ast Friday was a familiar scene to many observers with a memory stretching back twelve months or more: Millions of Americans rushing to the airport to mail their tax returns before the April 15th midnight deadline, only to be redirected to the post office, the nation’s more traditional outlet for its citizens’ mailing needs.

The April 15th deadline for postmarked tax returns still catches millions of Americans off guard every year, in spite of not having changed in over 50 years. Earlier dates of March 1st and 15th, set in 1913 and 1918 respectively, caused similar problems by arriving predictably every year. Experts agree that moving the date forward even later into the year would likely only solve the problem for people who hadn’t heard about the date change. Postal Service officials confirm an annual rush of elderly taxpayers every March 1st, proving that old habits die hard, though the Postal Service official we talked to thought it was because “that’s when they got their rebate check for denture glue or baby food or some shit.�

This reporter suffered from unusual difficulty collecting quotes for this story, since every person she approached on the street to ask if they’d waited until the last minute to file their taxes invariably screamed something like “Oh holy fuck!� or a comical “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiii- iiiiiit…� before sprinting away, either to hurriedly file their taxes or avoid the awareness of such for a few more precious hours.

Further digging, however, revealed Americans from all walks of life that were routinely bushwhacked by entirely predictable yearly phenomena, even those having nothing to do with 1040 forms, exemptions, or the Sino-Russo Breast Reduction. A surprising number of Americans were even caught off guard by the arrival of spring and warmer temperatures after months of cold winter.

“Jesus, it’s getting warm,� commented a surprised Burt Filbitz of Terre Haute, Indiana. “Who knows when this will let up? It’s weird. I hope it stops at some point, before we all get burnt and melted by the sun.�

Still others were similarly distressed by the rising of the sun this morning, a daily ritual that never the less caught some unprepared night-enjoyers completely off guard.

“There it is again!� screamed Scranton, Ohio’s Meg Dadry. “There’s fire in the sky, mama! Fire!�

In order to combat the yearly crush of customers seeking to get their tax returns mailed before midnight on tax day, often causing lines at post offices across the nation that make the pope’s funeral look like the line for voluntary chemical castration, the U.S. Postal Service has been running a series of helpful reminder television commercials throughout the months of March and April to help Americans to not be so predictably dopey.

The first of the ads featured a long-awaited reunion of washed up stoner comedy legends Cheech and Chong, referencing one of their most popular routines.

“Knock Knock,� the ad begins.

“Who’s there?�

“Tax time.�

“Tax Time’s not here, man!�

The starkest of the new ads and possibly the most effective, however, featured only a black screen with actor Jeff Bridges offering the simple voice-over “Wake up, dipshit, it’s tax time.�

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I think we gave up on Chernobyl too easily. I say that knowing full-well that too much radiation can make your sack blow up like a beach ball and your fruit starts talking to you and shit, which could be plenty scary depending on what the fruit is saying. I know some people who would be terrified no matter what their pear was belching out at them over the breakfast table, but I for one believe you can't live on that uptight of a level. At least I wouldn't consider it living. If I'm greeted to a chorus of "Mornin', Omar" from my fruit bowl in the morning, who's the victim? As long as they don't scream when I eat them, I don't really consider talking fruit to have a downside.

I'm not a doctor, at least when I'm not hard-up for cash, but I've got to imagine the health effects of living in a raging nuclear fallout zone have been overstated. You know how doctors are, one month immense dosages of radiation will turn you into a puddle of goop, the next month they'll give you super powers and you'll live to be 150. It's like the whole red wine thing. I'm willing to take my chances, because even in the worst-case scenario, being a puddle of super-powered goop doesn't sound all bad. No way you've got to pay normal tax rates when you're filing as "goop."

And Chernobyl itself could really be an ideal place to live, when you think about it. It's like an empty readymade city, just without all the giant Barbie dolls and the plastic Thunderbird with nothing under the hood. It'd be like Oklahoma City without the hick smell. They could hold a wild land grab like back in the old west days! Give me a cattle prod and let me loose in that place, trust me; I'll come out of the deal with Bricks Towers under my arm. It may have been Bank of Ruskie before the shit went Three Mile, but now that vault's Foghat's room, Ivan. What can I say; the dog likes to feel secure when he sleeps. Plus I think he might be catching on to the fact that the "Panic Room" in the Bricks Manor is just a walk-in closet with a bunch of pennies jammed in the door frame.

