Looking for Closure? Yes, I posted Part 8 yesterday morning. Scroll down to read it and, uh, let me know if you find issues with the prose.
    Part 8 is shaping up to be my least popular episode! Learn why as I compare a large roll of decals to Jesus Christ!
    A new episode is scheduled for a Monday release.

    The odometer rolls along, and another zero appears.
    Your SafeTinspector has posted two hundred and fifty times since 14 May, 2005.
    Two hundred and fifty one, including this post.

    I’d ask you what you think I’ve done right, what I’ve done wrong, and for your selection of five new CD’s for only ONE PENNY when you agree to purchase an easy three CD’s a month at normal club prices for the next three months. Hope you like The Dickies: Stukas Over Disneyland. Its the only album I have right now, and I’ll be breaking the law copying it the requisite three times to fulfill my end of the initial bargain. That’s how much I love you.

    Every time I see a snowmobile or ATV magazine or poster on someone’s cubicle wall I always complain that they don’t seem to have any good mounting points for armaments, and that their defenses seem woefully inadequate. Its my little way of trying to point out the impracticality of these frivolous conveyances. I suppose having a couple around just in case you find yourself navigating post-apocalypse America might be prudent, but I always assume I’ll just steal what I need in that eventuality.
    Ask me about my plans to steal an accordion in case of nuclear war.

    Did I mention I’m not doing segues tonight?

    Have you ever read my first post ever? It’s available off the back-issue rack if you’re trying to complete your collection. If not, on this occasion I choose to repost this following appropo excerpt:

Anyway, I don’t actually believe in blogs. For the average person like myself, a blog is merely a unwarranted piece of self promotion which is completely out of proportion with our place in this world.
I may be important to my wife, daughter, and my mother, but I’m fairly dispensable to the rest of my acquaintances, let alone the public at large for whom I am merely yet another soft-in-the-middle 30-ish white dude with a slightly menacing face.

    I’m almost a year older now. None of the other facts and opinions I stated at that time have changed appreciably. I tend to indent my text now in a way I didn’t then. It makes me feel irritated when I read those old posts. Damn you, younger me, why didn’t you indent like a normal human? And quit having sex with my wife.

    Two bloggers I liked have quit in the last month or so. El Barbudo and Veach Glines. Their reasons are similar, in that they both plead chronic and blog-terminal buziness.
    Rest assured that the only way to get rid of me is to completely and totally ignore me. I know that comes as a relief to those who like me and an inspiration for those who hate me.
    Take comfort in or make use of this data–your choice!

    I hate converted mansions that are being used as office buildings. These creaky old edifices have the worst HVAC systems, and I usually come down with galloping pneumonia from the various temperature, humidity and barometric pressure zones I pass through while traversing the grounds. If it weren’t for my pocket full of Cipro, I fear I’d have succomed to the siren song of the tasteful throw rugs that invariably find their way to the lobby area. If only I could lay there and rest for one minute….but I know I’d never rise again.

    The hair output of my ears is really starting to scale nicely now. Soon only the most hearty flies will be able to force their way into my ear canal to lay their eggs. The rest will die alone with their broken dreams in my forest of kinky ear-hair.

    Is there a better way to die?

