This was an experiment in honesty--I spent the day with a tiny notebook always on me, stopping at least every quarter-hour to write down my impressions--my real impressions, no matter how unacceptable to others. The experiment triggered a bizarre dream that night... confirming some of those unacceptable impressions. A few of the uncomfortable realities were:

1. Sexual despair due to parental abuse that left me terrified to take any initiative. Since men are monsters. Thanks, Mom!
2. An aura-sense I've had my whole life but was reluctant to acknowledge, knowing that mentioning it was likely to get me mocked or locked up. Thanks, Dad!
3. Emaciation. I assumed I starved myself and failed to notice, as anorexics do. It was really food allergies my doctors swore I didn't have. Thanks, Kaiser!

Sunny, mild. I pack a lunch and bike across San Francisco. A date with the artist inside me. I'll just wander free, and see what I see.

A cute woman at a garage sale down our block sits among furniture. I imagine saying "Are YOU available? Please come live with me." Spin into fantasies about unwanted girlfriends & boyfriends sold cheap at yard sales. A sex slave? But I notice I have to treat her nicely, even in fantasy. The peak of the fantasy is the moment when roles dissolve and love (or at least generosity) bursts out. Straight outa romance novels!

Pass a cute Latina in tight black jeans and a white tank, with wild Cher hair, like an actress on a soap.

Bike down Mission a few more blocks. Traffic's heavy, though it's Sunday. I nearly get hit by a big tattooed jerk in a convertible. Scares and angers me. So I veer off Mission and take a back street for safety.

At the next corner, I'm in a crosswalk when two vatos booming their car stereo see me, make eye contact, deliberately gun their motor and turn, nearly hitting me--stop only at the last instant.

In terrorizing me, they stall their motor! Poetic justice.

Still, I HATE the Mission. The only part of town where men hassle me, a total stranger.

Find a quiet back alley. North a mile. No one interesting at all--except if you're Goya or Da Vinci--I know derelicts have character, but they're no fun for me. To my eye, cartoon grotesques are everywhere, a dime a dozen. Not inspiring. What excites me is harmony expressiveness and brains--all rare on American streets. Maybe rare anywhere, anywhen.

Pass the Women's Building with its gigantic golden murals. They're working on the side now. One of the artists is up on the scaffold...
Pass Mission High School. Guys slouching around the park. I have to play a street-crazy in a video this Friday and I ought to study them, but I don't want to. They scare me. On the corner, a whole gang of high school kids, half girls half boys, crosses against a red light, deliberately. Drivers honk in rage. One girl's sexy even as she sneers. (And sneers normally turn me off! Is that why I don't like Elvis? Because when I was a kid and saw a teenager sneering they usually weren't defying some authority but putting ME down.)

I zigzag northwest thru the Castro. In Duboce Triangle, a woman comes out her door and I stare--long long naked legs. She sees me looking and beams at me. I'm flooded with delight and beam right back. Wait, was it delight? Or relief?

Duboce Park is filled with dog-owners. Very doggy dog-owners.

Lower Haight. Two couples walk by, I look at one woman, sexy body but a spoiled combative face, then notice her boyfriend sees me watching her, and I panic, he'll hit me for my impertinence. He nods "Hi!" quite amiably as if he's pleased to noticed by such a cool person. I'm a crazed biker, one of the fabled weird people of the Haight... apparently.

I ride on, amazed at how my childhood brainwashing persists in the face of so much disproof.

North on Divisadero. Narrow sidewalk, grubby, traffic. But it's a pass between two hills, so I stick with it. Guy selling junk, excuse me antiques, on the sidewalk. Hmmm... if I want to be an acrylic painter, I could get framed canvases really cheap and paint over them. Almost free.

Pass half a block of firetrucks and cop cars, flashing. Horde of gawkers, but I see nothing.

Head north past Geary, three more blocks to Pacific Heights. Not far from my therapist's office now. Everything's clean up here in the rich zone. Tall blondes look in shop windows. Beautiful (smart, harmonious, expressive) girls walk by, ten for every one in the Mission. If I lived here, I'd meet some.

