Causeway -> Heart -> Log -> Aisle

by Sal Bleeker

My discman sputtered out before I reached Electric Ladyland, before I’d even cast my hang-ups over the seaside. I had no choice but to recalibrate my ears to the hum of illuminated billboards lining the road at long intervals: LOVE YOUR BABIES: BORN & UNBORN. NEED HELP? 1-800-395-HELP. LAST GOOD CUP FOR MILES. 4 1/2 MILES ON THE LEFT. By removing my headphones I was made aware of the gummy swamp air on my neck, of the gnats congregated around the billboard lights, of this place, no place actually, an isolated road cutting through wetlands to the airport. A little after dusk the sky still reddish and hazy, I could just make out the silhouette of a six-story car garage up ahead. I must be near the airport, I thought. I’d been walking for about two hours, my progress checked by the relentless stream of tractor trailers whose right of way I was obliged to acknowledge, abandoning the road for the soggy grasses to the side. They blared their horns as they approached and as they hurtled past, as a reproach, as if to say, “This is no place for an evening stroll.” No, nothing to see and take in along this silt and coal ash filled causeway.

If I had to compare this place to one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, I’d choose Clarice, a place that reconstitutes itself from its very ruins, but an unsettled place. An unsettled place is a rare, special place is it not? Huge swaths of the country share this peculiar quality of being unsettled and purposeful. Lonely roads laid over swamps, mountains or deserts with no discrimination, colonized by glowing billboards. And not just roads leading to and from airports. You also get the precise feeling of being anywhere in former warehouse districts repurposed as corporate bazaars. Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, San Diego, what’s the difference? A square mile of Home Depot, Target, Best Buy and Ikea has nothing to do with the city it is circumscribed by, it transcends the function of a city. But I really see these places, I can’t not see them, although they try their best to be pure ideas. I see the little slivers of grass between highways and their retaining walls. Hopelessly abstract little islands of green, they almost look habitable. I’d clear off the detritus from the road and take real good care of them. I’d husband those slivers of nonroad, those odd triangles of futile longing for the lawn, for habitation, for home. What planner decided to leave in a tiny slice of hope? And why grass? Why not lavender? I suppose these scattered slices of lawn remind long-suffering commuters that they too tend a little piece of subdivided earth, and they take heart.

Preparing to camp for the night I wondered, where are my comrades? Safely tucked away I presume. Our rugged culture heroes aside, Americans are a decidedly indolent, pampered multitude. And though the frontier ethos lives on in rhetoric, one is always within striking distance of a Taco Bell, a Starbucks and an Econo-Lodge. But I was traveling lower than low budget. I’d sooner sleep in the bushes than fold my lanky frame over chairs in a perpetually lit, thrumming airport lobby. Besides, airport workers are trained to eye me like a terrorist or a drug smuggler. I should have eaten earlier. The moisture clinging to everything was cooling. It was cooling on my skin and my body temperature was dipping in accordance with its own rhythm. I thought, I’d like to lay down now. I’d like to walk into the road, lay my head down on the road, press my ear to the asphalt, and listen for a deep rumbling in the earth… I peeled myself off of the road and into the brush beside the road. I hadn’t eaten since noon and I was a bit dehydrated. I stepped over some brush and then through the trees, squishing wet grasses under my feet. I stumbled on a downed log, a good place as any to crash. I laid my jacket down over the damp grasses and collapsed next to the log.

