VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). You'll make something intricate with your own hands, and one tiny detail will have people leaning closer to ask how you did it. There will be praise from someone hard to impress.

doubtful 👆 I make things fairly often, but not lately and I don't want to impress anyone. I'm back to not wanting anyone to remember I'm alive or know where I am, an invisible island, move Ears to here, pray trouble stops finding us for a while. 

I am cancelling Kalamazoo today. writing off the rest September. 

I woke up thinking about the little old ladies who sell knickknack gifts and books in the lobby - a charity of some kind gets the proceeds - they're hardcover books, fat stupid myster thrillers and histories. hardcovers aren't allowed on behavioral health floors. if the ladies are there today, I'll ask how to donate some paperbacks. 

probably we are atypical, having wee English Lit classes by half at every visit, me bringing him new books, him passing back ones he's finished, him folding down pages for me to reread later. but he can't be the only person on those 4 floors who reads. and there are no books up there, just air hockey. though obviously (to me now) people live there, indefinitely held, nobody would describe those floors as human habitat. maybe we can leave behind books when he finally gets out, enough for there to be one good one to find on those floors/units. 

Ears says the nurses put up with crazy bullshit all fucking day. a million dollars wouldn't be enough to make him want that job, he says, and that's why they're so mean to families. and the doctors are people nobody ever wants to see now or again ever, like Grim Reapers. it can't be awesome to be in those jobs, the universal reaction to you being aversion every day of your life. my own quickly formed fear-revulsion, despite my years-long ingrained allegiance to nurses in particular, is another 💔. they are positively hateful, but I am sure they weren't back when I would have met them and given them a book. it's all a crying shame. 

back at it all today, of course. paperwork 🫩, jeezus. reams of paperwork, a buzzilion calls and 45-min holds, all to get I am not sure what benefit(s) at the end of the day, just tossed around at sea. I honestly cannot imagine how anyone's regular life survives this. I suppose those lives sucked anyway or they wouldn't have wound up there, but still.

it is going to be very hard to break the habit of thinking like that, i.e. systemically. to think instead only about the one, Ears, not the many anymore.

 -_0 dreamt I wrote a book then frantically looked all over in a hospital for it