Of course isolating myself behind the barrier of the Mission is a way to keep from having to face the pain of feeling sexually wrong and hopeless. Which I do feel. Thanks, Mom! A sex-negative feminist, she tirelessly taught me men are all abusers and oppressors, so I shouldn't trust myself. Ever.

Hence all this longing and frustration. If you hadn't noticed.

Bike past the house where my favorite twelve-step Anorexia Group met. Still meets, I think. I want to go again--not because I'm undereating again (much), it's just that they were so cute. "But with problems" I remind myself. The main one: I'm single, but they were all married. To anorexia, I mean. No energy left for romance.

So? It was a support group. Who doesn't have problems? At least their problems were my problems.

But I notice I don't swear I'll go again. It's true that I got better on my own, I'm not sure it helped. And it was frustrating...

Past the Jewish Community Center. Almost stop and go in to see the new mural--a friend of mine painted it. North, climbing, breathing hard, hot from the effort. 300 feet up now, at least.

Over the top. Below, the Bay, Angel Island, Golden Gate Bridge, a big container ship slipping in. I zoom down sharply to Kahn Playground at the edge of the Presidio. Stone wall.

Seven huge dogs burst through the gate. A willowy little black teenage girl lets her mom herd the dogs onward--she heads for the playground. I follow, but it's all in the searing sun. I head into pine-shade. Relief.

The slope's all sand. Walk my bike and it's still hard going. Northwest across the hillface.

Boys hiding behind a tree eye me. I pass them. Walking away, my bike wheel tosses something up, and I flinch. Thought the boys were throwing things at me, as they did when I was nine. Thirty years ago, and still getting flashbacks.

Down into a little valley full of flowers; no surface water, but an aquifer. Lift my bike over branches, thorns. Climb a hill, hot and dry. Sign says erosion control, don't go further. I turn away west.

In these woods I have a sudden fantasy I'm an alien wolf-lion-man; my species disliked for being sexually pushy and promiscuous. And I have to convince a human woman that I'm still worth loving, trusting.

But then, this isn't a fantasy exactly--just a metaphor for my real perception of most men.

(Well, and also... I dreamed I was a unicorn-mare-lioness, and a male of our people told me my true name was Wayan, and to nonhuman me, he looked hot. When I woke and drew what I'd looked like, human me found her hot. I have these little identity/orientation problems.)

Anyway, I'm not so sure what's fantasy, and what's memory resurfacing.

Nor am I sure why. At least... why now?

I reach a high saddle. Ahead, a level road winds north through the Presidio. Follow it impulsively. Views north and east: deep woods. Bikers, but few cars. Stick to the heights.

Now the road winds through military housing, neat, spare, few personal touches. See a lot of the residents, out in their yards... and they're the same! These families (who'll have to move out soon, as the Presidio reverts to civilian control at last)... who are they? I record this for future generations: the auras of the military people I saw showed no evil, nor any great discipline--just an utter lack of imagination. Was that what nearly destroyed the world?

Wind through houses, along the ridge, over the Tunnel, west to the drop-off. I climb to the peak. Hidden in the grove is a YMCA camp. Christians and the Army, it figures. No views here, so I return to the main road and soon find a lookout to the north. See Mount Tam and the lighthouse and even Point Reyes, faintly, two counties off. China Beach, cliffs with gunmetal green water under them, all the rest silver, backlit.

Down, down down. A big hospital, inexplicably mothballed.

Lake Street Park. Swans on the eponymous Lake--really just a pond. Old Russians everywhere, gabbing on benches, ignoring the exercise stations. Signs NO BIKES, so I walk mine. Others ride around, blithely ignoring the signs. Three bikers pass me--one a pale freckly 20 year old who is actually too thin for me! I was starting to think that even with my eating normalized, I'm so skinny that NO ONE could look too thin to me--anorexic distortion. Wrong.