    With legs half-spread and bent over at the waist, I supported myself with my left hand on one knee. I renewed my gasping search for the air I couldn’t seem to find, all the while never taking my eyes off of Bruce’s still form. My right arm dangled, wieghed down by the sticker gun’s sturdy form, now split down its entire length; this particular decal launcher had seen its last tour of duty here at Furd Motors.
    Bruce wasn’t moving. Was… was he dead? I unstrapped the wreckage of the sticker gun and tossed it into the parts cart which presently contained slightly more than half of my friend Chuck. As I turned back to the form of my asshole foreman where it lay before me, the subtle, mini-lip driven rustle of the decal covering his brother’s tiny clown head indicated the two of them yet lived. Good. As much as it pains me to admit it even now, I never really wanted to hurt Bruce.
    I kneeled in the sticky strawberry goop which had spread from Chuck’s abdomen and I summarily ripped the anti-pot dashboard sticker from Bruce’s nose, ignoring the subtle undulation of the decal covering the tiny clown head. I was rewarded with a thin, reedy whistle as Bruce began laboriously breathing through his newly exposed nostrils, turned bright red from the trauma of the sticker’s rapacious removal. I listened to him breathe for a moment and absent-mindedly brought my fingers, wet with the viscous claret coating the floor where Chuck was bisected, to my nose and lips. Shit, it even tasted like strawberry. Was it pie filling?
    “A HAZARDOUS MATERIAL CONDITION IN AREA 194 IS STILL HAPENNING, PEOPLE! LEAVE ALREADY, AND AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS!” and then, “SI USTED ES HOMBRES VERDADEROS USTED DEJARÁ EL ÁREA 194. TIENE DESECHOS PELIGROSOS.”
    Oh yeah, the alarm. I suppose Bruce set it off to give him some murderous privacy. He was out cold now, and I had next to no time before the arrival of the hazmet team he’d indirectly summoned. With the sleeve of my jacket I wiped my lips clean of the strawberry body fluid, brushed my hands off on my thighs and then stumbled back to my feet… and back to the task at hand.
    “Hide me, buddy,” pleaded Chuck’s swollen taste buds from somewhere in the parts cart. I walked around the five tons of “Do Not Attempt to Grow Marijuana in Glove Compartment” labels wound up around the decal spool. The forklift sat, having pierced its side, a Roman soldier to the spool’s adhesive Jesus. It was still rumbling and farting as it muttered discomfort to iteself. So in passing, I distractedly reached past the tiller and turned the key. The kerosene engine fell silent with a last wheezy puff and presently I reached the far side of the spool and the resting place of Chuck’s lower body.
    This section of my friend, which started at the top of his pelvic bone and continued down to the non-skid soles of his workboots, was somehow more disturbing than the torso had been. It seemed more definitively dead, I guess. A pelvis can’t live alone, not even one with a veritable salad of misshapen black tubes and linkages erupting from the waistband of its pants.
    So it was with considerable unease that I dragged the remaining remains by the boots across the painted factory floor. I wove around the forklift and up to the parts cart, leaving a winding stripe of strawberry pie filling in my wake. Hooking one hand in the belt loop of Chuck’s slacks, I heaved his lower body in atop his torso. The mass of Chuck settled from the pressure of its own weight and his arms fell around his legs in a loose embrace; it appeared to me as if he were hugging his own thighs.
    I looked again at Bruce and considered his fate. If I left him here he would be found by the same hazmet crew I was seeking to avoid. If he awoke, he might tell them anything. And the likelihood of truth being the particular shade of anything he’d choose to relate was very small. Further, if he didn’t wake–in some coma or whatever–I might be accused of attempted murder or some crap.
    I nodded in agreement with myself.
    Bruce would have to come with me.
    Bracing myself against the spool, I rolled Bruce onto his back and then muscled him into sitting upright on the floor. From behind, I reached under his arms and around his chest, half of which was now coated with the sticky red stuff. Only after standing the both of us up did I realize I had allowed my chin to rest on the shoulder closest to the orange wigged monstrosity under Bruce’s ear. My legs were threatening to buckle beneath our combined weight, so I simply tried to put my proximity to that little clown head out of my mind. The quiet rustling of his lips against the drug-safe decal made sure I was unsuccessful. So it was with great relief that I wrestled Bruce atop the waiting cart and let him go.
    I spent some precious seconds repositioning his slumbering form so that he was laying atop Chuck, completely hiding his sectioned corpse. Bruce’s arms and legs draped out of the cart and his snoring head was tilted back, hanging off of one end. I silently apologized to Chuck; no man should have another man’s ass sitting atop his own ass while sitting on his own head.
    I know, that’s a very specific pronouncement, but I stand by it to this day.

