Accounting overwhelmed me literally one evening in the closet – one of the shelves with densely packed folders with densely packed sheets of comp-printouts, invoices, bank statements, receipts and other modern corporate papyrus quietly pressed me in the back. A sign of change. I immediately changed the safe design. I distributed the paper lava with unexpired absolute statute of limitations from the last ten years to their original owners. I separated the remaining paper from the folders-nylon-paperclip-binding and subjected to reformatting. What? Snezhinkovo. Small-large, oblong-oblong, sometimes pinkish-red, bluish-gray or simply yellow, depending on the ore, accounting-printed snowflakes were poured into sacks, obtained from a shredder to permanent machine exhaustion. At first. That and on the second.

In fact, I had turned into a snow machine. A methodical, post-accounting fun factory. Stored since 1994 (haha, sounds like an inscription on a whiskey bottle “produced by …”, “authentic from …”) tax returns, annual financial statements and all appendices to them, legal bearers of primary and secondary accounting were turning into fluffy paper snow. Ready-made swollen material for children’s burying, digging, repeated tossing, uncontrolled pouring, without dependencies on clouds, climate and meteorological inversions. Can be original outside, can be office inside. I started stockpiling snow. Unstorable at first sight “water” without subsequent evaporation, melting and leakage. I collected my white accounting in black bags, decorated with colorful, cheerful ribbons. What a sight! What a preparation for the favorite Christmas holiday! What an accounting-non-accounting surprise!

A harbinger of the heavy accounting snow in 2021, in defiance of global warming, is the paper Christmas of 2014, when for several months I painstakingly cut out the white clean scraps without text and numbers from actual invoices in operation and computer meaningless (now) printouts (to save the planet a hundred sheets wood) and folded square origami snowflakes from them, shaped and chopped into various configurations and symmetries. The “snow” then fell all over the house in large patches. Now it is raining in a large rectangular “snowball”, dense-loose “snow” mass and “ice” pieces of paper. What prevents us from sticking snowflake shapes with accounting snow? Stack the new material using the papier-mâché technique (from French Papier-mâché, literally chewed paper meaning crumpled paper – I have plenty) in desired images with flour, starch or wallpaper glue? To shower green artificial and natural trees with the newly acquired permanent source of pre-Christmas cheer? Get to work, dwarves! Let it rain!

The accounting snow is falling quietly.

Caressingly pinches the brains again.

Where is the old NRA in the yard?

Accounts overwhelmed everything in time.

The desk raises a snow cap.

Snow has covered the office again.

Colleagues anxiously shake their heads:

“How is that possible, what is this?”

Tax-inspector is still a little puppy.

Can the taxman find out?

How stupid NRA you are now

How cowardly you look at the snow.

(Accounting revision for the purpose of the “Accounting Snow” project of the infamous winter song ” Quietly is falling the first snow” by the sweet-talking magician, who bequeathed it to us with love, the poet Tsvetan Angelov.)

Ha-ha, and while I was writing about the white-white abundance and mercilessly cutting imaginary snowflakes, on 22.09.2021 real snow fell on Vitosha-mountain, unusually-real, not just unrealistic-accounting. For comparison. To remember. To recall. Parallel realities. Which one is more real.

My initial idea was to distribute or rather return the new “accounting” before Christmas to my colleagues and like-minded people and to share a common experience from various territorial points. An old thesis of mine is that people can be collaborative and together from different places. I launch new snowflakes for connection at a single moment, but at distant spatial points. It might work. Hope it works.

I imagine how, at the 12th hour of the New Year, my accounting snow is scattered over the square, like in New York, for example. How smiling people with hope in their eyes pick up the old (mine) to turn it into a new (their) experience. The wheel of life turns. For better.

As I focus predominantly A4 format and here and there A5 sheets in the slot with a swallower and a subsequent shredder grinder, I think about the true occult essence of these documents – here behind these numbers lies the investment in the education of an excellent person, there is the paid off loan for a happy home , a desirable villa built, smooth roads follow, successful expert supervision, carefree tropical excursions, faraway exotic vacations, a fast new car, a lavish delicious meal. Each with a different purpose has thrown efforts, skills and work ethic, provided me with the paper carrier of their dreams, insomnia, ambitions, assertiveness, professionalism, routine, satisfaction or work exhaustion.

A paper invoice is a valuable document. Analog digital information carrier. Moreover, a monetary information carrier is cashable or has proven cashable (where the money is received in advance). So these sacks are full of valuable information, with securities, albeit shredded. Encoded human information. For past company, family, personal and various events whose statute of limitations has passed? Is there a statute of limitations for feelings, for health, for memories, for experiences, for energies?

“There are documents, there is accounting” – that’s what my first auditor said. “There are documents, there are destinies,” I would add after so many years of accumulated consequence of someone’s curriculum floating around. Translated from Latin literally (in this case numerically) course of life, circle of life. A biography in numbers, the business card before the NRA, the hidden work biography of our feelings, that behind which I am looking for what Carlos Castaneda calls “the road with a heart”. The accounting tale. I have read it before bed for many years. I’ve even put off going to bed for hours. Behind your paper fairy tale, colleagues, is my real fairy tale. My CV. Which I now turn into a carrier of a tale. Looking for a new hermetic transformation. I turn “wood” into “water”. We only know. I’m looking for a new life for something gone. All at once. On a professional path.

How much wood does it take to produce one standard 500 sheet pack of 80gsm paper? What is the volume of the tree, creator of the volume of a top paper? A pack of paper cut into snow has approximately the capacity of 4-5 stacked unused rooks, or more. Like snowflakes. Like the snow. As it melts, it shrinks. Here, the direction is reversed – the compact tree is filled with air, it is enveloped. Tree of life. The circle of life. Ditto. Funnel up. Growth. Decomposition.

“The most intimate questions are the financial ones” – that’s how an experienced colleague from my first job used to joke. What bigger secret to each of the income? Well, that’s why I cut these sacraments into snowflakes. It is prohibited by state law to just throw them away in the trash. Lighting fires in urban areas is prohibited by municipal ordinance. So here you are, dear colleagues, welcome your income-expenditure secrets in unmelting snowflakes and at the same time in unreadable materializations. Would anyone be willing to put together the shredded texts and former sequences of numbers? Or should we entrust this to the NRA? Solid puzzle material. Game of games. Yes, but it doesn’t matter anymore. The statute of limitations has expired. No accountability obligations. As she was. I have so painstakingly arranged the documents so that they can be found easily and conveniently, to be presented quickly and without delay, to assist the inspection and revision authority as much as possible. Should I have? Just a clerical job done. After accounting work done. First arrangement, now arrangement. Cycle. Cyclicality. Spiral. We come to the roundabout again. There should be development. Ideas. Implementations.

So now I wonder, am I doing accounting work splitting documentary snow or preparing an art installation? Am I complying with the requirements of the law for the storage of personal data or am I wasting a resource for paper murafetti? Or how a paper mine fuels an inspired art-intent with paper ore. This simultaneity of two opposite activities throws me into the yin-yang polarity, which, however, tends towards completion. Mutual satisfaction. Unity sought. Mathematics and art. Left and right brain hemispheres for One. “Friendship for ages for ages!” I’m just recalling an old socialist motto.

Be One-Is-We.