Running the Asylum

I just found the following as an old draft of an entry I never completed:

There is a lot to be said for being alone at work. Not all of it is good, but still, allow me to say some of it.

I'm alone, accountable only to my clients and to my myself. No oft painful small talk with peers, though no invigorating conversation or amusingly senseless banter either. No coordinating or compromising with coworkers, but neither do I get any real breaks. No cleaning up the messes of others, or at least less of that, but on the occasion I must do cleanup it does suck that the ruiner has left work and said mess long ago. For that matter, when I'm wrong, nobody is around to correct me, so I do the clients a disservice. 

That's all I wrote at the time.  I remember this last week of my hospital job.  I was working the night shifts alone at the mental health clinic, always an interesting time.  I, like my colleagues, made my office a small training room in the administrative building across the complex from the inpatient building.  This distance made it so that if a nurse truly had a problem, he or she could call me, but we would not be bothered by every trivial moment of doubt that flitted about the staff.  This was not the best way to do our jobs, but it was the best way to relax, stream movies online, read, or simply work on one's blog.

But yes, there is something eerie about being in a dark, empty building on the campus of a psychiatric hospital overlooking downtown Los Angeles (which is creepy enough on its own at 4am).  Your mind wanders.  It's hard to shut your eyes because you're just a tiny bit fearful that when you open them again the stillness will have shifted.  Then you'll have to wonder how and why and whom - or what - did the shifting...BOO!  And that's how it would happen, my second ghost story.

I miss the weirdness of that job.  I think about the back cover blurb on my copy of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying:  It told me that Faulkner wrote the novel over six weeks while working the night watch at a power plant.  I can't help but feel that's when the ghosts come.  That's where I ought to go to capture them, and weave them into the blank sheets of stories I haven't yet learned.