"The TV lounge has devils in it," Doug always said, every morning. "I'm extremely afraid of Tom Brokaw's accent. Can you feel it? I feel it even walking past it: A thought eraser"
When they all made out their lunch-orders Doug wrote:

"I'm ordering swill," he told Letterman. "It's important to live on purpose." Letterman said, "I'm ordering compost. That way we can make more"
In the central office, which had thick lucite walls and a heavily shackled door, the staff watched in amazement at the patients and made notations. The Lucite made them look more bulbous then they really were, but what really fascinated the patients was the content of their writing. In Letterman's case it got noted down that when the patients played cards (which took up half their time, since no therapy exist­ed) Letterman never joined in. This made the bulbous figures nod knowingly. The other patients played poker and blackjack and argued about brands of beer and what was being written about them, while Letterman sat off by himself reading books about ecological footprints, thermodynamics and the Bosnian Pyramids.
"Why don't you play cards?" Penny, a psych tech, asked him.
"Poker and blackjack are not card games but money games," He said, lowering his book. "Since we're not allowed to have any money on us, there's no point in playing. Besides, the pyramids are twelve thousand years old. They have been waiting a long time for us to discover them. Did you hear what Tom Brokaw said about them?"

"I think you should play cards," Penny said.
Letterman understood immediately that he had been ordered to play cards, so he and Debbie played kids' card games like "Fish." They played "Fish" for hours. The staff watched from their lucite office and noted down what they saw with their swollen pens.
One of the women had managed to hold on to her Bible. For the thirty-five patients it was the only Bible, King James Version but it would do. Carly was forbidden to look at it or get anywhere near it. However, at one bend in the corridor the staff cameras had a blind spot. Some of the pages would stand there and make faces. Fat hung out there sometimes to pass their copy of the Bible, their communal highlighted copy with writing all over the margins, over to Carly for a quick glance at The Sermon on the Mount or Ecclesiastes 12.5. The staff knew what they were doing because they could hear Carly's ecstasy - She "suffered" from St. Theresa Syndrome and would writhe in bliss while reading the passages particularly salient to her current life situation. By the time a tech got out of the office and down the corridor, Debbie had shut the book and rambled on, panting.
Mental inmates always move at one speed and one speed only. But some always move slowly and some always run. Carly, lithe and vital, nonetheless ambled along slowly, as did Doug. Monsieur Lettero - for this is what the other inmates had begun to call him - always walked with Doug, and matched his pace to his. Together they circled around and around the corridor in spirals, conversing. Conversations in mental hospitals resemble con­versations in bus stations, because in a Greyhound Bus Sta­tion everyone is waiting, and in a mental hospital-especially a county lock-up mental hospital-everyone is waiting. Everywhere people wait and walk in circles. They wait to get out. Some patients couldn't wait to "graduate" and lost it, dissolving in the anticipation of their freedom and making funny enough sounds or faces to get the attention of staff. They called this a "Hotel California" and often resulted in an extended stay.
Not much goes on in a mental ward. Patients do not really overpower the staff, and the staff does not really torture the patients. Mostly people read or watch TV or just sit smoking or try to lie down on a couch and sleep, or drink coffee or play cards or walk, and three times a day brand name trays of fast food are served. The passage of time is designated by the arrival of the chirping food carts. At night visitors arrive with tours, the leaders walking backwards and flowing with information, repeating themselves six or seven shifts per night. The visitors always smile enormous, cheshire smiles while the information is repeated by the backwards walkers.