    I’ve posted the final edits to episode 7. I felt there were some awkward spots, and I’ve smoothed them out. No real substantive changes, so you needn’t read it again unless you were disappointed. In that case, you should read it over and over again until you begin to hate me and everything I stand for.

    Episode 8 will be up tomorrow morning, barring unforseen circumstances.

I leave you with the following anecdote:
    On Sunday we were visiting my mother. As I was in the office, Samantha ran in and asked gramma excitedly, “Can I have one of your chicken cookies?”

    No, Sam, we don’t normally call these delectible marshmallow treats ‘chicken cookies’.

    On the whole, a kerosene powered forklift isn’t really a very efficient means of murdering an able-bodied man.
    I won’t say I calmly stepped aside as Bruce drove the farting, aged Komitsu forklift past me. After all, my last few minutes here at Furd Motors had begun with the violent death of a friend–who then commanded me to hide his dismembered remains through means of his swollen tongue–and was now culminating in this attack by my asshole foreman and his tiny, clown-faced, conjoined twin brother. I was a bit on edge.
    Which is why I won’t say that I was calm as I stepped aside; in fact, I’m quite sure I was jabbering something along the lines of “Oh, God–shit–he’s trying to kill me!”
    As I dodged, the forklift drove by me and Bruce let out an angry yell–along with an impressive string of expletives. He passed me only a scant few hand lengths away, but was too engrossed in controlling the forklift to so much as take a swipe at me. Only a second or two went by before his cursing was drowned out by the screeching groan of tortured metal as the blades of the forklift sank deep into the side of the Furd Expulsion just pulling up to the hydroponics installation point.
    “You should fucking stand still, Joe!”
    The hell I would! I cast about wildly for something with which to defend myself as a blinking light and a loud “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!” told me that Bruce had begun backing the forklift away from the truck. I thought of simply running away; I’m almost completely sure I could outrun the Komitsu. But I still hadn’t gathered up Chuck’s legs and pelvis. His arm, protruding at a crazy angle from the cart where I’d already dumped his torso, seemed so vulnerable and needy. I remembered the words of his tongue as it spoke to me in a courier typeface just moments earlier,
    “Hide Me, Buddy!”
    That pleading tongue hardened my resolve and gave me new purpose. I had to deal with Bruce, grab the rest of Chuck, and get the hell out of there before the hazmat team arrived. If I was lucky, they’d be delayed by their union steward and his insistance that they hermetically seal their coffee service. …If I was lucky.
    At that moment Bruce swung the forklift around wildly, striking a blade against a mezzanine support with a loud “CLANG!” I readied myself and, thinking quickly, subtly positioned my body in front of the decal spool as he straightened out his impromptu and ineffective death machine and charged towards me again.
    “I’ll show you who’s a freak, you dumb shit,” he yelled, “you’ll be the freak! Only freaks have forklifts in their kidneys!” Amazingly, at this point he began hopping up and down behind the tiller of the Komitsu, laughing and shrieking like a cheerleader. Bruce’s little brother, with his clownishly furious green eyebrows and jolly red smile, bobbed up and down as his tiny, little lips silently mouthed, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
    At the last instant I hopped out of the way and Bruce barreled past me.
     “I told you to fucking stand still, man! I’m your foreman, and you are STILL ON THE JOB, ASSHOLE! –Umf!”
    That last was forced out of him as the Komitsu’s fork slammed into the five tons of dashboard stickers resting in the pool of Chuck’s pleasantly berry scented bodily fluids. Inertia had thrown Bruce against the knob of the tiller and had knocked the wind out of him.
    I ran up behind him and yanked him off the lift by his shoulder. Bruce staggered for a moment, still gasping noisily, as I hauled off with a wild roundhouse punch which missed him entirely as he bent over to try and catch his breath. I followed it up with a desperate uppercut which struck him in his left shoulder and jerked him upright. Startled back to what for lack of a better term I shall call his senses, he bellowed in rage,
     “You hit me? That’s another fucking write-up, you know that?” He proceeded to lunge at me and I barely jumped back in time as he continued, “That’s two in one day, Minnetola!”
    I made another desperate swing and this time my fist made contact. With a certain amount of horror I glanced down at my fist and saw smeared make-up covering my knuckles.
    I looked up at Bruce, who was standing there with shock written across his face, and noticed that his little brother’s clown paint was smeared half off, exposing the pink flesh of his bulbous little head for the first time I could remember. Bruce’s shock morphed into obviously telegraphed hatred.
     “No one hits my brother. You mess with him, you mess with me.” He closed the distance between us and punched me hard in the stomach. I’m no fighter, and hadn’t been struck since high school. I’d almost forgotten the incredible sensation a good strike to the solar plexus brought with it.
    It was now my turn to double over, gasping for air, while Bruce grabbed my hair and pulled me back up straight. My eyes rolled about as I struggled to pull some oxygen into my lungs, and I noted with interest the way Bruce’s lips seemed now to be working in time with his little brother’s, as if they both were quietly going, “Wow. Wow. Wow.” I saw his other arm drawing back to hit me.
    My only thought was that I really didn’t want to be hit again. That last punch sucked. I instinctively brought up my other arm to try to fend him off and was pleasantly surprised as he struck the solid mass of the sticker gun, still securely fastened to my forearm, and howled in pain.
    Letting go of my hair, still screaming in fury, he grabbed his wrist and shook it in obvious agony.
    Oh, yeah! The sticker gun! With that thought I hurriedly brought my Furd standard-issue decal launcher to bear and fired four times in quick succession, emptying the hopper of the remaining sticker feed.
    Three direct hits. Bruce’s eyes, mouth, nose and his little brother’s head all now asked that consumers please refrain from growing pot in their glove box.
    I would have expected Bruce to work at the stickers blocking his airways first, but he reached to help his brother instead. Interesting choice. Either way, however, he was left blind just long enough.
    With as big a wind-up as Pop-Eye could ever have asked for, I windmilled my arms and back-handedly slammed the sticker gun into the side of Bruce’s temple with a sick thump.
    Unable to see, he didn’t even flinch at its approach; he simply dropped like a stone and landed with a wet thud in the sticky slick of Chuck’s deliciously smelly blood.

