suspicious pop-tart bereavement

It isn't possible to buy just a few of anything from Costco, so I wound up with a whole case of poptarts, which I brought to the office to snack on, as my roommates of the moment are largely gluten-free and can't indulge in normal wheat-based treats.

Vince repeatedly asked for permission to mooch the occasional poptart, which I gladly gave; at one point he said how much he liked them -- he took a package home to give his Japanese marriage-track girlfriend, she told me she enjoyed them -- and I believe I actually said to him "when you die, I'll put a package of pop-tarts in your coffin."

Which promise I entirely forgot about until several weeks later when I was sitting in his open-casket funeral service and his ghost sat up and looked at me and demanded them. By then it was too late. It would have been entirely appropriate, as the eulogy from his best friend repeatedly asserted Vincent's sense of humor and comedic nature, to have brought some with me and slipped them into his final box, and I had repeatedly shared my urge to do exactly that with various people -- wife, co-workers -- none of whom had agreed that the urge resonated to them of propriety. But they hadn't been party to the conversation, which I had forgotten.

So Vince, since you are reading this -- it is well-documented that the dead read all blogs -- I'm sorry that I forgot that I had actually promised you I would put poptarts in your coffin, in the shock of you actually dropping dead and all. I believe you have forgiven me this slight; your ghost did not seem furious, just slightly disappointed. Perhaps Tomiko will enjoy pop-tarts ritually from now on. Perhaps she will leave her post in the Atlanta school system and go work for Kellogg’s. I have no idea.

The sudden death by natural causes of Vincent Pruitt is made somewhat creepier by the coincidence of the plot in Dilbert involving a dead co-worker immediately following. I had corresponded with Scott Adams fairly recently. I wonder if someone at the FBI has done some statistics matching people who write to scott adams with mysterious droppings-dead in office environments in november 2006; perhaps Dogbert is really truly evil evil evil and has access to ricin and a network of operatives --- did the dear departed have an encounter with a small trenchcoated dog who poked him in the leg with a sharpened umbrella?

Apparently Vince was writing a draft of some fiction when, as the minister said at the funeral, "God called in his loan." I think the plot device of the story concept that makes the author suddenly die has been fully explored in several works, the first two examples are the very weird horror movie "The Ring" (the discusson on the IMDB page for which refers us to W. Somerset Maugham's story "Appointment in Samarra") and the Monty Python sketch about the joke that is so funny that it is translated into German by a team of translators who are only given access to at most two words each and used as an offensive weapon in The Great War.

Monty Python possibly reveal that the joke is very close to, but not exactly

1: My dog has no nose.
2: How does it smell?
1: Awful.

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