let's get some things clear.

up until this point i'm been telling things pretty straightforward and chronological, but it's only involved generic admissions workers and police officers and ER nurses and such and things were pretty straightforward. NOW the story is going to get more complex and involve people that are real and interesting (not that the police officer isn't a real interesting person, but for the purposes of my story, he's one-dimensional) and the timelines are going to get blurred if i try to illustrate a concept or stick to one idea that spans a couple of days since i am writing a blog entry and not a novel.

in a novel one may spin out ideas concurrently; in a blog entry one may not. so strict chronology may go out the window.

also since i have already identified the august institution at which i am still a patient, it will be of little use for me to disguise its identity, or to disguise the identity of certain of the staff working with me, or parts of the building or grounds, so i'm just going to say that i'm not going to say anything stupid and that if i have any unkind opinions i will either disguise those identities or i will keep those opinions to myself.

when speaking of patients, i am either changing their names and identifying characteristics or i am referring to them by the nicknames we gave them on the ward (with a little removal of identifiers). "tornado girl" is a good example; we never learned her real name. why should i ever call her anything else? and there was a guy named bob, too. three of them. we gave them nicknames to sort them out. i intend to refer to them by their names, since we only had three and we had to nickname them to keep them distinct. you probably know guys named bob, too. but no, mostly every other patient gets a brand-spanking-new name, which is sometimes funny, because once i was telling stories about a time on a mental ward using cleaned up names and a woman i met on a ward years AFTER i wrote about that story was all proud because she thought i'd told the story about her, using her real name, and no amount of argument, including the copyright date on the publication compared to the date of admission when we had met could convince her she hadn't been part of the story.

oh, well.

talk to you tomorrow.