And I AM still a bit anorexic: planned to eat lunch here, but I'm too hot and not hungry. Cool off for a while, walking walking gently through the park... do a few stomach curls at one exercise station. At next, chin-up bars, try, though I still can't quite do one (I tried at the gym).

I do one.

Walk on, amazed. Find water, drink gratefully. Dog trainers.

A black hound on her own has her nose in a gopher hole--forms an amazing shape, deep chest and wasp waist, haunches high and wiggling with excitement. All S-curves and spirals. Realize she too looks sexy--I don't just want to paint her shape, I'm actually turned on.

By a dog digging in the dirt. Go figure.

Three teens enter the park. One is a tall slender blonde in a gauze minidress. I shiver with pleasure looking at her. Then, sadness seeps in, as my training walks me away. Mustn't bother her!

Struggle and loop back, where I can look at her once more, memorize her, jot down my reactions. She looks nothing like Andi from my dance class (who I had a major crush on for a year) but I get the same feeling from her, almost the same exact aura--like a little kid dressing up sexy, who just happens to have an adult body too...

Wonderful aura. Playful, erotic, innocent.

The last flowerchild in San Francisco!

Then I notice she's smoking. And not pot. Tobacco. Nearly taste the bitter smell in my mouth, though the wind's the other way. My empathic sense is giving me more than I wanted... as usual. It can be great during sex, heightening intimacy, but here on the street with strangers... not so fun.

Andi smoked too. Drugs are a part of that playing with grownup things--like Mommy's lipstick. Only with smoldering cosmetics, the animal testing is us, we're the guinea pigs, we're the hapless rabbits...

Bike on, across the Richmond, toward Golden Gate Park, an uneventful mile. Pleasant but unexciting area--except for Clement Street. Nearly head for Green Apple Books or the giant toy store, but it's Sunday--they're probably shut anyway.

Golden Gate Park. In the chess pavilion, a biker gang's having a Sunday barbecue. Their dogs ignore humans, but when a leashed dog walks by, they bark in chorus. A huge roar from all the picknickers as they scold their dogs in unison, "NO!", like some demented Dr Seuss story--One Dog, Two Dog, BAD Dog, Blue Dog.

Dozens of skaters swirl around the Crystal Palace, happily ignoring the NO SKATING signs. One tall thin beautiful girl after another, skimming by like golden birds. Does skating make you fit, or do only the fit dare skate?

Oh. A third possibility. Skates flatter the figure--lengthen the leg, change your proportions, like high heels--so no one looks bad on skates. Do they? They WERE all tall and thin, that group. Several as thin as me. Yet they were beautiful. Maybe that means I don't look as pathologically thin as I think. Or maybe I do and similar women don't because there's a double standard.

Wait--sexual dimorphism is real. My frame IS bigger, my bones so heavy I sink in water if I hold my breath--so a high percentage of my meager weight is bone; the exact same weight on me looks bonier than on those light-framed girls because it IS--it denotes real emaciation.

The truth is, I don't have a clue what weight I need to be healthy. And that isn't necessarily same as LOOKING healthy, let alone attractive.

And I don't know what's attainable anyway. Not much more, not easily. Getting up to 125-130 lbs (56-59 kg) wasn't too hard, but I struggle to get above 130 (60+ kg). It's not psychological--my body just rebels. Wants to stay thin. So thin it scares others, they figure I have AIDS or I'm starving myself. Nope.

Look for a place to stop and eat. Afraid I'll get ticketed for my bike though I'm walking not riding it... Know the fear's silly, as swarms of happy lawbreakers go by... yet I walk on past the crowded lawns where I'd like to sit and watch people, past the jugglers' and hacky-sackers' green (still mostly guys, all the girls just sit on the side eating, watching the boys perform.)

I don't want to stop there, it smells of piss. The only place since the Mission that has. Ugh. Bike on til I find a non-stinky bench, sit alone, rest and eat, feeling quietly sad. Defeated by shyness and fear from lunching on the big lawn, enjoying the sexy skaters.

