(incidentally, the SF Bay Guardian did fail to post The Violin under "Rep Clock" for the Roxie)

Yesterday, I go to the BART station to wait for the train. I have just missed one. The next is not for 11 minutes. I go to the spot that will let me off right in front of the escalator at 16th and Mission. There is one person waiting there already, at the black tiles that indicate a door position. I stand behind him. A line forms behind me, single file, stretching almost to the other side of the platform. Then a woman walks up. She has a robin's-egg blue trenchcoat folded over her forearm. In her hand, a thin copy of the free newspaper, The Examiner. She walks up to the third position in the line but stands apart from it, and begins fanning her face vigorously. It is January. It is not hot. She looks too young to have hot flashes. I notice too late that she is directly upwind from me. But my legs have already started to tell me that something is wrong. There is that faint prickly feeling again.

I am impressed. This woman has really tried hard. She must have covered herself with cigarette smoke, but I can't smell anything. I just feel it. The dose of nicotine. I wonder what to do. I turn and face directly at her. I stare directly at her. She keeps going. She avoids my gaze. They always do. I think it has something to do with guilt. Deep down, they know what they are doing is wrong. Or they just can't own up to it 100%. So, they flinch. They look away.

I stand like that for several minutes. I wonder if there is anything else I can do. Snatch the paper from her hand? It's a free paper, so is that theft? She is, technically, battering me. Talking to her is out of the question. She has already prepared her canned response, as I know from past attempts. The dose is so faint, though, I let it go.

Eventually, the train comes to end this standoff, which seems to last forever. I get on. We are packed in like sardines. The man directly in front of me sees me. He conspicuously clears his throat a couple of times. Then he starts mumbling to himself. He does this all the way to 16th and Mission, three stops away. I stare at him, as well. He, as well, does not meet my gaze, until I finally move my head to where he is looking. I try to tell him "Real good." He says, in a thick european accent, "What?" (Incidentally, he is dressed very sharply in business attire. He's clearly not a random nutcase.) I repeat myself. He removes one earbud, then the other. "That was real good," I say, "You should be an actor." He thanks me unintelligably beneath his heavy accent and I leave.

The movie I have come to see is sold out, so I go to a cafe. It is pleasant, and the air is clear. I take out my copy of Schelling's book on Conflict. Within a minute or two, the cafe is filled with the smell of cigarette smoke. I don my mask.

At work, my work had been sabotaged. This has been going on for five years. It has a number of effects. Primarily, it causes me emotional distress. This is supposed to both toughen me up and make me want to go to therapy. It also cuts down on my self-confidence, makes me more pliable, fearful, and easily dominated.

At home, my room is full of smoke. I let the fans run for a while, then I turn in to bed. I am too tired to swat the bed first. Besides, as I have mentioned, it raises the particulate matter in the air to very unhealthy levels. I immediately smell the difference. With the sheets and covers up to my nose, it smells like I am asleep on a pile of tobacco leaves.

I awake with fire in my throat. How can they do this to me? Smoke is a carcinogen. I take my long underwear off the floor and put it on the bed. I take out the tennis racket and swat it a few times. Each time, a while cloud of smoke emits. This was exactly what happened after I had been wearing them for a while, without swatting them first. I had thought maybe the smoke was dead skin or dirt from the road, so I let them lay out for a few days. Same thing.

I think of how nicotine is a contact poison. It can be easily absorbed through the skin. Whoever is loading up my long underwear with smoke obviously intends to dose me with nicotine, whether through my lungs or otherwise. Nicotine is thought to have an effect on the symptoms of schizophrenia. I have noticed that I am less prone to crying, now that I am thoroughly dosed pretty much all the time. I don't like that. I feel like the emotional part of my brain has been dulled to the point of despondence.

MindFreedom Internation has sent me a welcome packet, including a newsletter from 2006. It says that schizophrenia is not inherited, that there is no evidence of inheritence. It is wrong. There have been studies that show this. Children seperated from their biological parents at birth have twice the chance of schizophrenia if a parent is schizophrenic, normal chance otherwise. Anyway, I am skeptical of the statistics I see being flung about by people without a background in statistics, in general. Especially regarding schizophrenia. There's an inherent sampling bias in the diagnostic process. Schizophrenia is not a well-defined condition. Therefore, the base rate is not known. Are there a hundred thousand schizophrenics in the U.S., or are there 10 million? Depends how you count them. All the other statistics change drastically, depending on how you do.

I go to work angry. I want to start speaking out. "Schizophrenia" is being used as a label to taint anyone who has a really toxic family, or has unpopular political views, or is sufficiently anti-religious. It is a somewhat self-fulfilling label, as well. The train stops at the platform. The doors open. The driver keeps them open far longer than necessary. This often happens. It just so happens that, each time the driver does this, the platform is also reeking with cigarette smoke. The smoke enters the car. I don my mask.