Seated by the aisle, I dozed lightly knowing that the flight attendants had only an inch of clearance on either side to push their pitiful carts past as they offered sodas. Exhausted from sleeping rough, rocks in the spine. Soda, soda, soda. The idiotic word soda, and the blind faith in soda. The crisp pop of a carbonated beverage being opened, the muffled pop of a dud. Baseball, Wall Street, soda, soda. I must have slept in a clump of weeds last night. I smelled like big fern weeds, the kind of weeds we thought were wiped out when we laid down concrete and sod, those big fern weeds that blight everything they touch, that grow back twice as high when they’re cut down. Seated next to me, a woman bobbed her baby up and down. The baby had a winning smile and the woman, tall, composed, fresh from a good night’s rest, was itching to chat. She told me the baby, a good-natured little blob, had a penchant for rap music, and she told me other particulars of her typical existence which I responded to kindly and tactfully: a conversation. I even took out a little thumb piano and plucked the keys for the baby, old Uncle Sal. In the presence of this little family, Mom and Baby and Grandmom to Mom’s right, I felt strangely at peace, chatting away. For a moment, cocooned with the other cargo on this passenger jet lifting us literally out of the swamp and into clear skies I thought, maybe I’ll settle down, have a family. What kind of a man is so driven by impulse that he burns through his meager resources before he’s even gotten off the ground, reduced to sleeping in the foliage off of the road to the airport? What kind of an abject creature would husband a sliver of highway median and not a household? A prodigal, profligate man that dwells in neglected spaces, that admires the pigeon and knows how many stray cats are put down each day. As I touched on before, I hadn’t eaten and I hadn’t really slept. My nerves were keyed from all the sodas popping off. Each muffled burst represented in my mind the petty aspirations of a multitude of meritless, web-footed, complacent nothings sucking on sodas like spoiled children at snack time, without any sense of purpose or meaning or decency. Rabble, I thought, rabble with syrupy, muffled aspirations. Hah, I was on a righteous motherfucking tear. Abruptly the baby spat onto my pant leg. I wiped the white milky substance up with my hand and assured the mother that it was nothing. But she insisted on patting my leg down with a burping rag, really rubbing my leg vigorously with the rag, come to think of it. Recall that I had slept in a marsh last night. By no means had the innocent baby spoiled my spotless attire. Here I was being patted, caressed and rubbed down with maternal affection by an attractive woman with large, manicured hands, just as I had been alternately cursing and pining for the comforts of a home life, unwisely contrasted with the occasional indignities that an itinerant endures as a matter of course. “A little milk on the pants is nothing,” I insisted awkwardly. I must have looked uncomfortable. Grandmom intervened and the two had a heated conversation in a Slavic tongue. Finally Grandmom blurted, “You look like her dead brother. Here, picture, loooook.” I did resemble the thin, bearded man in the photo. I was taken aback, and I understood how the woman had scrubbed my leg so gratuitously without a shred of self-consciousness, since I could have passed for her dear brother. My mouth was dry and my eyes were heavy. I wanted a Coke. A coke, at that moment, transcended my inner strife. I looked back down the aisle and, sure enough, a flight attendant was easing her cart through the cramped aisle.

