Dear Diary. Let me put this as simply and plainly as I can. Life bites! I mean it. I know my doctor will have a thing or two to say about that statement when he reads it here but right now I’m in a really sucky mood. I’m here when I would rather be pretty much anywhere else. I don’t know why I’m here, I don’t know how I got here and all the locked doors in the asylum are going to make sure that I stay here so complaining is kind of a moot point. Isn’t it? Staring at the straight horizontal line halfway up the wall that divides the sickly-green lower portion from the pallid-white above it I can only wonder; why green? Why not blue or yellow or even orange? I mean, could this place look any more like a hospital with this color combination? All right, well, it is a hospital of sorts, but still, could they not have shown some imagination? Pictures of unicorns would have been a nice alternative to the two-color monotony that circles the entire room but I suppose they figured the best décor for a sanatorium would be something bland. But why green? Green has never been my favorite color. Oh well, I suppose this is to be my punishment for flipping out like I did… well, do.

Writing my thoughts down in this diary was suggested by Dr. Pernicious, my mental health director while I’m stuck inside the Barmy Mental Asylum, and I suppose in the long run it will probably be beneficial in helping me sort through my thoughts and come to terms with my most recent meltdown. Damn it, my nose itches again and I can’t reach it to scratch because of the restraints holding my arms down. It’s times like this that I wonder which is worse, the torture of being locked away from the general public and my normal life or the agony of a device that was obviously designed with the sole intent of keeping me from scratching my damned nose. I suppose I should count my blessings, though. At least I have enough slack in the restraints that I can reach the pencil to the paper I’m writing on.

The asylum is enormous. There are three wings, North, East and West. I’m in the North Wing which I had hoped would be some sort of good luck omen, polarity-wise. Um… no. The place rises up 20 stories high and each floor contains 80 rooms giving the place total possible room count of 4800. Now, each room is capable of holding two patients with the exception of those on the sixth, seventh and eighth floors in the North Wing which have not yet been renovated from when the asylum was built in the early 1900’s. This gives the Barmy Mental Asylum a grand possible occupancy total of 9,360 patients, and believe me, the joint is packed. Nobody – and I mean nobody – has a single room to themselves, or a single thought, or a single moment to take care of a single animal instinct that is singularly forbidden here… if you know what I mean.

Pretty much everything is controlled around here from what and how much you eat to when you go to bed and wake up. Medical activities are scheduled throughout the day such as private and group therapy sessions, and even recreation is controlled, this by the asylum’s color coding system which I’ll explain later. The place is run like a well-oiled machine with the staff assuming the role of the gears and the patients being the broken spokes and squeaky bearings.

I see my roommate, Pullet, is up. Fine thing, they keep me restrained in bed while somebody who thinks he’s a chicken gets to move around freely. I mean, if he wants to sit in the same corner hour after hour trying to hatch some imaginary egg that’s his business, but the constant clucking is driving me nuts. Isn’t the idea behind restorative mental health to heal my shattered brain rather than furthering the disease by locking me in a room with a man who struts around making chicken sounds and hatching eggs? The very worst thing is being awakened at daylight every morning by the crowing. God, I hate the crowing, and I’m dreading a repeat of molting season when Pullet starts ripping his clothes up and throwing them around like he’s losing his feathers. Don’t get me wrong, Pullet can be a nice guy when he’s not a chicken… well, his real name is Gene but the doctors told me to refer to him by his chosen name of ‘Pullet’ for fear that he’ll start squawking and screeching again like last time. Oh, that was a disaster. He nearly broke a wing the way he was flailing about the room, and… well, you know, an arm. God, now I’m believing he’s a chicken. Anyway, Pullet has never really bothered me and pretty much keeps to himself in that one corner so I guess I could have done worse as far as a roommate. Every day I hear horror stories of other patients’ roommates, so I suppose, given the choice of lesser evils, I would choose to live with Pullet.

Selected text © 2010 MT Shivers