By Ed Staskus

   “You’re early,” Barron Cannon said.

   “I know, but I wanted to come in before class and ask if you would help me navigate my new electric yoga pants,” Zadie Wisniewski said. She flashed a pop tart smile. The pants were skin tight and cherry red.

   “I don’t think you need any help from me,” Barron said. “Your pants look high voltage enough to navigate themselves.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “The color, you can’t beat that cherry red.”

   “Oh, right, they are bright. They’re a special pair. They’re usually black.  No, what I mean is, they’re actually electric.”

   Barron Cannon was a freelance yoga teacher. He often taught classes at the border of Lakewood and the west side of Cleveland, near where he lived. Zadie was there for a Hot Yoga class. Her pants were hot looking enough to fit right in to the theme of the class.

   She was wearing spanking new Nadi X yoga pants. The X pants are high-tech high-performance yoga wear, trumping Perfect Moment, Lululemon, and Runderwear. They are up to date. They are like wearing the mind of somebody else.

   There is a battery attached to a port on the pants. Wires are woven into the fabric. Sensors sewn throughout the pants are synced to an app that collects data as the wearer practices yoga. If a pose is going wrong, the app makes that part of you that is getting it wrong vibrate with a low-voltage electrical charge. When you make an adjustment, the app pipes up with praise. If you keep getting it wrong, the app keeps buzzing you and saying, “Please try again.”

   “Are you pulling my leg?” Barron asked.

   “No, of course not,” Zadie said. “These pants cost me two hundred and fifty dollars.”

   “They’re cool,” said Folasade Adeoso, an influencer with 86,000 followers, the day she demonstrated the pants prancing on a pretend runway at her yoga studio.

   “That’s an arm and a leg,” Barron said about the bleeding-edge pants designed to make you bleed money.

   “So, I wonder if I can roll my mat out in front of you, and if you would handle my phone, keeping it next to you in case I need an adjustment?”

   “Sure,” Barron said. “I’ll do my best.”

   “Great!”

   “You said navigate. What does that mean?”

   “The app is supposed to do it all on its own, but I would feel better if you kept your eye on it.” She handed Barron her iPhone. It was an iPhone 16 Pro Max. It was the most phone Barron had ever seen.

   “It would be super if you would put it on your mat where both of us can see it.”

   “All right,” he said. “But I’m not sure I like this. You should be paying attention to what you’re doing, not relying on an app. Besides, when you come to my class, supervision is my responsibility.”

   “I know,” said Zadie, “but it’s a one-off. The pants are for home, for when I do yoga in my spare room.”

   Nadi X yoga pants are the brainchild of Billie Whitehouse, a fashion and tech designer. She has developed vibrating underwear that buzzes for its own reasons, never mind what’s going on with your private parts. She has developed a driving jacket that vibrates right side and left side to alert you to turn right or left. The latest thing she and her tech team thought up were the new vibrating yoga pants.

   “The vibrations on the body cue you about where to focus and the app lets you know how you went at the end of each pose. Get the smartest yoga experience!” is how the experience is described. “Nadi X guides your yoga practice through the latest state-of-the-art technology based on your body’s alignment. Listen to the audio instructor on your phone and feel the guidance on your skin. The vibrations will guide your focus.”

    It is downstream to go modern, of course, taking mindfulness out of the equation, and go straight to machine learning, straight to the Big Brother of asana practice, the brother who has your best interests in mind and won’t mine any of the data it collects about your body.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” the showman PT Barnum once said. He would have been delighted with the new age and gotten in fast on more of the action.

   “Wearable X is the future of wellness that brings together design and technology to create a better quality of life through experience and fashion,” declares Wearable X, the Australian cyber company behind the yoga pants device.

   “Putting electronics into garments is still so new and so difficult,” said Ben Moir, co-founder with Billie Whitehouse and chief technology officer. “Yoga pants get stretched, get sweated in. The sensors had to be invisible and the pants had to not be a tech-looking product. That’s kind of an engineer’s nightmare.”

