Yesterday, complained to the landlady about the smoke in my room every god damn day for the past six+ months. She asked me who is doing it. I say I don't know. Then she just stands there like a god damn post for over half an hour. I stand there with her, in silence, until her husband comes home, tells me off in Chinese, and they leave. I continue to stand in the hall for a while, still waiting for her answer to my questions, until I get too hungry. I go upstairs to fix dinner, then start swatting my bed, which has smoke in it, especially the mattress, which has a lot. Next thing I know a flashlight is in my face. It's the police. The landlady called them. They ask me if I called them, and ask me to let them in. The landlady gets there first. One of them speaks with her in Chinese. Then they talk to me. They say I need evidence of someone breaking into my room, and suggest I install a video surveillance system and buy an air cleaner. They leave.

This morning, went to Socialist event. Had the usual discussion. They have too many issues already to deal with mental health issues. They don't want to hear about decision analysis. They have incoherent preferences and they like them that way. Having coherent preferences is capitalist ideology, they say. They call incoherent preferences "nonlinear thinking". They say coherence of preferences are the root of all our problems. They can't muster any evidence to support their position. I tell them about BC Hydro in British Columbia. They ignore it. I come away feeling disaffected. Not particularly surprised, but not feeling good about seeing them again.

I mention the one economic issue: that low income is a symptom of schizophrenia! That's got to be the biggest laugh. Because of my political choices, i.e. not wanting to work for large multinational corporations or the military, I am classified as crazy. How predictable. T. asks about anagnosia. I say that I want freedom from forced medication, from people doing mean (i.e. deliberately deceptive) things in order to show me that I have a disorder "for my own good," etc. The room fills with tobacco smoke, though no one there is smoking. I feel the sharp pin-pricks in my legs. No one mentions it, and I am afraid to ask. I want freedom from my work being sabotaged. No one wants to touch any of it.

I get on the train to go to the gym. There are people in front of me and people in back. We are all very close to the door, all walking towards it. We are boarding quickly, in the normal fashion, and the driver closes the door on me. I ask him why he did this, and he gives me some bullshit about not being sure whether people are trying to get on or not. I call him on it, and he tells me to go to hell. I say I will gladly do so, and I will see him there when I go. He says, "Oh no you won't!" and right then and there I know I have another fucking Christian asshole on my hands, so I ream him out about it. I stare at him after I get off until he leaves. I didn't mention that the train is full of tobacco smoke.

I am at Kinko's, now, and there is smoke here, too.

I went to the movies last night, and, lo and behold, T. was there. Soon after the start of the film, I smelled smoke. I looked behind me. Someone upwind was hastily concealing something with their hand and shoving it into a bag on their lap. It occurred to me that the last two times I had smelled smoke, I had turned around to find the exact same thing happening. Movie theaters are dark. It's hard to see what's going on. I don't know what it was, but the smoke made my legs hurt. Sharp pin-pricks. Ouch! What the f--- is this stuff? I had been having a conversation with G. in the lobby beforehand, and the ubiquitous cigarette smoke began to drift in from outside immediately. But it was no problem. I felt no effects. Is this just a matter of different kinds of tobacco smoke, or is there something else in the smoke?

After the film, as the first credit appeared on the screen, T. stood up and left, with her two friends. I had my mask on, of course. When I put my mask on, she put her hand to her face and kept it there for over an hour (it was a long film). Just as I had stood up and left the week (or so) before, at "The Lives of Others", where I had "accidentally" run into N. (different N. than on the train.) And I had one of the two experiences with the smoking then, as well. Well, I pretty much knew I wanted nothing to do with N. the day that she said my roommates were "doing me a favor" by smoking up my room and my belongings every day. Yeah, they're doing me a favor allright, putting me at risk of lung cancer, emphysema, cancer of the esophagus, heart disease, stroke, for the sake of other people being more comfortable about my behavior. For that, I stood her up at the magazine thing she had invited me to. So, I was surprised to see her at the theater. If I wanted to have anything to do with someone who thought such things, I would still be in touch with L., my ex. N., T., they're all the same. Sometimes it feels like a taunt, like, "see what you are missing because you won't accept medication."

I am getting the brush-off from another person over the internet. It happens in a recognizable way. They say, "sure, I'll do X", where X is add you to the mailing list, review your paper, or whatever, and they never do X. I come back to them to ask again, and they say that they'll do it, or they're "researching" it, or "contemplating" something or other, and they don't do it. And I can come back as many times as I want. This happens at work, too. They will eventually do it, but only after repeated, relentless inquiries, and the result will be half-assed, if any. Etc. So, this time, just to mix it up, I sent them this:

Look here, pal:

