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A STROLL WITH RAINER DOWN THE SANTA MONICA BOARDWALK--
or:
THE TITTIES OF PARADISE: My breasts have fallen and they can't get up.

1

The first thing we noticed were palms trees rising up though encasements of concrete: Then southern California's other exotic transplants-- all encased in the concrete of commodified paradise.

The fog gave the Santa Monica Mountains a hue of powder blue, the color of a leisure suit from 1975.

The mountains of my heart, you said, were draped in similar preposterous shades.

We heard a lost elegy of decay drifting from the Leisure Suit Mountains, singing to imprisoned palms and fragmented memory;

our memories, glinting like the shards of a shattered mood-ring, scattered among the ruins of yearning, while we swooned to the mountain's preposterous melody of polyester rot, barely audible amid so many insistent voices of more fashionable junk.

Not this. Not this. Not this-- the song cried out.

Wane insights: Fragmented man: Age of proliferate junk-- we chanted back, out of time.

2

"I once had talent," I insisted, "It rose, flexible yet upright, towards the future," I continued, scanning the landscape in search of metaphoric fodder, "... like... like the tits of young girls who skate past us on this boardwalk...

"Talent like young tits.... Expecting men to be good to their word, I revealed those titties to all the wrong sorts... was felt up and betrayed-- Now I am aging, bitter, and stretch-marked."

"What a preposterous comparison; it's almost sinister in its banality and self-absorption," you replied.

"Yes, it is. As preposterous, banal, and sinister as that decade was.... The years I spend here in Los Angeles.

"My high school friend, Lia had large, much-admired breasts and a nature given to expansive, Rilkean yearnings, both of which lasted about the duration of the Leisure Suit Years-- and she was, of course, repeatedly disappointed and betrayed. As she proceeding through the years, she grew sagging, silly, booze-bloated and chronically discontent.

"Then a detested grandmother died, left her millions and she gave up her reflexive rousing and moved to the old's woman's estate in the country.... But there is no analog to this incident of anomalous providence in my story," I lamented to you: "My sad, spiritual stretch-marks remain."

"There will be no divine force to lift my titties towards heaven, no silicon salvation will be bestowed, no preacher will lay on hands and heal them...."

You replied, "....then they will have to fall, plummeting from paradisiacal hope, falling all the way to veritable earth, and, then perhaps, rise like alien palms among the fateful encasements of time and place."

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