Safety

Was I really ever an OSHA superstar? When I took my first construction helper job in the late 60's, even my reckless-even-for-a-teen eye was able to see safety hazards to shake a seasoned veteran. The seasoned veteran who was mentoring me reinforced my natural observations with a stern determination to promote sorely needed safety protocols. As I cycled through the throw-away kid camps, OSHA was born. By the time I cycled through my Army tour and returned to contract construction helper work to pay for college expenses, OSHA was in its prime. "Safety Joes" were cycling through construction sites like Robocops, forever handing out citations and threats. By the time I retired from construction in 1995, the Safety Joes were more concerned with regulation than safety. I never did master the higher art of keeping a hard hat on my immensely thick head of hair while supervising overhead activity. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked the typically bald Safety Joes to empathize with the fact that bare scalp and thick hair are not the same? I certainly shouldn't have asked for empathy on the itch and sweat factor. Plastic hard hats and all their plastic straps were a nightmare in that department, especially during a long, hot sub-tropical summer.

During the long, hard maskite occupation, flashbacks have turned more than one store clerk into bald, peckish Safety Joes in my mind with their commands to, "Stay Safe." Where'd I leave my fricking hard hat this time?

My paranoia of the maskite invasion caused me to delete all my journals from the early maskite occupation for fear that the germaphobic faction was/is compiling Blacklists of non-compliers for? ? ? God know what. I have since been attempting to revert to my old world spiral notebook and subscription-free pen.

I miss my DS journal. Am I safe yet? Dare I return to keeping my therapy journal in the less private Virtual World? The maskite occupation is not over. **They** are still around, less readable than ever as their eyes dart over the rims of their masks. Are they formulating plans to use their Blacklists for a more effective coup de e'tat on their next go-round? 

Testing, 1, 2, 3. . . I don't **get** to know what the maskites are up to, but I can test my own emotional responses to this daring act of publishing an on-line entry. We see what grows.