Meanwhile, somewhere toward the central Everglades...

Doris woke early to hear the sound of the mailbox splintering.

"Harry, darling, the axeman's here," she chortled, shaking her husband violently and quite possibly injuring his genitalia.

"Axeman?" sed Harry. "Again?" he sed.

"Oh DARLING, you know you love it when he BASHES in your skull. Just like your mother-in-law!"

"Oh," sed Harry. "That axeman," he sed.

But the axeman had already left, intent on ordering a large cheezburger to eat with the dead crow he had found in the mailbox. The dead crow was in the mailbox for purely aesthetic reasons. Don't worry about it.

The radio was playing Buddy Holly, but he was dead, so the axeman stuck his finger in the cigarette lighter instead.

"Rotten Japanese cars," he mumbled as it exploded. Apparently a gasket had become unstuck in time.

The gasket entered a former part of its existence, back in the factory in Lansing, Michigan, where ten million generic laborers (95% of which were in the labor union) were paid to sit and inspect the gasket, name o' Thurner. They weren't Japanese. They just sold the gaskets to foreign nations, because they paid more for them. Over the counter of the Sex Hammer & Sickle Bar (the hip local hangout) hung a sign with the workers creed: "Capitalism at its best, fuck the Commies and all the reds." It didn't quite rhyme, but it was spelled right, which was a sincere compliment to the intelligence of Joe the barkeep. Unbeknownst to the innocent patrons lurking metaphorically in his establishment, Joe was the mastermind behind it all. It was Joe who had first come up with the idea for the gasket factory. It was Joe who had opened the bar. It was Joe, who, on horseback, had been the first to discover the area now putrid with factory smoke, home sweet Michigan. Joe was, and probably still is, immortal, but he was good-natured about it. There wasn't a lot of peer pressure at the top.

The axeman cursed. Now, instead of having a shitty car, he had a dearth of a shitty car. The gasket vanished into antimatter and reappeared on the surface of Venus a few weeks later, a fact that troubled many philosophers for centuries to come.

Continue...