At the theater, I ask the guy at the box office if he is going to give me the finger again. He usually pulls the tickets out of the dispensing machine by pressing them against the stainless steel top of the machine with his middle finger and sliding the ticket, and his finger, toward me. This time, he takes it out and hands it to me. "No?!? Why thank you!" I exclaim, graciously. I go in. It is a double-feature of Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood", which I want to see because of the "ghostly landscape of fog and inescapable doom." I am late, but barely. I sit somewhere far away from everyone else and put on my painter's breath mask. The screen is a bit oblong from where I sit, but then I won't have to deal with people lighting cigarettes behind me, putting on their sunglasses, or touching their faces in a delicate, sensual way. Weird behavior in general. I am wearing the mask because there is a haze of burnt popcorn in the theater, as usual. Popcorn can conceal other smells, like tobacco smoke, which sometimes enters the theater through the ventilation system. Besides, my lungs have had it. The previous evening, I had to swat my beddings and bedclothes because of the tobacco smoke that is always in my bedroom, even though I have never smoked a cigarette, cigar, or pipe except maybe once in childhood. Whenever I do this swatting, which beats the smoke into the air in great white puffs, it raises the particulant matter content of the air to very unhealthy levels. My sinuses swell up so that I can barely breathe through my nose, and I cough. In the morning, I feel like hell, and my chest is hurting. Enough lung stress for one day, I figure, and I don my painter's mask, not caring that I look like an idiot.

During the show, I pop one of the exit doors to take a look. It is still light outside, and I see that next to the exit is a parking lot. I make a mental note to check it after the double-feature.

"Throne of Blood" ends. I go out to check out painter's masks at the hardware store down the street. I have a feeling the one I have isn't optimal. When I get back, I can't figure out which of the ticket stubs, all from this theater, is the one for today's ticket. The ticket-taker identifies it. "If you want to go in and out, get a hand stamp," he says. I reach for the stamp, standing on its pad. He grabs it first. I offer my wrist. He stamps the base of my thumb instead. "Whoops."

At the end of the intermission, before Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress," which I want to see because it is "Acknowledged as a primary influence on George Lucas' STAR WARS" is the trailer for "Blade Runner". They always show this trailer, and have been doing so for weeks, even though the movie won't arrive until mid-February, a month and a half from now. I don't blame them. It is a cool trailer, and makes me want to see the firm yet again. It starts out with the little machine that they use to identify replicants popping up its little magnifying glass, and the iris of the replicant is in full view on the laptop monitor. I remember this scene from the movie. It's near the beginning. They ask the guy being interviewed, "Do you love your mother?" He freaks out, attacks the interviewer, and goes on a rampage before they shut him down. This is one of the ways they identify replicants.
They don't have mothers, so they can't answer the question right, and they don't know how to fake it. I think back to how I feel about my mother, and how a conflict I had with her seemed to start this whole mess, many years ago.

"They're either a benefit or a hazard," says Harrison Ford, in his dark, husky voice, "If they're a benefit, it's not my problem." The rest of the statement is left to our imagination. It is in fact the content of the whole film. The same thing can be said for a lot of things, though. Autism, for instance. Autistic people have more of a tendency towards the extremes of the functional spectrum - highly functioning or highly nonfunctioning. If they're highly functioning, they're a benefit. Same goes for some forms of mental illness. They're either harmless screwballs or....

"How can it not know what it is?" Anonymous male voice speaking. Paranoid schizophrenia - it's the only mental illness that has, as a symptom, the belief that you don't have the illness. This film is ostensibly science fiction, with no reference to reality. But the corporate dystopia it portrays is often cited as a form of covert social critique. Might it be commenting on mental illness as well?

"If I were to go up north, would you come after me?" It is a woman talking. Attractive, dark hair. Eerily perfect features and hair. A replicant. No doubt about it. "No," replies Deckard/Ford, "but somebody would." No, escape is impossible.

The second film reminds me nothing of Star Wars, but I enjoy it anyway. Afterwards, at the subway station, a black man, wearing dark glasses, carries on about being careful what you wish for, how he is going to the gym to do some body-building, and how he is going to take control in the new year. He is bothering passers by, and one of them threatens to call the police. I am going to the gym too. He asks me if the train goes to Embarcadero, the end of the line, right before we arrive there. I say yes.

Before the gym, I stop off at Kinko's. I want to check out MindFreedom.org and ask J. to return some money of mine. While I am there, the same black man pops in, singing the same song, then leaves abruptly.