Walking systems

by Howard Kleger

Where can malls potentially exist? In the distant future, they are more commonly way below ground, on the ocean, under the ocean. Much further into the future, they are in a space station, or on another planet. I walked home last week and my mind was churning out in its regular routine as blood flow met cells and boredom in the loathsome city with my head making resourcefulness in my fox's desperate attempt to chase white rabbit of frustration and letdowns through the blinding snow. I was (coming from) the market for groceries. I was isolating realities as a psychosoma in a no solution safe world howard discovered while searching the internet 2 hours before and finding that even the water is completely unsafe and irrevocably unmanaged. You'd think that would be a problem enough. Walk with me and entertain a little further down the street for some deeper issues. Its time once again to go to the movies! Oh no! So, i continue on filtering the segments of reverse systematic scientific formulas and any proportion of 2 dimensional ratios in balance with the universe against itself. Fantasy, reality , proofs, POOFS, oofs, and loose leaf books. Sleuths...where IS a market located? Why? Who am I? Why do i persist? What way do i resist? HOW do i exist? What do i miss? So, where is a market. On earth. okay. check. in a subway area..hmmm...check that, too. And elevated, connected to a garage with cars, or in a mall. Less commonly, on the water, in Japan. I reevaluate as i approach my house. It is one day later, and im reviewing what i forced myself to think about at two locations, until i was convinced as i walked back home this afternoon, that what i was doing was worthy. I compared, and continue to. Yes. Then, I utilize what I've found, again, and thereafter I tweak and reconstruct the reality structures unearthed on multiple snowflake and calcitrant levels, some of viscosity and turbidness, or whatever fits the prose.
In a sense of distrust, their might be too many areas for the questioning individual to function effectively, and, it IS true: their are many areas, places, avenues, for this person to be fooled and unable to filter and reconstruct certain integrities of information he (or she) has to receive, transfer...which is one of the reasons why everything is so indisputably and indefinitely unresolved with complexities, reammendment, and contracts. People need business councilors to help talk out intent, at least, or trust, or, for that matter, truth. Confusion would not be the case otherwise. Dreams, schisms.past, future, and an immense space.
So, in this chapter, we will see how it all will be potentially flipflopped on another dimension by first stating out loud the most minimal bit of an idea.
The intersection is approaching as i ask, "can we commonly have a sense of movement without attending it to our, his, her,their, my, or Howard's sense of reality?" "Mostly on recall, is a specified answer to self. My past, a past, i feel, for the sake of walking this prose for analogy to paste interesting collage designs, is more about a collection of information that occurred. It can be redistributed. This is why dreams and unknown items are more likely surrounded by a larger ratio of information to space for whatever was left behind in its path that was so much, in such a noncomparable world of thought, against those on the ball to daydreamers, all sitting in the same pool, wading and treading, flying, dying, selling automobiles, eating shoes that bark, when they all go to sleep. Eh..so, not necessarily, then, in this line of reasoning, connected to "facilitators," attached to everyday activities, or any of its direct parallel comparatives, perhaps. Also, this redirects loss of responsibility for some immediate American (if you live in Howard world, like me) trans-actions that are used to make reality function on its prime level that keeps everything, supposedly, wrapped together. The action moves our components together before it is thrown and recombined into our totality we'll call democracy, for one useful example, if i did'nt make that analogy enough. I did. Whatever. Okay. We might consider the reality or its intent, but that's not altogether necessary for this discussion right now.

masked figure totem me w tp

All Wrong

  by Howard Kleger

    Early in the morning I was forced out on a walking trip at the command of Brian.  Bit paranoid, by halt and by vault, in the silver Toyota Celica.  Brian's rain, and Brian's reign.  Brian's brain, his bells, or bells; do we have reigns?  Brian's rain posed concurrently with scriptures.  Chapter twelve, verse two, perhaps, to determine our conversation.  An urban project, a floating island satellite mind of trees.  The kind that talk back to you.

    Our conversation, they tell us, or, in the "civilized woods" of our conversation, or some place geolocally and spiritually unrelated, a lonely island sits in mimicry of the orbiting technotrap.  I never knew I would be able to share paranoia. But still... Which side am I on, if any?  If only I can figure out this Brian thing. Until then, all words fall into the present intelligential landslide of an incorrect nature--my own zen buddhist paradigm of self-whiplashing with no recursive path ever directly attaining any genuine outcome, not even the insubstantial wall that my mind trickles from.  To breathe my true afterlife, satanic born, half-birthed, retarded and reboot-pickled brain of a weed, a mere sprout that just may fall--even here in the virtual absolute path-skimming reality.  Me, college, welfare, financial aid, Social Security, Howard Lee Kleger, Jerry Kleger, Judy Kleger, Susan Kleger--all wrong.

    Salvador Dali had his bitrthday one day later.  The great black jazz singer--I forget her name--had died that morning or the day before. Dali called this self-verified panoramic stereophonic paranoia, as part of the concurrent dynamic of my faulty British civilian pervert's social crutch, that really poses no more than rightful humor.  In this case, a faulty idea of some ridiculous modern age Dr Livingston character that might, at specific moments, among fellow hikers, be likened to a diametrically opposed ornithologist:

    "Oh that brown speckled bird is not sexy."

    "Here is an interesting specimen of industrial debris," picking up a piece of rubber with a stick, "the kind that talks back to you with an open city energy, at an oceanic trot to the New Jersey beach, in normal time.  Like, you know, life." 

