No Smoking Joint

Smog-Free. Shiny-White. Clean Lungs.

but i smiled and he flinched. and an automatic response to a hackneyed query. 

"i'm good." 

you know, the mechanics of American goodwill starts with the obligatory phrase. soon, you would not realize the exact reason for doing so, except it was contagious. that it would become a staple in a language you would be constrained to inculcate. 

"then why are you smiling?" he asked me. noticed a stifle of laugh, and i thought this guy must be a nutcase. a person with an untightened screw. or needed little lubrication. then, he proceeded on a litany that only Soren Kierkegaard or Immanuel Kant would articulately attempt to evoke. the finicky profundities of life and the motors that influenced its precarious traverses. 

my reply was a mere shrug. he repeated something. 

"when you said you're good--it is because you feel good. not because it was the only right thing to say. people don't contribute to the overall atmosphere of your day. you create it. you make your own happiness." 

when he paused. i knew it would be followed by another kernel of his loose-screwed wisdom. "what makes you happy?" 

i was the one that flinched at this retort. i stood there, uncertain. the uncertainty came from the choice of words. of what the right answer would be. 

"you see, the universal response we get is our jobs, of getting what we want. but it is the immaterial things we neglect to recognize." i suspected that he might be trying to convince me of something. a method of persuasion by going through personal transparencies. 

after all, he made sense. 

but before i left, i made a rapid glance at him. he sat there on a lonely outpost of a deserted concourse in early morning, waiting for something. or someone he could impart a smudge of his brain's accretions. 

at the end of the world. where i think his happiness dwells.