   “We’re very proud that it is at its peak.” Billie Whitehouse said about their new attire device, proudly pointing the way to the future. She didn’t mention cow nose rings or anything else about the past.

   “I’ve got to bounce on that,” Barron said to himself. “I smell a rat.”

   “They make my butt look good,” Isabelle Chaput, half of a French performance-art duo, said a few months earlier during a demonstration of the pants in New York City. The high-waisted four-way stretch level one compression pants aren’t just for gals, either. “These leggings are extremely well made. The high waisted band is flattering, and these are honestly my go-to leggings for everyday wear,” said Justin Gong, reviewing the pants on Amazon. “Whether it’s a full 40-minute flow or a 5-minute session, my Nadi X allows me to flow whenever I want.”

   They were named Nadi X for a reason. “In Sanskrit, the nadi are the highways of communication that exist around the body when all your chakras are aligned,” Billie Whitehouse said, updating the long ago, eliding then and now. “As You Think You Vibrate” is one of the company’s mantras.

   Over the next twenty minutes the Hot Yoga class filled up, a quiet buzz and energy filling the room until there were thirty-some mats lined up in rows alongside and behind Zadie when the proceedings got started. Barron taught a one-hour flow class in a room heated to the mid-90s. His method was to start slow, pick up the pace, end slow, and encourage a five-minute corpse pose at the end.

   He didn’t like it when folks rolled their mats up after the last pose and bolted the room. “Hold your horses!” he demanded. “Lay down, close your eyes, and go inward. ”He could be imperious.

   Nadi X pants are manufactured in Sri Lanka, an island country off the southern coast of India. The nation is prosperous economically, has a strong military, and is the third most religious country in the world, with 99% of all Sri Lankans saying religion is an important part of their daily life. They are by all accounts proud to produce the vibrating pants for the spiritual practice of yoga. 

   Wearable X has designed several yoga sequences for travelers, making the pants and the app work with phones on airplane mode, assuming the flight attendants don’t mind a downward dog in the middle of an aisle at 38,000 feet.

   “Sitting is the new smoking,” Billie Whitehouse said. “It is a genuine epidemic. It’s not just because we’re at desks all day but because we’re constantly on airplanes.”

   Baron Cannon had never been on a jetliner, only a seaplane that flew 30-minute tours over Long Lake in the Adirondacks. He had been on it several times, whenever he went north to the High Peaks for a week of hiking, always flown by the same pilot, a stocky old man by the name of Bob, who if you saw him in the street you might mistake for a bum. He flew his battered Cessna with one hand, pointing out landmarks. Sometimes he flew the little plane with no hands, talking with both hands. He always safely landed it, fair or foul weather, like the lake was a baby’s bottom.

   Nadi X is a godsend for all the yogis who burn up the carbon, flying here there and everywhere, globe-trotting for profit and diversion. The pants are machine washable and powered by a rechargeable battery that lasts up to an hour-and-a half, which is as long as most yoga classes ever are. The battery connects by Bluetooth to a smartphone, letting one and all choose the level of effort they’re going to be putting into the practice.

   “Once you have set your vibration strength, you can place the phone next to your yoga mat during your session. Your pulse is monogamist to your phone. You can have different Nadi X pants, but your phone will always want to connect to your pulse.”

   Everyone knows that their smartphone never screws up and is always up to snuff. Silicon Valley would have a heart attack if it was otherwise. That would be the day a self-driving car runs down a cyberman directing traffic, sending both of them to the garbage dump.

   Inside of ten minutes it all fell into place for Zadie. She wasn’t an expert, but she wasn’t a novice either. In her mid-20s she was fit and smart, smart enough to catch the cues and act on them. By the middle of the class there were hardly any cues anymore. The class was flowing. She was deep into it and getting it just right.

   That’s when the trouble started.

   Even though she was going strong and was intuitively aware of how good it was all going, Barron not even glancing at her, she was getting zapped more and more frequently. The vibrations were rolling up and down her legs almost continuously. Was there something wrong with the device, she asked herself. Was there a ghost in the machine?  There must be! Maybe it’s all this sweat, she thought, mopping her brow. She looked up from the floor pose she was doing to ask Barron to turn her iPhone off, but he wasn’t at the front of the class.

