I arrive to work late, partly due to delays in the subway system. On the train are people wearing dark glasses, but they aren't napping. One is standing, looking directly at me. I arrive at the office. The first thing after I walk through the door, my boss asks me to make the coffee. On the coffee machine is a postcard, a 1950's colorized black-and-white drawing of an androgynous face against the background of a living room. In large type on a white background pasted across it as if on pieces of tape, three words:

MORE
MEDICATION
PLEASE

I return the postcard to my boss' wife. I begin to work. The office has its usual strange smell. After some time, I begin to notice a familiar irritation in my nose and throat. I reflect on my withdrawal symptoms early that morning. At lunch, I go to civic center for a burrito. On the subway, more people in pitch-black glasses, not napping. I skip a train on the way home because of too much smoke.

I return home that evening after work. As usual, smoke everywhere. I spend some time swatting my bed. I don't find much smoke, just a little in the top sheet and on the comforter. Nevertheless, it is enough that I was able to smell it when I leaned over them earlier. I think of what I read on Wikipedia about nicotine. Unlike other addictive drugs, nicotine addiction results in the development of more receptors to process nicotine. So, instead of needing more and more to feed the addiction, you need less and less.

The next day, I get up. I go down to the washer and dryer in the garage to get my clothes. When I come back up, I hear someone's door close. The air was clear when I went down, but now there is cigarette smoke everywhere. I open the door to my room. There is cigarette smoke there.

The next day is a half day at work. My other boss complains about the "arctic blast" coming through the open window. I have begun wearing my long underwear to work in order to deal with that. It takes the edge off of the fumes coming out of the radiator. We go back and forth about that. He starts coughing. In fact, every time I make a mistake at my desk, he coughs. He claims not to notice any smell in the office. I suggest it is the cause of his coughing. We go back and forth. I close the window. I complain. He looks defensive. I insinuate. I open the window. I send email to the building superintendent to please fix the problem. I close it again when I leave.

After work, I go to the gym. I change into my gym clothes and notice that there aren't any gym socks in my bag. I specifically remember packing my gym socks that morning. In fact, I went back into the house to return a sock that wasn't mine to the dryer that morning. I think back to how my gym bag is unattended whenever I go to the bathroom at work. Later on, I will think back on this and jokingly wonder if I should start pissing into a bottle as I have learned to do at home.

At the gym, the 20-year-old man on the cross-trainer next to me, who is in excellent shape, clears his throat. Over and over again, he clears it. I ask him what's wrong. He says its "this stuff" in the air, smiles, and lets out a laugh. I say I don't think it is very funny and I leave.

I catch the train to the grocery store I use in the Sunset District. The air is musty but okay when I get on. Other people get on later and the air gets smoked up. I reflect on how much smoke it is possible to get into clothing and fabric in general. I know from intimate experience during the last six months that it is incredible. I pull out my painter's mask and don it. The man next to me coughs a lot while I do this. I check the air again at UCSF, but it is still bad, so I leave it on until I get off the train.

At the grocery store, Jeremy asks me about my name. I feel like I have had this conversation before with him. Like everybody else, he thinks it's an "east coast name" and asks me if I'm from the east coast. I was born there, but we moved out here when I turned five. That leads into the usual discussion of the differences between east coast and west coast, how the east coast has more "old money" and more eccentric weirdos.

On the 29 bus, the air is smelly but it's not smoke, so I just stand by an open window. Later I sit down. I get home. More smoke. Cursing it, I prepare dinner again with the breath mask. I leave for more Karosawa movies, after a stop at Rainbow Grocery.

At the theater, everyone is coughing like mad through the earlier parts of "Rashomon". There are a lot of good lines in that one. Finally, there is a line. The men are talking about lying. The audience provides a cacophonous chorus of coughing to this. One of the men in the film replies with something like "You only believe the good things." I remove my painter's mask and cough vocally. The coughing seems a lot less after that, but still nearly every line is getting a cough from someone. Outside the theater afterwards, I am looking at the poster for some other film they're having. I hear a child coughing. I look down, and there is a four or five year old kid. He continues to cough in an even tempo.

I lose interest in Karosawa during the second film. It's some noir flick he did the very year the war ended. That's energy for you. But it was nothing like the others. I lost interest and left early. On the way to the bus stop, someone sidles up behind me with a cigarette. Standing there, another man turns up his iPod to what must be deafening levels to him, and, seeing my eyes upon him, starts muttering to himself and lights a cigarette. After he tosses it, I stomp it out and encourage him to light another. He waves me off. The bus arrives so late I think I could have stayed for the remainder of the film and still caught it. By then, the stop looks like a chorus line of very cold people. The bus itself is soon packed, and it is reeking with...hickory? Astonished, I ask rhetorically, "What is this, the Hickory Pit?" No one answers. Then I am hit with a blast of tobacco smoke from somewhere. I don my mask.

At the end of the LKM bus ride, the train is waiting with doors open. I wonder if this is just to taunt us, as it usually is. Usually, the train waits for the bus to arrive, and then departs before any of us can get on. On board, it is smoky. I put on my mask, only removed briefly after disembarking the LKM bus. I keep it on after I leave and walk across the nose of the train, so the driver sees it. He screws up his face in something that looks like astonishment.

Home. Smoke. Smoke in my room. I run the fans, but can't hit the bed because it is too late. I get in. I have to pull the comforter away from my nose because the smoke coming from it is so strong when I breathe in that it makes me gag. I wake up with the familiar burning sensation in my nose and throat. It's no wonder people get cancer of the esophagus from smoking, I think. Whenever you have something that is constantly irritated like this, you're asking for cancer. Kurosawa is not worth this, I reflect.

I wake up. Smoke is everywhere outside my room. It seems thicker than usual. I waste time transferring my clothes, etc. to the other bathroom, which is smoke-free. I have adjusted my routine to the smoke. I now dress in the bathroom so I won't have to spend much time in my bedroom after the shower. They smoke it up before then.

On the way to work, I am about to cross the street to catch the train to BART, but a train going my way cuts me off. It stops so that I am looking directly at N. through the window. I have met N. once before on the train. Once before that, I saw her. We have a short conversation about the recent storm and how it blew trees over and fences and garbage cans down. Then she returns to her book. After a while, I take mine out and the rest of the trip passes in silence. During the silence, I reflect on our introduction a moment earlier. "You're...N., right?" I said. "and you're...W," she said. I had never told her my name. I specifically remember the previous time, when we met. I asked for her name. She gave it, but did not give the expected "and what's yours?" which was a little odd but seemed consistent with a sincere lack of interest. Then I remembered the time before that, when I saw her on the train, but we did not speak. She was holding the corner of a kerchief up to her eye, as if to sop up a tear, but there weren't any.

Almost to the last stop on this trip, someone asked about the book I was reading, "House of Cards" by Robyn Dawes. I explained how I had read research papers by the author, how I had a great deal of respect for him, and how the cover art probably made it seem virulently anti-therapy in order to sell copies, when it was really very complicated about the issue, and very good. That person thanked me profusely and left. As she got up to get off the train, silently, I said, "bye?" to N. "Take care," she said.

At work, my heater is somehow turned down to about 1/4 the intensity it was at yesterday. I can't turn it down. I don't know how they do this. No doubt that the problem is indetectible now, the building superintendent will come by and try again to make me feel like it's all in my head, I think. Everyone is very chipper. The bosses' wife asks me to call the computer guy about the new computers. She feigns amazement that, while two were ordered, one for me and one for someone else, only one arrived.