At the gym, I go to the thickest knot of people I can find, over where the fan is blowing. There is safety in numbers, I think. Often, when I am at the gym, I will get hit with a cloud of tobacco smoke from the ventilation system. I like to think that it's less likely if I'm not alone. As I am mechanically, uh, cross-training, I look at the reflection of the woman next to me in the thick plate glass windows. She is mouthing something enthusiastically. Then she begins to laugh. I look at her machine and see she has her earphones plugged in. All of the machines have cable television displays on them. Maybe she is watching a comedy. Then she begins to cough. She coughs so much that the man on the other side of us asks if she is okay. I look at her and she is smiling from ear to ear. The other man leaves, and she soon afterward. The machines were about half occupied when I arrive. When I leave, after my 35-minute workout, they are almost all empty.

Back at the subway station, a man sits next to me with his headphones turned up so loud I could make out the song they were playing, if I could recognize it. This always happens, I reflect. My train approaches. I check for ventilation in the front part of the car. If the ventilation isn't working, I will go to the other part of the car, which usually is. It is on, however. I enter. The air is thick with some kind of tobacco smoke. This is a fresh train at the beginning of the line. It probably came from the underground yard under the ferry building. It was empty when it pulled up. I think of asking the operator where the smoke came from, but I know what answer I will get. "I don't know." Or maybe he will deny that there is smoke at all. Asking seems futile, so I just go to the back of the car to see if the air is any better there. The ventilation is on high, but it is just as bad there, so I again don my painter's mask and return to the front. An obese woman with short, blond hair who got on with me with dark flight glasses over her head has now put them on, and is looking at me. I walk up and take the seat across the aisle from her. She leans her head against the window and pretends to sleep (it is 8:30 or so in the evening). I look at her. She stirs, sits up, looks at me nervously, then pretends to go back to sleep.

Later on, directly behind me, I hear the loud staccato of deliberate coughing. I turn around. A young man with a knit cap like mine looks directly into my eyes. I turn back around. I know he is getting off at the Unversity, and when that stop comes, he gets up and walks forward. When he is directly opposite me, I look at him again. He looks at me and forces out a laugh.

At home, I am greeted with cigarette smoke. It is heavy in the foyer, in the hallway, on the stairs. I unlock the door to my room. Mercifully, what smoke there is there is relatively light. It's pipe smoke, much less obtrusive. For a long time, I didn't know what the strange, sweet smell in my room was. At first, I thought it was evaporated mercury from my busted low-wattage "eco-friendly" lightbulb. I cursed it and wondered how much mercury I was soaking up through my bare feet as I walked across my bedroom floor every day. Compared to the cigarette smoke, the pipe smoke was almost nothing. It may even have been residual smoke from the dustup that occurs whenever anyone walks across a carpeted floor. I didn't think so, though, so I opened my window, mounted my trusty blower-fans in the opening, and turned them on. The cool, fresh night air coursed into my room and felt wonderful. Thank god the neighbor had stopped burning a wood fire every night, I thought.

I went to the kitchen to prepare some steamed kale for dinner. The smoke was so heavy, I again donned my breath mask. While I ate, I checked the time on my nonworking cell-phone. 9:45pm Only fifteen minutes before ten and I still had to finish eating. That meant no time to beat any smoke out of my bedding or bedclothes before the noise curfew. My housemates will call the police and complain about the noise if I do my swatting past ten. And they will come. I don't want that, so I just check for smoke on my longjohns and long-sleeved t-shirt before going to bed. Not that I could do anything about it. They could have been smoked up while I was at the gym, however, and I wanted to know. I'll never forget the time that I opened up my gym locker to find the book that I had been reading (on measurement theory, "Foundations of Measurement" by Krantz, Luce, et al.) had its front cover sliced off, as if by a razor. When I told my "friends" about it, they just said it was my perception that the front cover was sliced off! Wow, I thought, just another opportunity to invalidate me, I guess. Anyway, no smoke. I did my teeth and laid down. I fell asleep quickly.

I awoke during the middle of the night, after some dark, dreary dreams. As I lay there awake, I could recognize the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. Nicotine is a stimulant, so withdrawal has a depressive effect. My nerves felt like they were made of lead, and hammered flat. "Well," I thought, "at least I know the painter's mask is working." I felt scared, though. Scared of this MindFreedom organization I was going to join the next day, scared of the reasons why I was joining, scared of the fact that I had been getting so much nicotine, despite my efforts to avoid it, that I was now suffering withdrawal. I was scared of the people who were doing this to me.