Like this

The story of this day is the sun not at all wanting to linger here. Up and over and out - like that. Leaving it dark when my work day is over and providing the excuse I need not to run again. 

Work kept me busy with tedium today. Hours spent negotiating the obstacles between where I stand at the starting line - me, the runner representing a patient in an ER waiting to transfer to a psychiatric unit - and the insurance company who may or may not agree to pay for some portion of the patient's treatment when the race is over. The whole process could be reduced to a straight shot, an easy jog even. But the race isn't designed for ease of use. It's a trial by ordeal. You must be willing to repeat yourself endlessly. It's like detectives trying to trip you up during an interrogation by making you tell the story over and over again looking for inconsistencies. They transfer you to non-existent voice mails or to holding pens where they soften your brain and erode your resolve with eternal loops of hold music. Sometimes they say they're going to transfer you and then hang up and you have to start the entire process over again. I did a lot of swearing and yelling at automatons for the first couple of weeks of this job. Sometimes I could hear the hurt in their voices. AI is getting more I by the second. It won't be long, I'm sure, before they have a zinger at the ready for me.

I don't yell anymore and I try not to give any outward sign of being flustered. They will press you to cardiac arrest if you let them see. I use it as an opportunity to practice self-awareness, to exercise patience, to find humor in absurdity and futility, while at the same time not giving up on getting the person I represent the authorization he/she/they require to take the next step into inpatient treatment that they often don't even want and rarely receive except in name only. But they're out of the Emergency Department at least. And that moves money around if nothing else.

The mice have moved in for the season. I trapped the first one last night. I have no quarrel with them but they don't pay rent and they eat and shit and piss and breed and chew through upholstery. I must destroy them all to maintain my quality of life. It's a biological imperative. We both deserve to survive and to be destroyed depending on your point of view.

I got outside for a few minutes in the afternoon to bring out trash and bring in mail. I read something today that provided a realization. It said something along the lines of us needing to avoid trying to hold something that is leaving and trying to repel something that is arriving. I've learned that first lesson by being dragged half to death more than once. That second one though. 

I heard a gust of wind tonight - the kind that tears loose the last few leaves - harkening Winter.