   He was patrolling the room making hands-on adjustments, alignment-based assists for backbends and forward folds. Barron didn’t push anybody too deep into their poses, but he tried to get them into the integrity of it, within the constraints of what their flesh, tendons, ligaments, joints, and bones would bear.

   A young woman had once complained about it in one of his classes, saying that touching her was inappropriate and reminding him about the #MeToo movement, saying it was a real issue to her.

   “You’re doing it wrong,” he said. “You’re compromising your safety.”

   “I don’t care, hands-off. My husband’s a lawyer, just in case you’re a pervert.”

   “Oh, the hell with it, get out of here and don’t come back.”

   “What?” She glared at him. The class stopped and everyone watched the goings-on. Those who knew Barron better than others rolled their eyes heavenward. They knew trouble was coming. Barron didn’t believe in the customer is always right.

   “You heard me.” He fixed his hand firmly on her elbow and led her to the door.

   When they were outside, he leaned into her and said, “Tell your legal beagle the local Hells Angel chapter practices at my class Saturday mornings, so I don’t ever want to hear a word from him about anything litigious or see your face again, understand?”

   “You’re an ass,” she said.

   “Let’s leave it at that, sweet lips. Now drift.” 

   Love, peace, and understanding, he thought, were all well and good, except when it came to the empowered wallets from the better neighborhoods, especially on the nearby lakeshore, which was called the Gold Coast. He didn’t need a bloodhound to know she sprang from there.

   Barron was an anarchist at heart. He believed anarchism walked the walk and fit  best with the practice of yoga. Any other affiliation with anything else, capitalism, socialism, democracy, dictatorship, consumerism, left-wing, right-wing, high and mighty, and the lunatic fringe, was inimical to the practice. 

   Barron was an idealist, but practical enough to pay his taxes and not run red lights. He kept his anarchism to himself. He knew free speech was a given, as long as you weren’t crazy enough to try it.

   Zadie was close to the breaking point. The longer the class went on and the sweatier she got the more her pants shocked her. It was only 12 volts, she knew, but it was getting to be 12 volts every second. Maybe it was more voltage than she thought. Was it rising higher and higher? 

   “Yow, that stung! The hell with it.” She ripped her cherry red yoga pants off and  tossed them angrily into a corner. She was left wearing a pair of royal purple Under Armour stretch undies. Everyone behind Zadie gave them a good look.

   “Eyes on me, everyone, front and center,” Barron harrumphed. “Let’s get back to business.”

   “Those pants can kiss my butt,” Zadie said, getting back into the flow of the class.

   “And, no,” she said, looking straight at Barron, “I won’t need any adjustments for the rest of the class today, thank you very much.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. A  police detective is assigned to find the bomb makers. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   The temperature was in the 90’s, like it had been for weeks, and the humidity was swampy, which it had been for weeks, too, when Frank and Betty Glass went for a walk on the multi-purpose track in the Rocky River Reservation, about a mile south of the mouth of the river and Lake Erie. Downtown Cleveland squats on the east bank of the Cuyahoga River ten miles to the east.

   The Cleveland Metroparks, more than a hundred years in the making, are a series of nature reservations within the urban landscape, more than 21,000 acres, which encircle the city and its suburbs. There are hundreds of miles of walking paths and horse trails, picnic areas and fishing spots, and eight golf courses. Steelhead trout abound in the river.

   Their home was on a side street on the east side of the valley park. If there were ever another Great Flood, the river would have to rise more than one hundred and fifty feet up the cliff to threaten them. Turkey vultures nested in the cliff face and soared all summer like gliders in wide circles on the currents rising up from the lowland. The Glass house, a dark gray Polish double, was ten minutes by foot from the park. It was always cooler mid-summer in the shade of the forest and along the riverbank.

   They walked down the Detroit Rd. entrance into the park, past the marina, the soccer fields, and as far as Tyler Field, before turning around. As they neared Hogsback Lane, the top of which was high above the near bank of the Rocky River, Frank suggested they walk up to see his friend Barron Cannon, whom they hadn’t seen recently. Betty wasn’t exactly Barron’s friend and had no great interest in seeing him.

