To make a really, really, long story short (the conversation lasted 3 hours on a public sidewalk, I don’t want to get into it), I got to meet a schizo that just left prison today!
Interesting mind, intelligent, but really, wowowowowowow… I now know first hand that what I see in movies isn’t all that far off from the real thing. Fucking scary! And the fact that this guy knows my name now and knows what I look like!.. :eek:
If I was an asshole this conversation would not have taken place or lasted as long as it did. Although, I’m still debating whether I regret meeting this person or not. To say the least, it by far the most bizarre conversation I’ve ever had.
What are some of your stories?
Well, what did you guys talk about? What made him so strange?
I’ve met a few bizarre people in my life…
I knew a lady who swallowed drain cleaner (as part of a suicide attempt, I believe) who walked around with a tube going down a hole in (what’s left of her) throat 24/7. She could no longer talk, eat, or even breathe without help. Imagine living the rest of your life like that. Too bad I didn’t take the opportunity to try and communicate with her.
A friend of mine first met me at Starbucks, where he asked to share my table. Then he immediately started talking about all the ex-girlfriends he’s ever had. Then he showed me explicit nude pictures of all of them, right there in Starbucks with his laptop in full public view. Then he invited me to spend the night in his homemade van-cum-RV… just as friends. I ran away for dear life.
After several of these attempts, I eventually gave in just to see what would happen. We ended up going out with a third friend, a cult leader of some sort, to watch fireworks. Then we went to her house, where the two of 'em spent a few hours cuddled up in bed talking about me while I was lying on the ground wondering why the hell they were cuddling in bed talking about me. Then she got bored, kicked us out, and we went to his van and watched a movie like nothing ever happened.
The next day we went back to the house and he stood by the cat litter box for an hour and a half – just standing there like a zombie – complaining about how bad it smelled while the rest of us just kinda looked at each other.
That’s just one of many weird events I ended up having with him. He became, over time, one of my better friends and I got to see past his weirdness, but I suspect most that meet him never bother to reach that point. He’s extremely intelligent, an MIT grad and Army IT officer, but, well, let’s just say he’s a few dozen wings short of being a social butterfly. Still… cool guy.
I knew this one other guy who seemed to spend his time going in and out of mental institutions, sometimes on court orders and sometimes on crisis doctor’s orders. When I met him, he was constantly talking to himself about all the lawsuits he’d file once he got out. He walked around carrying an big envelope (full of evidence, he says) with a big SEALED written across its seal and a list of every eyewitness who saw it, meaning pretty much anybody he could get a name out of. He was actually able to communicate if you tried to talk to him. Only he’d answer you – coherently – and then immediately go back to rambling to himself not a second later. He was also rather smart and very witty. I sat through a game of Ungame with him and he produced some of the most pithy and witty social commentary I’ve ever heard. Part of me wonders if he isn’t like that guy from the movie Conspiracy Theory, meaning “too dangerous to be left sane”. He claims he’s been forcibly drugged and everything he says seems to add up… maybe I’ll look into it sometime.
Probably my first encounter with the mentally ill was the most memorable. I was 19, waiting tables at Pizza Hut, and had a customer, a middle-aged woman, who got to talking to me about what I was majoring in. When I told her the plan was to be an English teacher, she started telling me about the books she had written…children’s books. She said she’d had a series published, and they were pretty popular, and perhaps I’d read them…but she wouldn’t tell me the titles! Kept skirting the issue, talking about the stress of writing under a deadline, dealing with publishers. She was fascinating to talk to…then she started talking about how she had to keep dabbing perfume on because of a strange odor that was coming from her temples, and how the doctors were lying to her about the cause. And she still refused to name the books, even when I asked point-blank. It finally dawned on me that this woman had some serious issues, and by the end of the conversation I couldn’t imagine why I had ever thought she was normal at first. There were a lot more strange things she said, but that’s what has stuck with me for years.
My uncle is paranoid schizoaffective, which means psychosis + mood disorder. He is very mentally ill and has been highly resistant to treatment. I didn’t really think of him as ‘‘weird’’ until I was much older and able to see how others reacted to him. He is highly intelligent and before his first psychotic break had a very bright future ahead of him. We used to write one another poetry. I have so many poems he wrote for me. His illness has definitely affected the quality of his poems, but I still find them interesting. One line will always stay with me:
‘‘I ask you not to laugh at the madman
But remember that the madman is listening.’’
I have friends who are afraid of the idea of being around my uncle. I would be lying to say it’s always a 100% comfortable experience, and as he gets older he is growing increasingly more unpredictable, but I still remember the time years ago when he could still participate in family events and he brought me ‘‘a box full of air’’ for Christmas. He kept insisting it was a box full of air and I thought he was lying. But I opened it up and it was, indeed, a box full of air – an empty cassette organizer box. He was a goofy guy.
