Board of Equalization, Baby Boomers and Keith Richards

Keif!!

Let me have a moan; we do the market at Fairfax once a month; some people do it full time and go every week and rely on it for a living but it doesn't seem to matter how much money you take you are supposed to charge sales tax on top of everything you sell.

The whole idea of sales tax here is ridiculous; in Britain, for example, where the equivalent is Value Added Tax (VAT), the dealer doesn't have to register till they turn over something like $50,000 per annum; maybe more.

Here, market traders at the flea markets have to register and actually eat the tax – ever tried to charge extra tax at Fairfax Flea Market? Of course not they would laugh at you; after spending five minutes bartering and getting knocked down to a price the customer wants to pay they are not going to give you 10% more – and the way to make money at flea markets is to be flexible with your prices.

When companies like Wallmart etc set up in the state the Board of Equalization let them off tax free for ten years – and yet the companies still collect the tax; and pocket it more than likely.

E-bay traders charge tax; so it is time the law was changed; big companies like Amazon and the like should charge tax (it doesn't cost them anything apart from having to administer it) and maybe the small traders in California should have to turn over a certain amount before having to register at the BOE – it takes a long time to file the sales tax forms and also costs the market traders after the fact which forces a lot of these free enterprise entrepreneurs out of business.

So that's my moan.

Now I was thinking the other day and you know sometimes it really hurts to think – I was wondering whether any of us Baby Boomers know what it’s like to be old – so far I don’t.

When my dad was my age he appeared to me to be an old man; I don’t think I appear to be an old man to my children I mean, after all, my contemporaries are Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart and Keith Richard – oh maybe I should strike out the last one but how does he do it in any case.

I read that Mick Jagger always gave the impression that he was a waster but in private he was on health food diets and kept really fit for his very cardiovascular stage act – but Keith Richard!!!

I read in the book The Dark Stuff that he had taken so many drugs one night that they thought he was dead; then in the morning he got up, shrugged and got on with it. I just wonder how anybody who is supposedly so drugged up could play the guitar fantastically well.

But getting back to me which is what this is all about; sometimes I try to eat properly – not all the time but I try; my dad had bacon, eggs, sausages and black pudding every day of his life. Maybe that’s what it is - the diet; we have heard the phrase you are what you eat so maybe that’s true.

I saw an advertisement for hair dye the other day and they used the phrase ninety is the new fifty – are we really going to live that long and see our contemporaries prancing around the stage playing the guitar?

If we do see that we know that they will be playing the same songs they do now as they have been playing them since they started – the only one who seems to have changed his tune is Rod Stewart but he hasn’t changed his way of life – he still has a young blonde wife and recently that young blonde wife had a baby.

So there we are – that's it folks for today.