I know I said there’d be a new Closure episode today.     I honestly intended to get one to you, but circumstances well within my control lead to my inability to follow through on this basic promise to you, my friends and readers.
	I stayed up until 2:00am on Sunday morning with nothing but an electric screwdriver and three DDR pads for company.*

    A number of months ago I covered my DDR use. Of the many things I talk about on this blog, my lifelong addiction hobby of playing video games has been fairly understated.
    Where other adult men watch sports, hang about with ne’er-do-well friends and their attendant flagons of alcoholic beveriges, fornicate with loose women, or build small tables with their portable electric lathes**, I play these infernal video games.
    I won’t go into much more detail than that unless an overwhelming number of my peers say, “SafeTinspector! Talk more about video games, that’s fascinating, and truly sexy in a way I’ve never realized before. Thinking of you with a wee controller in your meathooks gives me wood/moisture.”
    But, suffice it to say that shoddy Chinese manufacture required me to consolidate three pads into two so that I may dance upon them in the moonlight.
    Sunday is reserved for family. On that day I don’t work (I do work Saturdays) and I try not to commit to anything that doesn’t involve my entire SafeTclan nuclear family. Any blogging is performed early in the morning or late at night. I was in no shape to write when, at 6:30am, I was awakened by a 4 year old girl jumping on my stomach.
    And by the time the day was through that whole 4.5-hours-of-sleep thing caught up with me and knocked me out like a recreational pistol whipping.
    Lack of consciousness = lack of writing.
    No Closure, people. Get over it, you four-or-five people whom I love like a brother for reading the series so far. You’ll have to wait another day to learn what will happen as the forklift wielding Bruce (and his cosmetically angrified conjoined twin brother) bears down upon Joe Minnetola next to the apparently lifeless and dismembered body of the android Chuck.

