When she lived in San Francisco - the City - as everybody called it, on Waller Street, she could 'commune with the homeless', literally; the street was their favorite hang-out/pit stop. These guys were mostly Vietnam vets... And to top it off, she could hear the 'fighter planes', like U2, Joshua Tree, Bullet the Blue Sky", was telling her about. These planes over head, were actual fighter planes, on their way back to their home base, Moffat Field, in Mountain View, CA, where NASA was located as well. The sound, the sheer decibels... The house shook. And she pictured Vietnam, "across the mud huts as children sleep"... through the alleys of a quiet city street"... "Outside, is America... "
Lesson learned. It felt weird.

She could see, and hear, and discern all that new strangeness. The look and smell of the place was yet another dimension. It was the gay district, Castro & Market area, with Leather shops, Gay bars, Night clubs, and Burger joints. She was working for Antenna Theater, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in the Golden Gate Park, home of the bisons, the tourists, the homeless and -spooky disembodied spirits that lived there after dark. - She used to run the park after work, but gave it up after she met with these strange circumstances of the invisible 'things' chasing after her after dark. The fastest sprinting she had ever done then - once, when she went running after 9:30 p.m in pitch dark. She'd run the streets afterwards instead, which was not picturesque but depressing.

Her Canadian friends, a young couple from Vancouver, dropped in on her once; that day the sirens were going loud and some sort of commotion was taking place. Her friends were freaked; they couldn't stand the vibes... They said to her: "How can you stand it down here. It's like living in hell. They got out of there pretty quick.

Nina too at first had a problem with the vibration there. Her equilibrium was totally out of whack. From the Baja and sail boats to this, she was totally confused energetically. 'Resonance, frequency, vibration', she was not going into what was happening to her scientifically. Her Canadian friends, before they left to drive back, remarked that "these people here, are seeing things." She didn't know then what they were referring to. But, in retrospect, she too was starting to see things that she rationally concluded were not there.

That was before she moved to Palo Alto, after the Antenna Theater contract was finished. And that was before she started taking courses with the BPI, Church of Divine Man.

Worth mentioning was also that while she was sharing a house on Waller Street, with several other young people, she was doing some interesting reading. Bookstores in the City, and especially, in Berkeley, were the best thing about living in the San Francisco Bay area. She found this very thick, huge red book, called Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, a comprehensive manual that she kept reading. Back in Canada, in Edmonton, AB, she finished reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail, some time before she left on her trip. Of course that was some time after she'd finished writing Volume I, A Will to Power - A Fugue for Five Voices.

Well, the connections were all vague now, but she did something else before she moved to Palo Alto. She found a Templar Center in San Francisco, in the phone book, and called them and asked if she could go on a tour of the place, a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, she thought. What she got in answer was:

"Sorry, Miss. We don't do tours. Only members are allowed. And no women are allowed."
Well, that was really interesting...

The year was 1987.

[: Outside, is America... :]

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