Last Sunday morning, I stayed in bed and read my new books, the ones on mental health law. My legs started to itch and feel prickly. The bedding smelled funny, burnt, a little tobacco-ey. I thought, either I am coming off my imposed addiction, or there I am really inhaling a lot of tobacco smoke, just by being in bed.

I didn't want to swat my bedding just then, because I wanted to go to the gym. I would just have to do it again after I got back. I didn't want to get out of bed because there really wasn't anyplace else to read.

When I got back from the gym, I found that my bedding was, in fact, full of tobacco smoke. A lot of tobacco smoke. I yelled insults at whoever did this, as I swatted and huge billowing clouds of smoke rose from the bed. I went past the ten o'clock limit, and a car drove by outside and honked its horn.

That night, to avoid the poisonous levels of particulate matter, I slept with my mask on. I did that last night, as well. I was too tired to swat before 10pm. I could tell that there was already fresh tobacco smoke in my bed from just sitting on it. My legs began to feel prickly. They feel prickly, or I feel the blood vessels dialate.

Today was my appointment with the lawyer. I walked over to his place in the Mission. I was a little early. His secretary called him. He was to be arriving from the East Coast, where he was to have attended a conference. The secretary told me, with an affect that could best be described as perky, that his plane had been delayed, that he had just landed, that his back was killing him, and that he was sorry but he was going to have to head straight home. (I noticed that the secretary had excellent posture.) He said that he would call to reschedule. I asked how the senior lawyer, the one I had originally intended to see, was doing. He said he was recovering from his illness.

My boss is up to his usual bullshit. It is too tiresome to describe.

I have looked up "learned helplessness" on wikipedia. My, how familiar. Everything you do comes to shit. Even if it is programming a computer, somehow someone else logs on and introduces errors. (This is very frustrating if you happen to be working on a large, complicated mathematical model.) This has been shown to decrease immune response, it turns out. That could explain why I keep getting infections.

The law team I had visited is known for having won a large judgement against the FBI.