All of those filing a tax return have heard of The United States Tax Code but few have seen it, and none, I bet, have taken the trouble to read this 74,608-page long monster.

I decided to take a look on-line and got in by way of a hyperlink to a hierarchical table of contents. Within two minutes I fell asleep. It is Ambien in print.

The tax code is such a pretentious affair, so convoluted, so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of words that I left unencumbered by curiosity forevermore.

74,608 pages—let’s compare:

• The United States Constitution is 34-pages long, including the amendments.
• The Iliad has 297 pages.
• The average Bible has around 1200 pages depending on the translation.
• War and Peace by Tolstoy is about 1400-pages long depending on typeset, etc.
• Shakespeare wrote 884,431 total words, approximately 5,000 pages, give or take a thousand.

Is the tax code really 74,608-pages long? Surely not!

But in a desert void of active verbs and crawling with serpentine subordinate clauses poisoning each and every compound, complex sentence, who cares?