I say ‘‘was’’ because he’s so mentally deteriorated at this point that he can barely go out in public. He’s been banned from too many grocery stores to count. He comes closer to homelessness every year. I won’t forget the first time I went into his apartment and found his poems stuck all over the the nicotine-stained walls. He had letters to his assailants tacked onto the doors–begging them to leave him alone and stop trying to kill him. It might sound funny to us, see, but this is his reality–people are trying to kill him on a daily basis by poisoning his cigarettes and controlling his thoughts via electronic frequency. Can you imagine being persecuted your entire life in this way? The fact that nobody’s really there is irrelevant to his experience–my uncle’s entire adult life has been spent with others trying to kill him and control his mind. Throw in all the heavy medications he’s been forced to take and you’ve got yourself a recipe for misery.
Now he is so emotionally labile that he will start crying at a moment’s notice. He started weeping the other day when I talked to him on the telephone, because that’s how happy he was to hear my voice. He is a lonely man that most people avoid, and my family struggles to provide his basic needs while maintaining a distance. My grandmother once introduced her daughters to some friends at a party. ‘‘I have a son, too,’’ she said. ‘‘But he’s schizophrenic.’’ As if that was some kind of qualifier, as if he wasn’t really a son because he was mentally ill.
He wrote me and my husband a poem for my wedding day because (as we all knew) he was unable to attend. We displayed the poem in a nice frame on our gift table. It’s not a great poem and it makes no sense:
People who didn’t know about my uncle thought it kind of odd. I don’t care.
I can’t see a homeless person without thinking of him. Everyone in my family is extremely paranoid about going crazy which has resulted in a refusal to acknowledge any psychological problems or behavioral dysfunctions whatsoever. Dealing with his mental illness and his behavioral problems has been a huge burden on my family, but my damned family rarely stops to think about what a huge burden his illness has been on him.
I’m usually pretty lighthearted on this topic and I admit that everyone in my family sometimes copes by poking fun at his illness, but I don’t feel like laughing today. Remember that for every crazy person you meet, someone somewhere loves him and wishes to God he didn’t have to suffer.
I really liked the poem, didn’t find it odd either. I think that was really nice of your uncle to write a poem as well, since he couldn’t spend your special day with you.
Yes, I think the poem is actually quite sweet. You can get a sense of what he was trying to express with it even though the content is a bit disorganized by the illness.
I have rotated at various psychiatric wards in my med school training. When you think about it from the patient’s perspective, it is really quite frightening to think about how it would feel to lose control of your thoughts and not be able to trust what your mind is telling you is truly real.
I was just laid off from a job in a psychiatric clinic. We had some strange folks there, all trying to cope with problems that I can’t begin to understand.
But my worst encounters were back in the days when I was a cop. There were certain locations that we’d get calls on and we wouldn’t set foot on the property until there were at least three us, because we knew we were going to have a fight on our hands.
In college, I made friends with a man who believes he’s a werewolf. Once you get past the odd mannerisms (woofing in greeting for example) and the smell (an unfortunate glandular problem that doesn’t go away no matter how much he bathes), he’s actually a great guy- intelligent, caring, generous. I miss him quite a bit these days.
I currently attend a mental health day program. One woman there is so textbook paranoid schizophrenic that she actually said to me “See her? I know she’s plotting against me.”
I think that’s a sublimely sweet poem, actually. You can see where he’s going with the various threads in there, and they’re all really, really nice thoughts. I would be thrilled to have someone write such things about me. As it stands, if I get married, I’ll probably get angry and/or disappointed letters from my aunts and uncles about how much they disapprove of my love. I know it can be frustrating to be born into a family with certain issues, but this might be a good moment to think about the privileges you enjoy because of the way you were born. Just a thought.
This is a very poignant point that, IMO, everyone would do well to heed. Most people we would call “crazy” are victims of at least one crippling disease and live miserable lives, for no reason other than the luck of the draw. We ought to be a little nicer to those who can’t do for themselves.
I think the most bizarre person I’ve ever met in my life is best described as a second-generation hippie. He attends the UU church, has questionable personal hygiene, and wears a cape all the time. Pretty smart guy, but completely unlike anyone else I’ve ever met, and I could only take him in short doses. I think the strangest idea he came up with was that no one was real, we were all just figments of someone else’s imagination–a collective unconsciousness, in a way. Or subconsciousness. Or something. (He once spent a few hours insisting I was a figment of his imagination. Pissed me off)
Of course, going to the school we did he didn’t stick out all that much, and he was friends with everyone. Everyone at the larger school next door knew of him, and were kinda scared of him…but I think they were a little scared of everyone at our school. It tends to attract the slightly more oddball students.