Still not sold on the whole Chernobyl thing? How would you like to wipe your ass with the electricity bill? You'd be living that large in Chernobyl, since who needs electricity when the whole town glows in the dark? And if that shit can power a submarine, it should have no problem juicing up my Mr. Coffee. It would be like solar power, without the suck.

I got to thinking about fallout this week because of The Man's reaction to my oceanizing of the Bricksmobile III: Red Bagel Edition last month when I was down in Panama. Turns out the big Bagel had a real emotional attachment to that car, and a real dead space alien on dry ice in the trunk. That's what he says anyway, the story smelled suspiciously of hooker mishap to me. But if that's the case, he can consider that problem solved, because the only law that's getting into that trunk now is the Fish Police. And it was my understanding that they were cancelled years ago. Bagel always has been the paranoid sort, however, and I don't think he watches TV. Something about mind-control dolphin sounds in the audio mix, I didn't read the whole pamphlet.

So now I'm on the commune shit list, of Bricks List as it's being called at the moment. Quite a change from the Dunkin Detail as it had been known for years. Thanks to my loyal readership of gun nuts, truckers and the vicarious, my ratings the office chicken has been tabulating are keeping me from napping under the axe, but I'm still keeping my options open for a career move to the Far East in case shit goes bad again like last year when I ate all of Bagel's astronaut ice cream. One more mix-up like that and Omar Bricks will be the top name on the commune's Comrade Exchange Program, because I don't think those sly fuckers want Boris Utzov back. Wish me luck.

Bricks Out.

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My God, sir, the future is in jeopardy! And not the good kind, like Celebrity Jeopardy.

I found this out most recently, with my keen inductive powers, and a little help from my ham radio. Longtime commune readers, a species rarer than the bald eagle, are familiar that we frequently receive transmissions from Future Bob—it's this constant flow of information that keeps us reassured our actions in this time period don't louse up the future for generations to come. We've upheld this burden well for a long time. But then guess what happened.

That's right. The future's gone flunky on us. Well, not all of us, perhaps, but flunky on me, and that's more than enough. I was sharing a delightful conversation with Future Bob most recently, discussing the various odors of cheeses and our favorites, when I asked him about the Bagel clan of his time. He was puzzled, and told me he hadn't met any Bagels in his time. What a disaster! Only a few years ago, when we first met, he assured me the Bagels were around and quite prominent in his time. Either he was a complete fake, not in the future at all, or the future had been devastated by our actions in their past. Being a huge fan of The Terminator movies, the obvious choice was the latter.

I could hardly believe it, but it wasn't quite the first time. Other incidents reported by Future Bob, such as the Fruit Famine of 2003, or the complete nuclear annihilation of the world in 2004, have failed to come true. Not without a great amount of work on our part, I assure you—everyone at the commune reported these incidents and made major changes to their lifestyles to make these possible futures not come true. Omar Bricks gave up eating genetically-altered nuclear apples altogether. Future Bob himself, for his part, was quite happy to hear we had made his stories become complete works of fiction. But it's been a constant battle, needless to say, and all the stories he's reported on so far have never hit so close to home as this apparently innocent remark.

No Bagels in the future? What's gone wrong? Where have I failed? Was it not asking out that checkout girl at One-Stop? The mole put me off a little, that's all. Good lord, what if that was the future mother of the Bagel dynasty? I would ask Future Bob if the matriarch of the Bagel clan was a Rosie Bagel, as the girl's name tag read, but unfortunately, he's not been shielded from the time transition by a quantum bubble. Damn that Star Trek technology! Where are easy-to-use, low-cost quantum bubbles to protect us from ripples in the timeline? If the future doesn't have them, we're screwed. Maybe it's another thing one of my offspring would have invented, had I bothered to boink them out already.

It's quite depressing, to realize you're as old as I am (let's not deal in numbers here) and have inadvertently doomed your name to extinction. Who's supposed to carry on the Bagel legacy? My brother Gay? He will never have children, for quite obvious reasons—he despises them. So is this truly the end of the Bagels? Once and for all, the gene pool dries up here?

I will not allow it. Sir, I must make it my personal mission to go out into the world this very night and have as much unprotected sex as humanly possible. But this time it's not to win a wager, although I do enjoy the small TV/VCR combo I won from all that. No, this is to save the Bagel name, and perhaps time itself, from disappearing into history's cornhole. Wish me luck, and many coupling experiences.

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