* I recycled this picture from my previous DDR related post. I do not have a newer picture making a fool out of myself at this time.
** Statistically, these are the top four pastimes of adult males. Look it up!

    Looking for the Closure series? Scroll below this post for episode 6, where Chuck speaks in tongue. You can also find the Closure series by clicking using the SafeTselector above.
    In the meantime, I bring you a selection from the 27Anonymous archive. Really, the only funny thing he said that wasn’t profane.

Timothy Leary
    Timothy Leary was an aviation scientist who was responsible for some of the U.S. “X” plane projects throughout much of the formative pre-moonshot American air culture. This was before the founding of the aerial city of “Lofticretia” where most of the NASA engineers summer and house their precious super-children.

    As such, he designed craft that were intended to achieve greater and greater heights while still maintaining a normally aspirated engine configuration.

    Scram, ram, nautilus and pogo engines all owe their existance to him.

    He personally flew each and every test flight for his planes. Ultimately, no one got higher than Timothy Leary. He was high all the time.

    His untimely death, due to abrupt and catastrophic decompression when his canopy ruptured unexpectedly (well, if it were expected, would the fellow be flying at all?) caused his brains to bleed out of his nose and ears. In truth, he had indeed expanded his mind.

    Dumbly I gazed at Chuck’s vacant face and extended arms. Reality was sinking in and the pain in my shoulder seemed less important. My arm, no longer really under my control, quit rubbing the clavicle area and wandered off to find something interesting to tug at. Ah, it found some of the “Do Not Grow Marijuana In Glove Compartment” stickers, which had been fired onto my stomach and legs as I tumbled across the floor. The sticker gun itself was still attached securely to my forearm, with two or three decals left on the fragment of feed tape hanging from it’s hopper.
    Presently, Chuck’s twitching leg stilled, and it seemed as if the world became silent, though factory sounds continued on unabated. I stood slowly, regaining some of my breath, and began to hesitantly walk the dozen or so steps back to what was, moments ago, my little haven at Furd. Line position 194, hydroponics installation; the place where Chuck and I toiled side by side to make the Furd Expulsion a place safe for non-narcotic glove compartment agriculture. A place now occupied by the twisted corpse of the beautiful man I called “best friend” and his slowly growing pool of blood.
    The blood washed away all thoughts of Chuck’s lunchtime revelation from my mind. Robots don’t bleed, therefore it must have been an elaborate joke, although the hand was quite convincing at the time. Suddenly overcome, I fell to my knees in front of that beautiful face. There were no tears in my eyes, just a dizzying sense of loss and.. something else. Staring at his still, staring, handsome visage, I suddenly longed to touch it as I never had in the year we worked together. I reached out toward his cheek and…
    At that moment his mouth slowly and deliberately opened and his tongue flopped out with a wet plop. I jerked my hand back in surprise, and then leaned in to read. Clearly written in raised relief on the surface of Chuck’s tongue were these words,
    ’HIDE ME, BUDDY!’
    The words seemed to be made up entirely of swollen taste buds on his tongue; they were, furthermore, in a clean, courier typeface! I rocked back onto my haunches to gain a better look at the rest of Chuck’s bloody remains and noticed only then that the volume of blood was really quite small, and smelled noticeably of strawberries. Further, his torso, on my side of the fallen decal spool anyway, had broken from his pelvis cleanly, exposing the fact that his organs were not present in a way I imagine most organs would be under these circumstances. Instead there were black plastic containers, twisted, yet shiny linkages, and a small sack of cats-eye marbles.
