There’s some football stuff going on today. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

It will interest absolutely no one to learn the following bit of information: I did my taxes yesterday. Well, actually I had them done for me because, as regular readers already know, I’m broke — but I am broke in a series of complex and financially tangled ways. Also, I am terrible at math, to the point that I’m unable to quantify even the simplest elements of my life. So, it’s worth it to me to pay somebody to figure all this stuff out; quite frankly, if left in a room with a tax form an my own devices, in the end I’d wind up having to pay something like the national debt, and inadvertently signing up to join the Coast Guard, to boot.

But the really irritating thing is how, every year, my tax guy always says the same thing whilst poring over my ever-anemic W-2 form: "We’ll, let’s see how you’ve done this year." It’s bad enough that my tacky possessions make it quite clear just how on-the-ropes I am, financially; I don’t need him judging me, as well. And, I can’t really tell him that it bugs me when he says that, lest he should accidentally fail to mention some massively obscure deduction, or else surreptitiously tick the little box that says "Mark For Death" or something.

I mean, I get that taxes are necessary and all that, and I’m far too old to continue to indulge in the massive conspiracy-theory fantasy game wherein I imagine that we’d all be quite happy living a Mad Max-style anarchist utopia anyway. But the great anxiety comes from seeing in raw, black and white numbers, just how badly it is that I’m doing. Also, I don’t like it when my tax guy laughs as he types my numbers into his spreadsheets. That seems pointlessly cruel.

But today is Super Bowl Sunday, where all financial concerns are set aside for a moment, while we consider more import topics; like how much those Super Bowl ads cost. Or how much we’re all supposed to be spending on pizza, chicken wings, and beer. It’s a news-media tradition, these things.

There’s another thing that happens, year after year: the seemingly casual statements that deem Super Bowl Sunday a holiday. Oh-ho, that’s clever. I’ve been seeing it all over the place. Someone on TV even said that the Super Bowl is the 2nd biggest food-holiday, after Thanksgiving. But, as much as this sort of twee, elbow-nudge commentary annoys me, I’ve been thinking about it, and though I hate to admit it, they might actually, possibly, have a point.

It’s not that football is a religion (which it is), and that the Super Bowl is its high-holy day (which it is) — neither of these things necessarily qualify a given celebration as a true blue holiday in this country. There is something else that your average putative holiday must be, if it really wants to make into red ink on the calendar: It must be widely seen as an opportunity for retailers to shake us down.

Yeah, okay, things like Arbor Day, Columbus Day, and Flag Day are all real holidays, but most people don’t really care about them. That’s because, unless you’re buying a tree, a spaghetti dinner, or a brand new flag to hang from the pole on your pick-up truck, they require no extra expense on the part of the average consumer.

Not like Christmas, with its gifts and eggnog; nor Thanksgiving with its turkey and liquor; nor like Independence Day, with its fireworks and beer; nor like Valentine’s Day, with its flowers and wine; nor like New Year’s, with its champagne and taxi rides; nor even like Halloween, with its razor blades and condoms.

But you look at that list and think, well, put that way, of course the Super Bowl is a holiday. Capital expenditure is the name of the game, here. Walk into any supermarket in the two weeks leading up to the big game, and you’re likely to be slapped in the face with the same kind of gaudy come-ons you haven’t seen since Santa Claus was briefly getting more exposure than those kids on the OC. I’d say that retailers are desperate, but that might be understating the case; I think they’d run you over with an NFL-branded steamroller, if they didn’t think it’d damage your credit cards too badly to be used.

Well, legitimate holiday or not, I’ve had enough. Now, this might have something to do with the fact that, normally, I’m not usually cold-cocked by my tax preparer until well after the Super Bowl has come and gone; coming face to face with my perilous monetary situation right before the big day, on the other hand, has left me unwilling to participate in any kind of boozy, wing-soaked blow-out, especially the ones where they expect guests to bring something.