On toward the Haight. A wheelchair man wanders across Stanyan Street, having trouble coordinating, or a wheel is sticking. No one helps. I don't want to go near him either, his eyes have a hard animal distance--he doesn't expect decency anymore, and his glare guarantees his privacy in hell. Welcome to the Haight!

On the corner, a cop car's pulled over two teenage girls in a VW bug. The cops ignore the paraplegic trapped in traffic. Of course harassing girls is more urgent than some loser guy in danger...

I walk the length of Haight Street. Walk, not bike. Such a dense place, experiences come too fast at 20 kph; better at 5 (12 mph down to 3).

I feel tired and gloomy (because I didn't help? Backed off from that stuck guy's bleak glare.) Now everyone repels me--seamy, messed-up.

No, not everyone. A girl's locking up a sewing shop. A slight girl with black hair, intelligent eyes big as a lemur's on her small ballerina face. Notices me admiring her, smiles warmly. Hear her murmur something to her friend and know it's about me...

...but the robot in my hips keeps marching me mindlessly on.

A spacy teenager near Double Rainbow offers her left-over ice cream to two guys. She sounds drugged. I can't tell if she knows them--and they don't act like friends OR strangers. Drugged too?

Two blocks of wino obstacle course, threading my way through beggars and bad musicians. Tell myself it's my fault--"Your mood determines how you see people. After acting in a video last week, you were high for days. Now you've come down, that's all."

And then I'm proven wrong.

At the corner of Haight and Ashbury, three fifteen year olds huddle under the famous sign. Two of them are exquisite--sly sloe eyes blinking sidelong at all of us, full little lips with archaic smiles.

I almost cry out when I see them--for the first time my automatic walker almost falters. But they ignore me. If one looked me in the eye I might really have spoken. They don't.

I walk by. Turn and look behind, embarrassed to stare, unable to help myself. The two with the soft wet animal gaze are leaning into each other, rubbing like lovers. With the third...

... who has no such aura. Same age, build, body language, that flawless teen skin & hair--even similar colorful clothes--but it's not in her eyes. Aura? Just the two. I can't see why. But she doesn't have it.

And that proves it's not just my mood projected on others. I may hide my response to what others radiate. But some do radiate and others... not.

Pass a tall woman with aloof eyes, a lemon-silver-crewcut, tattoos, a triangular short skirt and power-shoulder jacket. Stalks along in big boots.

Clearly she's a captain (if not admiral) in some star-navy 1000 years from now, back here on a time-travel mission.

Or possibly she just quit the Eurythmics.

I pass the grocery near Anarchist Books. Three women, lithe tall and sloppy, like absent-minded otters, emerge and lug a big wobbly bag of food home together, slinging it by the corners. Their motions are so animalistic, for a moment I see their sack of prey as fresh-caught and still squirming.

I stare a long time at the school tile-mural where I acted last Friday in a video my friends are making. Quite a pretty mural, a local treasure. And of course scribbled on, smeared with garbage, pissed on, food and paper plates all over.

My left knee is getting sore. Mustn't walk much more.

A woman in splendid brocade like a Botticelli blonde (with a Barbie nose) ducks into a bangle and bead store, emerges to parallel my path for several blocks in front of Buena Vista Park.

Bus stop. Half a dozen teenage girls sit playing with yarn, waiting for the bus.

One of the six has whatever it is, and five don't.

As I pass, I have to squeeze by the one with the active aura. I get all shy. A truck passes, and the girls whistle and cheer. I look up puzzled.

Oh. It's the SF Mime Troupe, going home after a free show in the park. Talkiest mimes in the world.

Bike home the rest of the way--zooming past my friend Li's house, past a woman with wonderful auburn-purple hair, back past Mission High School, past a guy in a suit and tie with cerebral palsy, back into the Mission's dangerous traffic and stinking streets. Abuelas, cripples, drunks. And laughter floating out a window. Not all bad.

A boy with his arm protectively (possessively) round a girl with long legs, short pelvis, tiny waist, delicate arms, big black dome of hair, shimmering. Bangs. Thinner than me yet looks gorgeous where that biker-girl in Lake Park looked disturbing--sunken? Asexual? It's not just weight. Energy.

Home. Tired and sore. Did too much, but an improvement on days of no exercise at all! Do yoga to stretch those stiff muscles, and go to sleep.

I'm riding a bike through Berkeley, holding a strange gray metal mesh bracelet or gorget. The metal isn't aluminum or steel or silver or platinum. What is it? An alien device, but what? I MUST find out what it does.

Who would know? I remember a dance teacher I had once a long time ago, a mile or two north. Saw a recent ad--still teaching. He would know. I just have to get there.

I set out on my bike. Forgot to bring his ad; my memory will have to do. Hills rise to the east on my right, sending ridges out in front of me. I recall figuring out the best route in an epic dream I had years ago. Follow the promptings of the old dream. They lead me up an alley...

...into someone's house where a party's going on! I bike through the crowd--"Excuse me"--to a back window onto a second alley. Lift the bike down. This alley leads into a third, skirting a ridge. This route feels right.

The path narrows, encloses, becomes a hall leading to a theater lobby. I'm confused though my dream says "you've been here before, the path is here." But it turns into a stage! Live theatre. I'll crash a party, but not a play in progress. Back up, look for another way out...

Now the lobby is a laboratory--the Lawrence Hall of Science? The zigzag wheelchair ramp sparks a memory. Leads outside to a balcony and... the fire escape! Yes, this looks familiar. Down... Leave the bike--I recall now I was on foot in that long-ago dream. I think.

Spiral down the fire escape, at least four flights down to the bottom landing, still ten feet off the ground--well, a rubber mat in a wire mesh cage (bike storage?) in a playground. Swings, teeter-totters.

I hang, stretch down, and let go. Drop to the mat, squatting to take the shock. Catch my breath.

Up walks the man I was hoping to see, Chris DeWitt. My old dream led right to him!

"I have an alien artifact" I say.

"Uh huh.." He's polite but skeptical. I reach to show him... and it's gone. I lost it! I had it in the lobby upstairs, so it has to be on the fire escape. I explain all this.

He in turn starts explaining it away (very plausibly) as a dream or vision expressing some emotional need of mine--not a physical object.

My old dream pokes me again. Magnetism. What? Something about magnetism and the aliens. I tune Chris out and look around for a magnet. We're in his lab now, a big garage with a fridge--yes! Fridge magnets. I grab a couple. "Do you have a power tool I can borrow--no matter what, just something with spinning metal?"

"Yes" he says, "but--"

I grab a horseshoe magnet on a workbench and say "Never mind, this'll do!" I wave the magnets around in front of me--and Chris DeWitt backs away wincing! He can't tolerate even a weak fluctuating magnetic field. He's not human. He's an alien impersonating Chris.

No wonder he tried to convince me I was crazy.

This changes everything! Him, the scene, even me...

Now we're on a yacht, sailing into a marina in Southern California--Venice Beach? And now I'm a young English woman named Arabella, the black sheep of my aristocratic family. As long as I stay out of England and cause no major scandal, I get paid a modest stipend.

The price is silence. They don't want me talking about incest and sexual abuse--as a kid I was repeatedly molested by my mom's Central European lover--an aristocratic drunk.

I'm still psychologically fragile--brittle charm, desperate smiles.

I do have a Handsome Boyfriend now, who really does like me, knows my history, has been a great help. He listens patiently as I list all the terrible dangers around us, as we sail into harbor on a sunny day: hidden reefs, collisions with freighters, terrorist bombings... on and on, all the fears my past has taught me to guard against. En masse, they're paralyzing.

But as I list them all, there's a sarcastic edge to my voice--I'm making fun of their sheer numbers. He grins and hugs me, and the fears start looking silly. They lose power over me... at least for the moment.

Hmm. I AM making progress.

And I still have the Artifact. I guarded it successfully! Although... it now looks like a degenerate Central European count.

