THAT DAY

My friend Catshall visits. She had her first definite predictive dream--about meeting our friend Lily who showed her an art project she'd just made, a black quilt with starlike spangles. Woke up, wrote the dream down, came to visit me, and on the way up met Lily, who showed Cat her new quilt Redeye to New York (left).

She says "I have to face that ESP's not just some unconscious logical extrapolation or subliminal overhearing--I suppose those happen too, but neither one explains the specific visual design I dreamed hours before I saw it."

Our conversation drifts to history. Catshall tells me of her Confederate ancestors' involvement in the Reconstruction-era guerrilla war in occupied Kentucky. "The Civil War never ended there. The Klan saw itself as legitimate resistance. My family's still ashamed of their pro-Union ancestors--sees them as traitors." The evil of slavery? "Simple. They just ignore it."

We go to the Castro Theater, to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, see an early, experimental silent color film discovered and restored.

It shows William Randolph Hearst, the rich, spoiled robber baron who Orson Welles parodied in Citizen Kane, walking with California's greatest early architect and feminist icon Julia Morgan, in the gardens of Hearst Castle, soon after she built it for him.

Eerie. A window into another century. Like finding a color home movie of Queen Elizabeth walking with Shakespeare...

I develop a bad headache and joint aches--another Lyme attack. Damn. Go home, take antibiotic herbs, aspirin, zinc & ascorbic acid. Huge salad--I crave greens. Go to bed early...

THAT NIGHT

I'm in a gym, viewing a sort of police line-up or rogues' gallery of all the known members of a robber gang that works the San Joaquin valley and the Mohave Desert. Only they don't just rob you. They kidnap you. And not for ransom; forever. They sell you into slavery.

A plain, middle-aged woman with glasses is the leader. Lots of guys are scarier looking--positively pirate!--but she's the mastermind.

My family is driving across the Mohave. A big freeway. Only it isn't quite. We reach a stoplight, turn left/north, and... get attacked by the slavers. All my family but me is captured at once.

I'm left trying to get out of the area on a stolen bicycle. Reach the crossroad. Wait meekly for the light so I can cross the westbound lanes. Wish I could head west, but that's where those cops stopped us to ask where we were going... they almost certainly tipped off the gang. I better head the other way. It's equally far to the county line going east--over 100 km (65 mi). Luckily it's a hazy day, warm but not hot; and I have a big water flask. I really can do it--if I'm not seen.

Long signal. Uneasy. They could spot me. Cross warily. Take the frontage road, hidden by brush. See a swamp, an abandoned rusty bicycle... wonder if others were caught here and abducted or killed.

Then my bike chain snaps. Oh, great. Now I have to push-kick my bike to the next town. It's level, so it's just possible I can do it over the next day or so... but wow, am I gonna hurt.

But this time around, I have a pistol.

Figure they'll expect me either to flee or hover near my family, try to rescue them. So both are bad options. Instead I circle back to our car. A lone bandit has parked his motorcyle by our car and is stripping it, looking for valuables. A bottom feeder. Good. Less competent.

I hold him up at gunpoint. He tries to bargain with me, but he doesn't know I have an inner computer or psychic sense that tells me if he's lying. And he is. He'll promise anything, but I won't even end up a slave; I'm trouble, I've proven that. If they catch me now, I'm dead.

So I shoot him down. When I'm sure he's dead, I put on his black robe and sunglasses, and hop on his motorcycle.

I head for LA, hoping the robe will fool the local cops on the take long enough to get past.

I'll head straight to a big-city police department. I don't expect to live long--I know this gang has tentacles reaching all over Southern California. But maybe long enough to expose them and get an outside investigation going, if I work fast.

Better odds than on foot through the desert like before, with just a waterbottle and a broken bike.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• Female gang leader in Southern California: Julia Morgan at Hearst Castle! With her patron robber baron. I've always admired her architecture, but to build it she did have to kiss up to monsters.
• Cops aid the slavers: Catshall said her Confederate ancestors in Kentucky supported the Klan.
• Slavery: two nights ago I dreamt that to do grad research on slavery, I let a Confederate man enslave me!
• Heat, dehydration, fear, hard steady effort (crossing the Mohave!): all through the night, I knew in flashes this was a Lyme attack during sleep--adrenaline flooding causes tachycardia, while hot flashes and night sweats cause dehydration. The dream ordeal just reflects a physical one. I call these weakmares--never terrifying, just grueling work. Sheesh. No wonder I woke up tired.
• ACTION: treat myself, since Obamacare doctors won't--the insurance companies and the CDC committee on Lyme still tell them, despite a decade of evidence, that longterm infections like mine just don't exist. It's stress. It's bad diet. It's bad genes. It's a lie. In short, it's me. But they still take my money.
• Pardon my cynicism. This morning I'm a little tired of cops on the take.

A YEAR LATER

I'm uninsured now. It's a relief. Last year Obamacare cost me $12,000 in fees & copays and got me nothing; this year I spent about $300 on nonprescription drugs and herbs which have shortened and weakened my attacks. True, I spent serious time on self-diagnosis--but apparently I'm a better diagnostician than a harassed, time-short, insurance-company slave, forbidden to think on his own--and that's what most doctors currently are.

Self-treatment's not for all. But if all you get is patronizing misdiagnoses, why not eliminate the middleman and commit the malpractice yourself?

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