    With ease I embarked upon the forest.  In my excitement I never considered a frightfully natural tendency, until we smoked and vibrated our bodies' cosmic-consciousness four hundred tree lengths into the forest.  I figured my usual edge and panel-down regard was maladjusted to the malady of marijuana.  Just a joint.  And such possibility revealing toxins.  And I had an inkling, though still superficially and unsteadily, an edge, wisdom, and an uncertain confidence as to what, and of what worth determined the strength and unknown of the paranoia that so preceded and proceeded it, behind it, in front of the technical, complicated, sometimes natural bush. Jibber jabber, in other words. You cannot jibber a jabber without jab.  As long as I shook my head fast in my pants, moving forwards steadfast, alarmed yet comforted by my ability to sustain logic enough to know the sources of consistency of logic, that all people having read this far will put down this book.  And persecutors of such half-Jewish record shop owners such as Brian, and the source of South Park areas, extensions and follies that exaggerate from the root of logic, and hidden divisions of Brian.  I soon discovered talk of split concrete vault-mass, eroding... Oh, he did not know.

    

    We, and the dog, a hefty bulldog, seven years of age and not young, walked like an old grandmother.

    "Can you keep an eye on her, Howard?"

    He looked back to make sure.

    "I have a visor, a mental ray communication on her, sir."

    He looked dartedly up with his boxed head, short, shaven brown hair and squared off beard of personality, a quickly approaching middle-aged, responsible narcissist and paranoid conspiracy theorist with OCD.  Am I jumping too much to conclusions?  Wide, concerned eyes open; bulldoggish features, yet semi-attractive and without the drowlishness of the bulldog, obviously.  With a crescent shade of an aura of health, and vigor of a sustained and fighting youth of a still new generation of people, held in suspense and ready to discord and uproot like giant trees from the ground and reroot vaguely in a more vaporous, unsteady gypsy grounding.  A fresh new start for hybrid alienated yearlings and sproutings in the same area, with the memory chip of awareness switched to "Alien Origins, et cetera," and "That was wrong, this is something yet to come," and "Take us over as we die around it." 

    An older system, according to the American Indian way of re-adapting and living in seventh generational developments, caretaking mother spaceship earth, on 700 journeys around the sun, read in the fossils and layers of detailed comparisons of experimental growth on planet earth, spaceship earth.

    "Do you see this break here, man?" he said as he called us over to join him, the dog stumbling, resting and panting behind us.

    "C'mon, step closer here, check this out."

    "It's a different use of the senses.  It's quiet.  We're not bombarded by the outside, artificial, ego-driven drones and screams of automobiles.  It attunes your senses to a subtler frequency, not exactly quiet, but much quieter, much more natural and real.  Our bodies must identify again with this.  It's our true primal origins.  There's a lot to learn from this.  We can learn, if we listen.  I can sit here all day and study this.  I feel I've hit upon some basic, untapped intelligence here.  We have to start over.  Not exactly over.  We have the resources.  We can set up encampments.  We have the instincts of hunters and gatherers, and with the present technology we must have individuals that can harness it.  Cause, the shit's gonna hit the fan.  The old system is dead.  And nature and "god" are going to take us over again.  So we have to learn the signs and do a complete panel analysis, slowly, of our inner workings and more highly advanced information systems, our primate systems, talk to nature, learn which berries are poisonous, learn to live, gather handbooks, forage, re-acquaint ourselves with stuff like old vinyl, but work like a reality DJ with balls, no fears or tears attached, ready to die, or live... be humiliated, have humility.  Learn when to beat the wife, the mistress, the agent, or when to get mauled by a bear, a pack of rodents, a stick of Dentine gum, or an uprooted multidimensional chameleon technofern, the kind that breathes multidimensional oxygen and will stop you in your path... and whisper an exhalation... to breathe love into the ugly within, slowly, like the running river, uprooting rock rust and red moss and lichen, unremarkable, as slow as the river; those people were much slower.  We are as old as this river... time to pass... we have heaven."

    "Our bodies are trapped, but we will be reborn. Or something like that... who's in with me?" I think he said, calling out to Sage the dog, as we continued back up the slope.