   It was a month ago that they had gotten back from two weeks on Prince Edward Island off the coast of Canada. At the same time Barron had spent an extended weekend protesting on the American coast, in New York City, protesting the Donald Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy that was invested in the separation of migrant children from their parents at the southern border. Breaking up families was their big idea of the day. They had big ideas every day.

   “I thought Barron enjoys what he calls the antics of the clown car in the capital,” Betty said.

   “He does, but when he comes back down to earth he finds out the clown car is burning oil and he doesn’t like the consequences.”

   “Smoke and mirrors.”

   “That’s what he always says.”

   “You know I don’t want to go see him,” Betty said. She thought he was a smart man, but at the same time pontifical and smart-mouthed. She wanted to tell him her high school days were long over and she knew her ABC’s well enough.

   “I know,” Frank said, turning up Hogsback Lane.

   Barron Cannon was a trim young man in his 30s who lived in an orange Mongolian yurt he built in the backyard of his parent’s ranch-style house at the top of Hogsback Lane. He had a master’s degree in Comparative Philosophy and was a committed yogi, as well as a radical vegan. He owed a king’s ransom in student loans and was chronically unemployed. He never opened the urgent letters sent to him by the Dept. of Education, throwing them away in the trash instead.

   He practiced yoga for two hours a day and meditated for another half-hour. Sometimes he chanted or played his harmonium. He was thankful they had no nearby neighbors who might complain and the house was slightly off the edge of park land, so the park rangers couldn’t bother him. His parents had long since thrown up their hands. They prayed he would find a girlfriend and move away, but weren’t holding their breath. They suspected no woman of sound mind would have him.

   “He needs to be committed,” Betty had said to Frank on several occasions, usually right after they had visited him and were out of earshot.

   “Why couldn’t he stay in New York and occupy Wall Street instead of his mom’s backyard?” she added.

   Barron didn’t have a car or a television. He read books. He had never voted. ”Suppose I was an idiot, and suppose I was a congressman, but I repeat myself,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

   “I’ll vote when anarchists are on the ballot,” he told Frank.

   Frank wanted to remind him that anarchists who vote would be like atheists who pray, but he thought, what would be the point?

   They found Barron in his backyard, lying face-up in the sun on a Sesame Street blanket, on the south side of his yurt. He was naked except for a fig leaf covering his private parts. It was a literal fig leaf.

   Vera looked away when Barron propped himself up on his elbows and the fig leaf rolled away. She wasn’t a prude, but she was judgmental. She didn’t want to judge Barron’s private parts.

   “Sorry,” he said, pulling on a pair of cargo shorts. “I was getting my daily dose of sunshine here on the acropolis.” He was tan, from tip to toe. Frank could see he hadn’t been using an SPF lotion of any kind anywhere on himself.

   “You should be careful,” he suggested. “Too much sun isn’t good for you.”

   “That’s where you’re right, but even more wrong,” Barron replied. “Too much sun may be bad, depending on your skin and heredity, but avoiding the sun altogether is not good for anybody. Remember, we evolved in the sun, living outdoors for our two million years on this planet.”

   He flipped on a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and leaned towards Frank.

   “Then, not very long ago, we started messing with Mother Nature and started avoiding the sun. When you avoid the sun, you may not get rickets, because you can always take a pill, but all the pills in the world can’t replace the real thing.”

   He pointed up to the sky. ”When you avoid the sun, like it’s life and death on your skin, you increase the risk of dying from internal cancers,” he said solemnly.

   Frank must have looked skeptical, because Barron tilted his dark glasses down his nose Lolita-style and exhaled.

   “Look it up,” he said.

   It turned out, when Frank looked it up, Barron was right.

   “I really hate it when he’s right about anything,” Vera said.

   The Journal of Epidemiology, nearly forty years ago, reported that colon cancer rates are nearly three times higher in New York than in New Mexico. Since then many other studies have found solar UVB induced vitamin D is also associated with reduced risks of breast and rectal cancers.