    Hide me, buddy, I mouthed to myself. As I considered how I would go about hiding a 180 pounds of bloody remains in a factory of two thousand workers, I realized I had already decided to obey the tongue. Actually, there didn’t even seem to be a decision to make! Funny how some things don’t seem to be open for debate–even with oneself.
    All of this took only a few seconds. I nervously cast about, wondering who might have seen what happened. Cindy, Rake and Ty, the three workers from the Expulsion center-console deep-fryer work station some 60 feet up-line, were looking curiously in my direction and pointing. Rake, the taller of the men, was standing on his tip-toes and craned his neck. Conveniently, the hydroponic tube bin was blocking their view of Chuck’s corpse, but they could clearly see the top half of the fallen decal spool. How would I keep them away long enough to make a difference?
    The answer was made for me as an effeminate, automated male voice rang out over the shop floor, accompanied by a sharp buzz,
    “A HAZARDOUS MATERIAL CONDITION IN AREA 194 IS HAPENNING, PEOPLE! IMMEDIATELY LEAVE THE VICINITY AND AWAIT INSTRUCTION!” this announcement was followed by a gruff woman’s voice speaking in Spanish, “CONDICIÓN PELIGROSA EN EL ÁREA 194. DEJE EL ÁREA INMEDIATAMENTE Y SIGA SIENDO DE HOMBRES.”
    Idly fingering the decal gun on my wrist I considered that area 194 was the hydroponic installation point…my area! Who set off the alarm? The decal spool wasn’t a hazardous material.. Cindy, from her position up-line with Ty and Rake, called out, “Joe, Chuck! Get out of there! You need help?”
    I cleared my throat and, looking again at the courier text plea on Chuck’s hanging tongue, I yelled, “We’re fine. Don’t worry, go on!” Cindy joined Rake and Ty in a hasty retreat from the line, leaving me alone with Chuck and the repeating voice-over,
    “A HAZARDOUS MATERIAL CONDITION IN AREA 194 IS STILL HAPENNING, PEOPLE! LEAVE ALREADY, AND AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS!” and then, “SI USTED ES HOMBRES VERDADEROS USTED DEJARÁ EL ÁREA 194. TIENE DESECHOS PELIGROSOS.”
    Silently thanking whatever providence brought me this welcome cover, I ran to the nearest parts cart and upended it, noisily scattering miniature hydroponic lamps across the floor. Many of them came to a halt in the miasma of red, strawberry scented ‘blood’ surrounding the decal spool. I righted the cart and wheeled it over to Chuck, carefully avoiding the many hydroponic bulbs while trodding through the sticky red fluid.
    I would probably have 10 minutes or so before the volunteer hazmat team arrived along with their union steward and his hermetically sealed coffee service. (Some union rules must never be broken)
    I squatted down next to chuck and pulled at his outstretched arms. His torso moved away from the decal spool easily; apparently the thing had split him quite cleanly. As I was grunting under the weight of his flopping upper body, tipping it into the parts cart and receiving a throbbing reminder of the continued soreness in my shoulder, I heard the sound of a motor behind me.
    Quickly dropping Chuck into the cart and shoving his arms down over his head in a futile attempt to keep him and his protruding tongue out of view, I turned around and saw a forklift approaching fast from below the mezzanine.
    Behind the wheel was a grinning, wild-eyed man with a tiny clown head on his neck.
    It was Bruce.
    “Shit, I missed you, man,” he called out on approach, “too bad about Chuck.” He looked curiously at the parts cart, complete with Chuck’s hand and arm sticking out. “What…?” he shook his head, and then with renewed purpose, “I won’t miss this time!”
    As the forklift began to accelerate toward me, I glanced at Bruce’s clown-faced little brother and finally understood my peril:
    Upon the tiny head of his undeveloped brother Bruce had carefully drawn a set of dramatic, down-swept, ANGRY green eyebrows.

Sarah (of Sarah laughs and Blunt Cogs fame) made this picture. It’s the final product of Joe Minnetola’s hard work each day at the Furd plant. Curious? Click the picture or use the SafeTselector at the top of the page to pull up the Closure series. Quite possibly the best stuff I’ve produced since last July or so; I implore you to read it and critique. Episode 6 will be up in two days. Until then…     My 4-year-old daughter has a journal that she keeps at school. In it the children are instructed to draw an image on paper and then a teacher transcribes the child’s story underneath. The following are from my daughter, Samantha. The apple, as they say, doesn’t descend far from the twisted tree from which it spawned. Click to enlarge!
This one seems pretty normal. Don’t worry, they get worse.     This is a bunch of leaves. They stayed on the ground until someone raked them up. I raked them up and put them in the garbage bag. I put the garbage bag in the garage.
A simple, yet eternal story:     Once upon a time, there was a girl next door.
Like all love stories, this one ends in tragedy:     I love you. This is a beautiful garden. It was raining. There was a kite. I hit my head.
Waterfowl and frozen dairy don’t mix:     This is a big circle. The ice cream is melting. The ice cream is strawberry. It is in the shape of a duck. The ice cream fell in the grass.
A tale of high adventure!     My Mom is in the park. She was walking and she got caught in the trees. The cowboys came and got her free. My Dad came to rescue her. He grabbed her and swung from the trees into our house.
Don’t they all?     This is the road. It leads to Disney Land.
Look, this one is beautiful to look at!     It’s about a big Godzilla and another person: 2, 5, 7 persons. Godzilla is in the Iron Giant movie that my Dad has. I watch it with Dad. Iron Giant starts to be by Hogarf. It stays O-B-Bay. Not sure what to make of that last sentence.