    We stopped in a bit to let dogs and people pass.  Three girl hikers.  Still, remarkably, not a word of sex.  I was wondering. Remarkable, I thought. What is this?  I grew further unsteady and re-evaluated myself and others quickly, fluidly re-adapting the elasticity and longevity of a palapable, emergent, obviously parallel force, if seen through critical analytics from old-view eyes, ascertaining continual self-worth and a firm onward and upward grasp of my corporatized ego bot (self-calculated.com) at all costs (also Howard.com).  Who was I fooling?  I let the Stone Age wear away to survey the scene and noted my tendencies as an opposed standerby, and mentioned I was on... um... indebted and controlled at the heart of the government.  So I said I was someone who was like a direct filter and communication; my fetal, umbellical, life-experienced chord was attached to the heart of Satan.

    He looked half at what I was saying, sort of uncaring or disregarding.

    "I don't know man.  Sometimes you have to change, things must change... that's all a lie.  We're transformed into units.  We need to see that, and kinda learn from that.  I hope people see this. It's happening. There's no choice. The universe is talking to us. It's what we want, our inner souls, not this guise.  It's only a better, clearer reality.  But some people, like you, perhaps... who knows... some need to start at the bottom, and maybe become feed for generations, grind the mills. I'm just talking.  Listen.... here's an underpass."

    "Wow this is high," Nevin said.

    I thought this would break the tension, but I was half-amused that I was perhaps reading and insulting Nevin.  Of course, being who I am--or once was, as a matter of fact--did not and does not care.  Proportionally, to keep on a real note, at this moment recollecting these week-old thoughts on paper, precluding disaster, which made its introduction slowly, evidentially, paranoically--in other words, when I first met Brian, who had recently used Dan's coffee machine, saying, "Did you hear the news?  The Mississippi Delta oil spill?  This is deep geological cultural ballistics.  We're fucked.  The earth, or whatever, doesn't like us.  I'm prepared, I'm ready to shoot a deer or a person.  Me and my friends have a shelter with two years of government surplus military rations and canned goods in South Carolina.  A fallout shelter.  I'm ready to go when the 'bomb' drops, so to speak."

    We would laugh, but half warily, or less so.  What I'm saying is that I have recovered my senses.  I'm lying; I have never lost them. I give myself up temporarily to the onset of new situations, but I am a super-realist, which allows for the onset of abuse, even self-abuse with a surprise whooping Indian attack from the left side of my Brain.  Confederates in the lower cortex, Northern Liberties and Fairmount Park sharing the frontal and occipital lobe (this is simplified for literary reasons, of course).  Howard Kleger sharing the midregion, and a scattering electric corona fire of auric belts, humming and stampeding over the soft evispheres of terrain, charted and yet uncharted--maybe by Aliens, but always me, in other words.  Y'know? C'mon, comfortable on a sofa or chair.  Strong, versatile, wealthy, enjoying life and bits and pieces of my to-be-continued existence as I put together my 'movie', an artistic independent film adaptation autobiography: Howard on Howard.  Duhhhh... Right?  Of course. Don't say I didn't tell you so.

   

    Back to the conclusion of the story.  Armageddon, take two.  In the next and final part I will explain Cliff-Note Theory, Brian as defined by nature, an inconclusively vast, reality encompassing eminence, and all in contrast to that, supposedly, including himself, for a diametrically opposed, to-be-continued and revised, open to death but willing to jump from a waterfall and embark with wonder, wanderment, and discern, or spoil vaguely and mistfully, but also honestly, with boils.  Old age? Infinity? The question. Not always an easy answer. What would the Druids do?  Where are we, obviously, or for some, not so obviously, at fault?  What is the expression?  "A bird in hand..."  Who was Ben Franklin, really?  What type of scientist, and person, and world diplomat was he?  How does he affect us today?  Lastly, lest I forget, though my weak, nimbled chemical 'romance' with my self-preserved statements fades, their weakness exposed by the technicality of delaying the immediacy of the onset of the final descriptive, as would be expected in text, essayistic influence, main topic, diatribe, whatever.  I'm not self deflated out of a nervous disorder, I'm just testing the grounds of the possibilities of looking like a do-do, a wingless bird of prey, a pigeon, an oil- rigged fowl, unable to take flight, as, presently, real birds chirp happily in the oncoming, uncaring South Philadelphia preservation outside my friend's window.  Hello, good morning, in other words.  Jeez.  Semi-colon, dah dah dah... I hear the end of the George Harrison record coming clicking into view as I get ready to lay this last sentence down on the page... circa 1970, Electronic Sound/ Under the Mercey Wall.  I wonder.  How much would Brian buy that for?  Questions.  Questions.  No easy answers. 

    What of the symbology and analysis of the dying dog?

    "I communicated with her psychically, sir.  She told me she prefers basic 'communicating' through the eyes. Not mind rays."    

    "Okay," he said with his guise, slightly, and went onward, forward, as we check the next paragraph. The trashmen are yelping, "Yay... ho!" as they remove the garbage outside. In front of, or to the side of, this laptop, this chapter.

    The dog began gasping.

    "Oh... no," Brian murmured and held Sage's muzzle. Sage's aura is off, something is wrong.  It's grayish green.  To explain thoroughly, Sage had developed an enlargened heart condition from a tumor of still unknown origin, but common in older dogs.      "Can you look it up on pet MD?" 

    "No way am I going to look up an ailment for a dog that I can have examined by my neighbor friend who works at a vet clinic.  She checked the dog out."

    "Maybe you can just check the facts out, with actual dog results for the same type of ailment."

    "Well, she said a better diet and exercise out in a natural environment with a lot of oxygen should help reduce or slow down the symptoms. Sage is old though. Seven years old.  She lived a good life." 

    "How about water?  Or a valve replacement?  Or a medicine to soften the tissue?  Heart medicine?  How about holistic healing?"

    "What do you mean?  Like herbal remedies?  I'd rather stick to a professional.  There are too many kooks out there."

    "Well, it couldn't hurt.  Energy and chakra aura healers might work on pets as well, or their might be a witch doctor-type hand healer specifically for dogs."

    "Well, enlarged heart conditions are irreversable. It's two or three symptoms now, not just one. Less oxygen gets to the dog's brain.  You can see it in her eyes.  She's especially confused.  Sort of like a diabetic attack or anemia."

    "Maybe the dogs scared her a little, or she's just tired," said Nevin.

    "Or what if we put down some food, maybe there's some dog nutritionist. Maybe she's just hungry."

    "She just ate.  She's probably just tired."

    "Yeah... this is the furthest she's gone out in the wilderness ever. And it's been awhile since I had her out on a nature hike.  More protein, something to oxygenate the cells.  Extra protein, maybe a tender beef, fish diet, eggs and bread, maybe...?  I don't know. Whatever."

    He patted the dogs back.

    "Hey Sage," Nevin blurted, with a possible semi-conclusion.  "She seems to normalize and brighten up as if completely normal when you say her name."

    "Yeah, maybe she's just lonely," I said.

    "She needs some extra love and attention."

    We stopped at that point and exited the forest. But before we completely do so, let us review some other topics at hand I said I would mention here.  The Cliff-Note Theory.

    "What the hell are you talking about?" Brian asked. 

    I did not have time to explain, but here it is: Artistic types, creative eccentrics, scientists, inventors,

architects, fashion designers, actors, politicians, often share a trait of a distant relation to facts, which are often irresolutely locked in a complex pattern larger and also minutely smaller--an intrinsic trait for visions. The larger and more complex the patterns and time-space transparency and filaments that incorporate this invisible, dimensional, meaningful or sometimes stupid or fact-based terrain, the more adaptable the situation.  When I mentioned my writing of this "hiking story", Nevin called it flexibility, a means to survive and thrive in a swarming chaotic environment.

    It would appear indubitably, and I told him so, upon which he revoked this credit to his name. The perfect brainwasher cult leader. 

    "No, no. I don't care, let people make their own decisions."

    "He's just a mission guider, a stick pointer."

    At least I didn't call him a troll bridge collector, like Dan said of him yesterday, as we headed to the beach in the afternoon.      "It's raining more often," he said, "people are identifying again with ancient earthen components with a higher understanding. Its all in a quest to evolve. The old Roman system is dead." 

    Obviously.  People need to get their heads out of the sand.  They are the ones that are being brainwashed.  Deep indetermined value systems, mysterious travels, vague insecure designs. The quest of life. The story of dreams.

A tale of two lungs

"The healthiest man in the universe, upon autopsy, cross fingers--actually, scratch that, I'm French*... his lungs were pink..."
Dan was drunk, Dan was pink with thought, he was existential, or was he DADA?  Was i just a tired couch laying irony on the ironing board of drunk life?  Was this an Alex Gray session, was this a small Swedish restaurant psychedelic conference at a public back room in a cafe at the end of the turn of the century? and the new millenium?  Was this post-traumatic New York Disorder? 

The healthiest human in the universe smoked all of his life on his macrobiotic diet.  Why?  In one reality, for this wordology topic, Dan cased, a man tripeful of word-plays with a case of red wine. It appeared, he played with it temporarily, to pass by like a placebo-mosquito modifier, hints here and there, as when a novel is caught by the wind on a sandy beach, and the pages flit back and forth, and the mind's eye catches them anyway, being so far away from Philadelphia and all that, and needing, oh so needing SPF, as he swiftly adjusts with a downward swift stroke in the fancied air:
"Americans have a problem, fetishizing the body and the possibly empty neurotic rituals such as vitamins- E, K, Zinc, Fibre, diets, healthy food."

Changing his arm of thought, starting from wrist, extending to the elbow, and slumbing off a turn of the neck lazily from the head, shifting in his seat to talk about the smoking study.
"I don't care about bad lungs... I don't want to be found alive at 75 or 80 with healthy lungs, let them be corroded."

I warily nodded, of course; being that it appeared that all thoughts related to the demise of me--my personality. I'm sitting in front of Satan, I thought, the nemesis, the confusion of my days.  I need the emergency American Eagle scout to jump in and punch him in the face, so he can be out of the picture, so I can bathe myself in sleep on the couch, with the window allowing a modicum of fresh air to breeze in, just enough as to slightly fix the balance in the AM rising, to secure that only healthy results occur after my 100% morning intoxicating ritual, usually starting and ending with hocking phlegm.

"Phlegm," he continued, "is apparently what the germ of disease and sickness needs to attach to in order for someone to get 'sick'."  Then we switched to cancer, as he took a drag. 
"A healthy attitude is what one needs, or not to give a fuck, I mean to say.  Americans..."

Puff puff. 

"The longest-living people in the world, the Japanese--no, not the Chinese... Chinese food is poison--the Italians, Swiss, French (I really don't recall) all do whatever the fuck they feeeel like."

"And I suppose that has nothing to do with California-based new age principles of whole body / whole mind / whole particle regeneration? Life regeneration?"

"Partly," he retorts.
"Oh... okay.  Then what's the other part, Dan?"
"Eh-heh... The French cuisine is chock full of unhealthy ingredients.  A french diet is whatever tastes good... 'Tonight, ce la vie... I am a French bourgeoise elite... mua.'  But the French diet is like this every day.  Tripe, cod liver and oil, butter, cream, salt, sugar, fat, meat, intestines, frog's legs and calf eyeballs... lemons wedged in a pig, the bladder of a baby cow, a pheasant." "Even MSG?"
"Yes!  No, not really," laughing out loud to himself as he took a swig of his tenth cigerette required for the study.  He looked at the cigerette as the example the whole time.
"I'm not used to 10 a day," he says.
"All this talk is making me hungry for a cigerette," I said.
"Really? Do you want one?"
I nodded and he tossed one over.  A marlboro light, which tasted less poisony and lasted longer without extinguishing compared to Camel cigarettes.
"I really wish i could just smoke straight tobacco."
"You see... the real killer is stress, which causes high blood pressure. When they evaluated me, they were quite surprised.  I had absolutely no signs of high blood pressure.  I am basically healthy." (Well... he didn't say this.)  But insinuated all the fallacies to the maladies comprised and homed off to death college in Park USA of the American Environment called US. Well, most of us.  Me and the Philly crew.  I'm stressed, I have stressers; am I wrong to be making this movie? 
"Is that unnatural, Dan?"
"No, that's your life."
"Oh cool!" I smiled and laughed at my personal success in kicking life's ass.  That's me!  We gazed off in the distance.  I said I was reallly tired, but I'd like to rewrite the story and the next one too.