   “When the government and our medical monopoly started telling us to avoid the sun, they forgot to remind us we would need to get our vitamin D somewhere else,” Barron said.

   Tired of Barron’s pronouncements, Vera wandered off and was commiserating with Barron’s mother about the flower garden her son had torn out, except for a small plot she had saved at the last minute after coming home from the grocery and discovering what he was about. He had thrown her flowers into a compost pit and replaced them with rows of root vegetables.

   “Vitamin D is a hormone,”  Barron said “and it’s produced naturally when skin is exposed to UVB in sunlight.”

   Frank noticed a yoga mat rolled up and leaning against the rough bark of a sweet gum tree. The bark was like an alligator’s hide.

   “You’re still doing yoga outside?”

   “I am.”

   “In the buff?”

   “You bet. It was good enough for the Greeks, it’s good enough for me.”

   Barron told Frank vitamin D sufficiency is linked to a reduction in 105 diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. Some researchers believe, he added, vitamin D deficiency contributes to nearly 400,000 premature deaths and adds a one hundred billion dollar burden to the health care system. By many estimates vitamin D deficiency is a worldwide epidemic, with some studies indicating greater than 50 percent of the global population at risk. Three out of four Americans are considered vitamin D deficient, according to government data.

   “Do you know why?” Barron asked him.

   “No,” Frank said.

   “It’s because of overzealous sun avoidance, which has led to a 50 percent increase in that figure in the past 20 years,” he said, slapping a fist into his palm for emphasis.

   “I take a vitamin D supplement every morning,” Frank said. “I don’t have to go out in the sun. Besides, it’s been unbearably hot and there are lots of bugs this year, since we had such a mild winter.”

   “You think our modern time is complete and we know everything,” he said. “You assume science understands all the benefits of sunlight and that the only good it does is make vitamin D.”

   “That’s right,” Frank said.

   “That isn’t true,” Barron said. “Let me give you an example.”

   He told Frank about a recent study at the University of Wisconsin and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. They discovered that something in ultraviolet light retarded progression in an animal model of multiple sclerosis, which is a painful neurological disease for which there is no cure. While vitamin D supplements suppressed progression in the animal model, ultraviolet light worked even better. The report concluded that UV light was having an effect independent of vitamin D production.

   “If it happens to be true in humans, it means that sunlight, or UV light, contains something good in addition to vitamin D,” he said. “We just don’t know what it is. Hey, our ancestors evolved naked, full frontal.” Barron waved his fig leaf like a battle flag.

   “The sun is directly overhead. We have a long evolutionary bond with it. Humans make thousands of units of vitamin D, and who knows what else, within minutes of exposure to sunlight. It is unlikely such a system evolved by chance. When we sever the relationship between ourselves and sunlight, we proceed at our own risk.” Barron gave Frank a sharp look and settled down on his elbows

   At a loss for words, Frank was grateful when his wife reappeared.

   “I’m getting a little toasty in all this sunlight,” she said.

   They agreed that they should be going. They bid Barron goodbye, Vera waved to Barron’s mother and they made their way down Riverside Dr. to home.

   After dinner that night, as Vera watched “Lawrence of Arabia” on Turner Classic Movies in the living room with a bowl of popcorn, sitting on the front porch in the orange-yellow light of a quiet sunset Frank skimmed a review of a paper in the British Medical Journal.

   “Some people are taking the safe sun message too far,” wrote Professor Simon Pearce. “Vitamin D levels are precarious in parts of the population. They stay at home on computer games. It’s good to have 20 to 30 minutes of exposure to the sun two to three times a week.”

   When he put his iPad down, Frank thought, I might give it a try in our backyard, without slathering on any sunscreen as I normally do, but I am definitely wearing a pair of shorts. Inside the living room, on the flat screen, Lawrence and his Arab allies were atop camels and charging across a sun-blasted desert outfitted from head-to-toe in long robes.

   Where did Barron get a fig leaf, anyway? Frank wondered.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journa http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Cold War Thriller

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication