Because I work at the paper, I suppose it should be no surprise that I have paperwork.

But at home it tears me apart. When the bills and letters and papers start stacking, I feel my mind cracking. I feel lost in the shuffle, almost as if I were three sheets to the wind.

In this way, tax season can be especially taxing – the polar opposite of relaxing. The April 15 federal income tax filing deadline may just have passed, but I cannot say I have much tax relief.

Waiting until the 11th hour to complete my tax forms only adds to the misery. In recent years I have been a good boy in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, often doing the chore in March even when not driven by the incentive of receiving a refund.

But for some reason this year, April yawned like the Crack of Doom before I could bring myself to face the tax forms amid an ever more formidable pile of mail, magazines and other papers that I had stacked on the floor of my little living room.

“You see,” I told my cat conspiratorially, “I’ve done this deliberately. It’s all part of a sort of sorting strategy.”

He just rolled his eyes, knowing I was just making excuses in a paltry rhyme scheme as his territory was slowly usurped by paper.

I had set the materials on the floor in hopes that the swelling mountain of clutter would eventually buckle and spill forth, erupting in me irrevocable inspiration to tackle the paperwork with volcanic furor.

The dark chasms of my procrastination would fill and gush with the crimson lava of my newly directed energy and intent. Steam would rise from my purposeful pen moving rapidly across the income tax forms, and my past neglect would fall in a rain of ashes.

Unfortunately, the reality was far less dramatic. I got tired of the piles of paper, rolled up my sleeves, carefully excavated my tax materials from the heap of junk mail (which I simply set aside again), grabbed a pen, and worked my way through the tax forms for hours until I finished the job.

I didn’t even blow my top.

But I did feel new sympathy for tax form preparers. True, my tax return presented a task relatively simple when compared with those who have to account for dependents, business dealings, dividends or railroad pensions, and my retirement savings to figure was nothing compared to the tax code complexity of Form 9907-Q-RX-5, which for most income brackets doesn’t even exist.

As I had hoped, I learned I would be receiving a modest refund. That put me in such a good mood I contributed part of it to an assortment of social and environmental causes on the state tax form.

But I also shook my head in dismay. As tiny characters of ink on paper, any income from a year of work seems so arbitrary.

It’s even worse as transactions increasingly happen in plastic, and spending and saving is all a series of electronic ebbs and flows. A swelling tide of people now even file their tax forms electronically.

I suspect if we all used tangible coins for every purchase, we would be more inclined to save our money. We would be more frugal and stronger, hefting bags of coins everywhere.

But that would mean restaurants would be as noisy as casinos and our hands would always smell like metal. Bills of cash, those convenient little notes we carry in our wallets, seem to represent the next best thing.

Cash can work for us, and it is a form of paper, yet somehow we do not consider it paperwork. I would not mind if I had stacks of cash on my living room floor, for example.

But instead of ample bills of cash, I have ample bills to pay as part of the relentless surge of paper into my home. I already know my tax refund will exemplify the saying “easy come, easy go,” absorbed into the ebb and flow.

Fortunately, I also had a chance to engage in a different kind of paperwork, putting together a series of cards to mail to friends. That activity provided a pleasant respite in the way that writing an old fashioned letter can serve as an antidote to an overload of e-mail.

After my taxes were finally filed, I made a concerted effort to sort through the other paperwork, consolidate, discard, file away, and pay what I could pay.

At the end of the day, what can I say?

We should try to cut down on paper – not in one fell swoop, but as we go (watching out for paper cuts). If we have too many scraps of paper reaming us, especially here in the soggy Pacific Northwest, we run the risk of leading lives of pulp fiction.

As a reporter for The Daily Astorian, Brad Bolchunos (a.k.a. “Mad Vesuvius”) believes in the importance of creating a paper trail – but he is not always certain where it will lead.