Yep. That one.

Oh, he wears a monocle and a twirly moustache, and looks down his nose like he's better than all of us... but he's still the Artifact all right.

We tolerate him as a hanger-on, the sort of parasite that inevitably gravitates to heiresses. No point in blaming him for his nature...

...but really, we have no use at all for the Alien Artifact.

• Bike odyssey, Chris deWitt.: As I write the dream, my housemate Lily returns from Berkeley. She says "I spent all yesterday biking with Chris DeWitt." I had no idea she was. Except, apparently, I did.
• Alien artifact, gray metal = from Andre Norton's The Zero Stone. A gray metal ring has a stone with a mind of its own.
• The old dream I follow: a real dream from a couple of years ago. Ended down a fire escape...
• Magnetic fields: literal. I'm more sensitive to magnetic fields than most people; generally know which way's north, like a bird.
• Cage versus playground: Note it's a metal mesh cage. That's a Faraday cage, blocking electromagnetic fields. I think the dream's hinting my different senses isolate me--keep me from playing with others.
• Chris deWitt = Chris's wits? My intellect? Beside sharing my first name, he's rather like my dad: gifted, skeptical, rationalist, ignores dreams... In my dream he scoffs at the artifact's reality. When it's HIS reality I should suspect--he's an impersonator!
• My intellect models itself on my dad: he mocks intuition, dreams, ESP, prayer, even emotions. And it's lying--he knows damn well that stuff is real, he's had psychic dreams himself, as in The Murders. But it's not respectable so he denies it.
• Lost the ancient artifact = on my bike trip, I kept noting my true impressions; temporarily this lost or squelched some old pattern.
• Fluctuating magnetic fields drive off the impersonator = shifting feelings, following the mood of the moment, not the planned optimal action, drives off this bad-faith mask. Or acknowledging the auras I sense but tend to ignore "because that stuff's New Age nonsense." Thanks, Dad!
• Arabella = in Odd Girl Out by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Arabella's mom had an aristocratic boyfriend who molested her around age ten--compounded by her family wanting to hush it up & blame her. It left her alert, charming, scared, manipulative, promiscuous, dangerously compliant--using sex mostly for reassurance and favors. I saw troubling echoes of Arabella in me. Thanks, Mom!
• Brittle charm, making light of my fears = today my housemate Sean asked me how I saved up so much money; I felt this was nosy, didn't want to bare my finances--yet I complied, answered with a breeziness like Arabella's, trying to make light of it. When I dream I'm Arabella, note how my family bribed me to hush up about money not just sex.
• The Artifact's a degenerate aristocrat = Arabella's aristocratic stepdad molested her. So does the Alien Artifact stand for abuse, or acknowledging that abuse? I wasn't sexually abused, "just" emotionally--told I was a Sexual Degenerate by nature (all men are!) so I have to strangle my feelings. Forever.

My dad inside wants to deny it. But it's true. Face it. My sexual orientation isn't toward women, or men, or both, or neither, or pain or exhibitionism or kids or dogs or anything. Not any thing.

My sexual orientation is toward some kind of energy I can't even name.

Maybe I'd better learn to.

It took me decades to tackle illustrating this epic--I recalled the Bike Odyssey as loaded with locally distinctive cityscapes I'd have to draw. Wasn't sure I could. But I was startled, on rereading it, how much I focused on people not scenery, and less on their physical look than on their energy--I have to use the word aura. And auras aren't visual for me, but 3-D structures full of moving stuff (like cytoplasm in an amoeba) flowing not with colors but emotions.

I didn't even try to depict that here. I'd have to use visual tricks to symbolize the nonvisual--texture, value, focus, color (well, maybe I did use color). I might have tried going even cartoonier, frankly symbolic. But I suppose that would mislead you plenty of readers. "Wayan's claiming he sees signs and portents." No. Just streetsigns and portapotties. And people. Who glow like moons.

At least, three decades later, I'm clear that I can't draw what I see. And at last, clear why.

It's not visual. Never was.

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