Full disclosure. I never did well in school, still can’t spell or do long division, and never got along with any teacher in my educational life. I was a nightmare of distraction and rebellion, I still am.

So it was a profound revelation to me and all those teachers to awaken yesterday and discover that I am a genius, after all. I went bankrupt a year ago. I didn’t realize at the time that it was  really a good thing.

I rushed to relay the news to my very skeptical wife that I should be allowed to control our household finances and make all of the money decisions. (“You’ll have to kill me first,” she said, so far unpersuaded.)

A little more than a year ago, I declared personal bankruptcy, we could not sell the first Bedlam Farm for more than four years, and the process of maintaining two properties and the loss we took when we finally found a buyer left us in great debt – more than $150,000. I thought that was a lot of money at the time, but I see now it is peanuts, really, hardly worth noting. I am, as my grandmother used to say, a pisher.

I was told it wasn’t our fault – we were snared by the real estate collapse – but I felt foolish, ashamed,  even stupid. The way I grew up, going bankrupt was not considered an act of genius, but a great failure for a man, some people threw themselves off of rooftops rather than do it.

Before the bankruptcy, I had always paid all of my debts and earned enough money to live, I had all kinds of platinum credit cards and all the lenses I wanted. Every day, letters came offering me more money with no interest.

After the bankruptcy, I had no credit cards, and I was turned down when I tried to buy long-term insurance for the dogs and cats. Come back in a year, they said.

Then there were the taxes.

On top of everything else, and since unpaid debt is taxable, at least for me, we had a whopping tax bill at the end of year, and have been working hard ever since to pay off all of our debts and also pay the government what we owe them. They were not open to the idea of foregoing my taxes for a few years.

I was startled Sunday to see  supporters of Donald Trump saiy he was a “genius” for losing almost a billion dollars in failed business dealings and apparently paying no taxes at all for the next 18 years. “Absolute genius,” was the way former mayor Rudy Guiliani described it.

This got my attention.

I was  excited Sunday,  born anew, seeing myself in a whole new line. I’ve been all wrong about this money thing. Here I thought I screwed up.

I shouldn’t be embarrassed for falling into bankruptcy, I was clearly brilliant for learning so much about how it works, for taking advantage of the law that protected me from the poorhouse and enraged creditors, and left me my house, car, and socks.

This experience qualified me to manage the financial affairs of the farm in a way I could never have imagined when I paid my bills regularly.

Who better to understand money management than somebody who failed to grasp the implications of the Great Recession, believed for years that the farm would sell, bought many things he didn’t need, spent thousands of dollars on ads nobody read, nearly sold it to a swindler and fraud, and eventually did sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars below market value?

If I were a CEO, I could be sitting on a pretty fat bonus for all that savvy decision making.

Apparently, you don’t get any smarter than that. At the time, no one mentioned that this was genius on my part, when we met with the bank, the manager shook his head and made a sad face at me.

I confess to being less than brilliant when it came to the taxes .I was not so smart there.

Not only did I lose all that money, I owed about $18,000 in federal taxes after the bankruptcy, and I have been paying those  taxes off every month ever since.  Sometime next year, they will all be paid off, unless I am struck down by lightning. I didn’t know that  some people don’t have to do that. Maybe they are the truly smart ones.

My wife, who entered our marriage with absolutely no debt at all, and who considers buying retail clothing a war crime,  decided, after long consideration, not to stab me in the heart and throw my body in the river. She is still here, defying all of the odds and the best advice of her family. And paying the bills.

I am foolishly – stupidly I guess – haunted by the images of the soldiers, police and firemen, kids without food, flooded families, people who plow the roads in winter, soldiers fighting in awful places, men and women who risk their lives in wildfires, public health officials and emergency workers – who live on the taxes people like me pay, and we never even considered using our losses as a way of avoiding our taxes.

We weren’t that smart.

I have this thing I do with taxes, whenever I want to grouse about them, I think of the cops and firemen rushing into burning buildings, and the soldiers getting blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I don’t approve of wars. Still, these people give me the opportunity to live my life, speak my mind, go to the grocery store in the snow, pay for my Open Heart Surgery. Taxes are the least I can do.

Nobody likes taxes, but Maria and I always give thanks when we pay our taxes. I guess that makes us stupid.

When I went bankrupt, I went for a long walk with Red, and I apologized to this hard-working and buttoned up working dog. He does not ever screw up, I worried he might be embarrassed to be my dog. He looked at me sympathetically and wagged his tail, he is filled with empathy for anyone who is a human, and expects little from them.

As for the barn cats, they wouldn’t speak to me for months, they have only contempt for losers.

This morning, I pored over the news reports and, on an impulse, I called up the IRS. I was prepared to bluster a bit.

I only waited on the phone for a little bit, and finally a nice woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma got on the phone. I gave her my name and SS number and said I was wondering, just for the sake of argument,  if I could forego paying the $7,000 in taxes that remains from the bankruptcy – we send a check every month, even if the grocery bill is tight. We do not even want to think about what might happen if we are late.

“I heard about this guy who lost almost a billion dollars, and he is paying no taxes, and I lost a lot of money and I wonder if I can skip the rest of my taxes for a few years, or maybe for good?..What do you think?” The silence was a bit deafening but didn’t last long.

She laughed and asked where I lived and what assets I had and I told her. “We could get a team from Albany out there in an hour,” she said, “it would be interesting to auction off your sheep, donkeys, house, granddaughter,  dogs, socks and underwear. How tall is your wife? I see on your blog you have a pretty Red dog, I bet he would sell for quite a bit. Are you at home tomorrow, not that it matters? Do you have a new Iphone, I hope?”

Just kidding, I said, (foregoing the bluster)  have a good day. There are some things about being a genius I don’t yet understand. There is always something to learn.

The world is an amazing place, really, who ever imagined living in a world where screwing up four businesses to the tune of a billion dollars made one a genius and tax code specialist? I see the implications for me. I have a good new reply to those angry people who demand to know why I would dare to ask for helping in getting a new camera? I see now that I should have asked for three or four cameras, and some lenses too.

Maybe I could have gotten one of those MacArthur genius grants.

The bankruptcy was really a great thing for me, I realize.

Maybe I could also be an expert at freaking out at the end of every month, getting dunned by bill collectors, giving up on the idea of real vacations  and counting the dollars for food at the end of the month. Those were such fun days, and I learned so much, I got smarter by the hour. Maybe it’s time for more ambition, public office maybe?

I could lose more money, and build up my resume.

“Absolute genius,” I told my wife this morning, when she told me how much money we had left in the bank at the end of September. “Stay off of Amazon,” she said, yawning in resignation.

I have to be honest, there is this other matter of the debts, too, and I wasn’t so smart about that either. We are paying off our debts, so far, just about all of them – we paid the bank everything we owed from our farm sale. The laws permitted us to waive most of our debts, but we figured we didn’t have to walk away from all of our debts just because we could. If anybody wants to see my taxes, I’ll be happy to put them in binder and self-publish.

It’s too late for secrets.

The genre would be true life adventure.

I told Red this morning on our walk that I was actually an absolute genius, he sniffed the air, walked off the path and took a dump.