    So it was with a noticeable waddle that I made my way down the assembly line to my assigned station. The warmth in my shorts was passing rapidly, leaving behind a cloying, salty chill I figured would remain for awhile. It would be a constant reminder of the red smear of mini-clown lipstick I’d scrubbed off with my bare hands as I’d rushed from the mens room.
    I was, I admit, a bit late at this point; but the line must never stop. The line must never stop, so Gail was working with Chuck, staying past her breaktime and probably muttering curses under her breath. The nicotene demons had her soul, and every minute unnecessarily sans-tobacco was a wasted one. I, as the responsible party to her momentarily delayed gratification, would bear the brunt of her hatred. This is a cross I’ve borne a few times without incident.
    I approached the cab of this, the latest brand new Furd Expulsion to roll down the line. The familiar ribbon of the sticker feed snaked into the cab and wiggled in testamony to the fact that Gail was busily applying the “Do Not Attempt To Grow Marijuana In Glove Compartment” decals in my stead.
    Gail was not alone, of course; Chuck worked beside her, quickly connecting the already installed wiring harnesses to the hydroponic grow-lamps he carried in his satchel. I waited outside as the two finished on the truck, imagining the tight confines of the cab the way I had experienced it, hundreds of times a day, five days a week: Chuck’s lithe form squirming out from under the dash while Gail, kneeling on the plastic covered upholstery above him with legs spread to offer him room, held her sticker gun aloft with the taut sticker feed suspended above them both on its way out the gaping door to the decal spool below the nearby mezzanine. As meaningless as I found the job, the warm camaraderie found in the tight confines of an all American truck chassis made it bearable.
    Memory converged with reality as I watched Chuck spring to his feet, Gail clambering out after him. Nicotine withdrawal reared up and cast its wild, hungry eyes at me.
    “Jesus, where the fuck were you?” she demanded as she quickly ripped off the fastener holding the clicking sticker gun from her forearm and shoved it into my chest. I hurriedly caught it and twisted it in my hands so as to keep the anti-pot adhesives from sticking to eachother. Stepping closer and clenching her yellowed teeth in a voracious grimace, her good eye rammed into my soul as her lazy eye lolled about, quite possibly looking at my ID badge. Both eyes were equally dark and sunken into her head, framed by the sandy hair straggling forth from her orange hard-hat. Atop which, incidentally, a portrait of the Marlboro Man smiled down upon me with beatific confidence and cool smokiness. Chuck walked up behind her and lay a concerned hand upon her shoulder. She jerked her head around to draw a bead on his placating smile.
    “Gail, gail, just go on break, it’ll be fine,” his soothing, yet carefree tone and ready grin seemed to diffuse the situation. As she turned back to me, only slightly mollified, he winked over her shoulder at me, and I wondered again at our earlier conversation. Surely the whole robot-from-the-future-where-zombies-fight-the-50-foot-apes story was some elaborate joke. This was Chuck, work mate of almost a year. “Let Joe get to work. The line is moving,” he continued somberly, “The line must never stop.”
    “..must never stop,” Gail and I both mouthed along with him. As mantras go, it was weak. But we shared it, and it made us brothers and sisters so long as we worked the line.
    Gail moved to brush past me and paused, pointing her finger up into my face.
    “Next time..,” her arm shook with the ravages of severe withdrawal and her sleeve fell back, exposing the long line of Nicoderm patches running up to her armpit. She concluded, “uh, there better not be a next time.” Clever pseudo-threat apparently finished, she rushed off down the line, clenching and unclenching her fists as she muttered imprecations against me. I turned back to see Chuck already dipping into a bin of hydroponic lamp tubes and filling the satchel he wore around his neck.
    “Forget her,” he shrugged, “C’mon. Next one’s almost here.” We both looked up-line and saw a partially assembled Expulsion slowly creeping towards us. The workers at the immediately preceding station had just finished successfully bolting down the center console deep fat fryer and it was soon to be our turn to shine.
    Strapping the decal gun to my forearm and testing the firing mechanism (which went “pop-pop!” quite satisfactorily) , I nodded and said, “right. Back to it.”
    We turned, poised and ready, waiting for the Expulsion. Twenty seconds before show time, at least. I restlessly checked the sticker feed going up to the 5 ton decal spool suspended above us. Why Furd Motors felt they needed five tons of “ Do Not Attempt To Grow Marijuana In Glove Compartment” stickers on tap prior to each shift was a mystery I’d often contemplated. Another glance at the slowly approaching chassis and my mind drifted back toward lunch.
    “Uh, Chuck.”
    “Yeah, Joe?”
    “About that shit from lunch, you know, the whole time traveling android thing…” but I had no chance to complete my halfway thought-out question, because at that very moment I heard the loud crack of a solenoid firing above me. I looked up and had just enough time to see that the release hooks for the decal spool had opened and 5 tons of futile admonishments were falling straight at me.
    “Watch out!” was that Chuck?
    Suddenly I found myself sliding across the factory floor on my ass, rolling wildly and grasping at metal supports and railings as I went. I finally thudded to a halt with my shoulder barking painfully against a painted iron guard-rail next to the slowly moving Expulsion we had been awaiting moments before. I sat up, trying to regain my breath, rubbed my screaming clavicle, and looked back to see the decal spool laying at a rakish angle. A crazy laugh rang out from the mezzanine above and I looked up to see a blur with jolly colors disappear into the waiting spools of decals. A soreness in my chest caused me to belatedly realize that Chuck must have shoved me out of the way. I now remembered his hands roughly shoving me away from danger, knocking my wind from me.
    Only then did I think to look beneath the decal spool. Chuck’s eyes were unfocused, frozen open, hands outstretched toward me as if grasping, and his one partially visible leg was twitching violently, making little skittish noises as his non-slip boots hopped and slid across the painted shop floor. I could not see the other leg; it was blocked by the five tons of glove box stickers resting upon his shattered back.

HUGE props and many thanks to Sarah of Sarah Laughs… for making this awesome picture of Bruce. Sarah is such a sweetheart, and I’m unworthy of her favors; I’ve given her NOTHING in return for her continuing charity.     Curious about Bruce?     Check out Closure Pt 3 and Closure Pt 4.     I’ve also added a Closure category to the SafeTselector at the top of the page for your convenience.
Be sure to check out Blunt Cogs for more of Sarah’s fabulous artwork.     She also contributed this excellent DOG Priest armored church artwork to Dog Priest pt 3

    Now, dear readers, answer me this:
    I have a rather long plot for Closure, and what was going to be a short story is looking to be a short novella. Does it belong on its own dedicated web space, or should I continue to post the episodes here?
    Or, alternatively, should I wind it up quicker and get on with more important drivel?