goes.

I pay taxes. This surprises people. They see a goat in a dumpster and assume — no income, no liability. Wrong. I run a consulting business. I consult on what’s edible. The answer is almost everything, but people pay good money to have a professional confirm it. Last year I grossed $34,000. The government took $6,200.

I want to know what they did with my $6,200.

I asked a congressman once. He was at a fundraiser behind the steakhouse on 5th — good event, excellent garbage, shrimp tails everywhere. I asked him directly: what did you do with my $6,200?

He said he was working hard for the people of this district.

I headbutted him. Not hard. Professionally.

He said the tax code was complicated, but he was committed to reform.

I headbutted him again.

He got in a car and left. I ate his business card. It tasted like a promise — which is to say it tasted like nothing, dissolved fast, left no impression.

Here’s what nobody says out loud: it’s not the paying taxes that kills you. I don’t mind paying. I’m a goat. I understand the collective. The herd shares the good grass. You don’t eat everything yourself and leave the others to starve on a hillside. That’s goat fascism. We don’t practice it. Not in the herds I’ve run with.

What kills you is the suspicion — low, persistent, dumpster-smell suspicion — that the money isn’t going to the grass. That it’s going to the guy who owns the field, who charges you to stand in it, who then gets a tax break for providing agricultural access. Which is a real thing in the actual code. I ate the pamphlet. I know.

You pay your taxes and drive on a road with a pothole that’s been there since the Obama administration. You pay and read about a defense contractor who built something that doesn’t work for $40 billion and nobody went to jail, nobody got headbutted, nobody got held accountable in any way that registered as real.

You pay and Congress can’t pass a budget without threatening to blow up the whole operation like a goat that’s cornered and feeling dramatic.

I’ve been that goat. I understand the impulse. I don’t endorse it as governance.

A woman comes to the H&R Block every April 14th. Same folder. Color-coded. Receipts back to 2009. She sits with the preparer two hours and comes out looking like she survived something.

Last year she sat on the curb next to my dumpster and said, to nobody: “I owe $340.”

I looked at her. She looked at me.

“I know,” I said.

She didn’t seem surprised I could talk. Tax season hollows people out. Refills them with exhaustion and mild fury. There’s no room left for surprise.

She paid her $340. Drove off in a car with a bumper sticker: PROUD AMERICAN. I thought about that a while. Ate a Wendy’s bag. Thought about it some more.

You can be proud and furious at the same time. That’s the defining condition of paying attention in this country. You love the idea of the thing and watch what they do with it and feel both simultaneously — until April 15th passes and you go back to regular life and try not to think about it until next year.

That’s what they’re counting on. The not thinking about it.

My extension’s already filed. Did it myself, online, library computer — because the library is a public good and I use every public good I can get my hooves on since I’m apparently paying for them.

The extension buys me until October. By then the leaves will be down, there’ll be new garbage, and Gerald — wherever he is — will probably have filed an amended return for that missing K-1.

I hope Gerald’s okay. I hope his business is doing well. I hope somebody, somewhere, spends his $6,200 and mine on something that matters.

I’m not holding my breath.

I’m a goat. I have excellent breath control.

It’s never once helped me with the IRS.

Maurice the Goat covers finance, food waste, and the occasional congressional fundraiser for Scribe Safari. Leave something edible near the dumpster on Meridian Street. He will find you.