A chilly bedroom. I'm using my down sleeping bag as a blanket, and it's still not enough. Disturbing--the bag's rated well below freezing, but it seems thinner than it should be. I fold it over so it's double-thick. Now it's narrow, so bits of me keep slipping out from under. Brr.

In the morning I wake feeling down. The room is grim, for me at least: not just cold but gray and dark and viewless. On the other hand, it's just my first night in town. I'm on the south-central California coast, north of Santa Barbara--San Luis Obispo I think. I wanted a small town out of range of my family's telepathic field. I suspected that my persistent phobias about being locked up as crazy, and my inexplicable guilt about being male, were telepathic spillover from my crazy, brilliant relatives. And it looks like I was right. They all lived near me in the Bay Area, and as I drove south, the feelings faded out, a couple of hundred miles away. Out of broadcast range! My therapists were wrong. You CAN run away from your problems--if they're external. All along, I wasn't walking around with my family's craziness inside me, after all. I was picking them up live!

For the first time I think I can look for a job and a girlfriend without panic attacks or getting sick. The geographic cure! For neurotics, maybe it's just a band-aid, but for telepaths... it works!

The room's miserable now, but this far south, winter's brief. In a few weeks it'll be warm, and if not, I can find a better room. My present discomfort isn't a sign something's wrong. It's just the cost, and a very low cost, for escaping a lifetime of madness and misery. At last. At last. At last.

MORNING NOTES

• Central coast and San Luis Obispo = where Mariel Hemingway found love in the film PERSONAL BEST. Philip K Dick wrote on the central coast, and my father grew up in Santa Barbara.
• Why even the down bag isn't enough = the bag in the dream was my blanket years ago when I lived in a car with my brilliant, crazy, violent girlfriend Kay. She slashed it open in a rage; though re-sewn, it lacks a lot of its original insulation. As I did, after her battering...

The "geographic cure" could well be literal. My relatives are notoriously boundaryless, and are strong telepathic broadcasters, to the point my sisters and parents and I share illnesses and injuries and sympathetic pains as well as dreams. ESP researchers mostly say distance doesn't matter, but my dreams disagree--moving far away really MIGHT help.

So I recommend it for sensitives from crazy families--not as a solution, exactly, but a first step.

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