I have been getting this EXACT same treatment for over six years, now, without relent and without exception, from many, many, many disparate people besides yourself. The ONLY way that this can happen is if someone else orchestrates it. I don't know WHO is doing it, and I don't know WHAT they are telling YOU about ME. For all I know, it could be outright LIES and vicious slander. But whoever it is, they've got you playing their song. Go ahead, tell me I'm crazy. It's been like this for OVER SIX YEARS. EVERY SINGLE PERSON I contact through this or any other email account. This is NOT normal. You are NOT going to convince me otherwise. All I know is YOU are cooperating with it. WHY?? WHY?? WHY?? WHY?? WHY?? Whatever the story is, it must be VERY CONVINCING, such that you don't DARE break with the program, you don't even STOP to QUESTION it, or ask for my side of the story, etc. This technique, intended to instill "learned helplessness," is used to break people down as a form of brainwashing, psychiatric treatment, and other nefarious ends. I am NOT going to allow this to happen. It is NOT going to work. So, if this email even gets to you, if it is even YOU that I am dealing with, know that your efforts are FUTILE. Some people ARE capable of resisting this, and I am one of them. The ONLY effect they are going to have is to worsen my physical health, which prolonged and total frustration of this sort WILL DO and HAS BEGUN DOING. Is THAT going to satisfy you? Are you THAT sort of person? YOU ARE, as long as you cooperate with this campaign of isolation and continual annoyance. I am asking you to STOP. NOW! Call me at 415-956-5700x120 and talk to me in person, because, if you even get this message, your reply might not even get through, or could be edited. Don't bother to do so to tell me I'm crazy, that it is "all in my head," etc. I want to know WHO has contacted you about me, and WHAT they have said to you about me. DO IT NOW!

The lawyer who stood me up has been calling me night and day, begging for my business and has been so apologetic about leaving me high and dry, complaining about his bad back, etc.....NOT!!!

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.

(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.

On Monday, returning from work, I saw a sticker on my door that the DHL deliveryman had come by but was unable to deliver. It had two tracking numbers on it.

On Tuesday, I typed the two tracking numbers into the DHL website to see where the packages were. If delivery had been attempted (successfully or not), I would have proceeded with my usual routine of gym and then grocery shopping, before returning home. As it was, one of the packages had been successfully delivered. The other had not. I remarked to A. how inefficient it was for the same delivery company to put two packages with the same destination on different delivery trucks, and headed straight home.

At home, there were two boxes, one from DHL, the other from Airborne Express. I ate some food, then realized that the tracking number on the Airborne Express was the second of the two packages that DHL had tried to deliver before. So, I guess DHL delivers for Airborne Express now.

One of the boxes had a DVD drive in it. The other had the carrying case. It was brown ("chocolate"). I had ordered black.

Not much else to report. Just the usual: pipe smoke in my room every day, cigarette smoke in the halls. There's a guy who walks by my window and coughs vocally as he walks by every day. It happens right when it is time for me to wake up, so on most days it is the first thing I hear. Sometimes, it even wakes me up. Ah, another day.

This week, a young man coughed vocally as he walked past me at the bus stop. On his shoulder facing me was one of those alloy clips that are used for rock- and mountain-climbing (and some people use to attach attach their wallets to their belts). This one, however, was shaped like a fish. Often, the people who cough in a very loud and attention-getting way are wearing some sort of religious paraphernalia. Usually, it is a cross around the neck. One particularly annoying guy wears a big Star of David.

There are other people I've learned to recognize. One guy has gray hair and a gray beard, and always wears a baseball cap. I've run into him at the Main Library, at the Roxie, and other places.

One of the lawyer's colleagues called me back and we scheduled a meeting. I am thinking about what I'll say then.

This morning, I woke early. I had a strange feeling that I had over the weekend, as well. I felt giddy and lightheaded. My body was still resting. My brain felt like it was going a mile a minute, but without thinking anything. I don't like this feeling, whatever it is. I didn't have the now-longed-for feeling of withdrawal from nicotine that I had last week, but that is largely because I've slacked off on swatting my bed. Still, every night I come home, my room is full of pipe smoke. Friday night, the smoke from home fires was so thick, you could see car headlight beams shine through it, so I didn't even fan out my room until much later. I just sat there in the smoke. Saturday and Sunday I woke up and started reading, without getting out of bed. Bad idea. Inevitably, I would turn this way and that, causing my matress, covers, etc., to exude tobacco smoke, which I then inhaled. Shit!

Yesterday, I bought a Dust Devil to deal with the heater at work. But today, when I got here, the smell was gone. Not particularly surprising, given that the heater is off during the weekend. Now it's back, but it seems less bad than it was.

I checked the theater website - The Violin did play Saturday night! Did I read the paper incorrectly? They have f---ed their listing before.

Dell's & DHL's automated systems say a second box is set to arrive today.

After work, I go to Kinko's, then to the gym. At Kinko's, I post a complaint to the postal inspector about my missing merchandise. At the gym, I find that my lock isn't in my bag, so I use one of the $0.50 lockers. When I get back, someone has posted an out of order sign on it ("This piece of equipment is not in working order."). Nothing appears wrong with the locker.

When I get home, the missing delivery is sitting on the stairway, where the mail normally goes. In front of my bedroom door are three other deliveries. One is my other order from amazon.com, apparently intact. The others are from Dell Computer. Upon opening the Dell deliveries, I find that they have filled my order incorrectly. I have ordered a motherboard, installation instructions, a DVD/CD drive, a keyboard, and a carrying case. They have sent me two motherboards without installation instructions, and a keyboard.

On Saturday, I call Dell. I spend half an hour with them while they put me on hold to conduct "research" and pass me off to one another. After 30+ minutes, they are about to pass me off to a third person. I tell them I don't have time and hang up. At various points in the conversation, they misstate my order as having two keyboards and no DVD/CD drive, they tell me that my order has shipped correctly, they tell me that I have to return the motherboard (but not how to do that), they tell me that the DVD/CD drive has been delivered, and later that the drive has been delivered "to the carrier".

The people I was with the day before told me that they would be meeting that day to see "The Violin" at the Roxie. I find out later that the Violin is not showing at the Roxie this week.