Yesterday I was waiting on the Skytrain (Vancouver’s Light Rapid Transit) platform, and observed a fellow picking cans out of the trash and putting them in a plastic bag. Not an unusual sight by any stretch of the imagination, but the guy didn’t look like your usual binner - he was wearing fairly expensive-looking rain-gear (fecking pouring yesterday.)
The odd part was this, though:
After he checked all the bins on the platform, he sat down on a bench, and began flossing his teeth with the top edge of the poly bag he’d just filled with cans from the trash. :eek:
My husband the letter carrier reported this morning that yesterday was such nice weather that Pennerman was out in a skirt. I said oh, Pennerman being a female letter carrier?
He said no, Pennerman being Decatur’s most public transvestite. He parades up and down Eldorado Street during the day, just happily taking the air. And Tuesday, as I said, it was a balmy spring day, so Pennerman emerged in a skirt.
And the unusual public behavior is not that he was wearing a skirt–it’s that he walks up and down Eldo, which is US Route 36 through town, and grimy light-industrial all the way. He’s not cruising for tricks; he’s just out for a stroll.
The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen was a few years back, something like mid-November. I was driving home at night, must’ve been about 11pm or so. I turned the corner onto the street next to mine, and I saw her-
Indeterminate age. Rollerblading. Wearing a full kimono, and holding a fan up in front of her face.
My karate instructor boards horses. He’s the sort of guy who has a lot of side businesses so it doesn’t strike me odd that he boards horses (since he has a barn) but I always assumed he just boarded them as he doesn’t seem to be the sort who rides them.
A month or so ago I was standing in my boyfriend’s driveway (who happens to live down the street from my karate instructor) and a horse came galloping down the road with a large rider.
It was my karate instructor, who sort of looks like he could be Bill Clinton’s bigger, meaner, stupider older brother, taking one of his horses out for a ride.
The mental image of my karate instructor with his shock of white hair, being a huge guy on a horse, galloping down the busy street, has stuck with me for a while now.
At lunchtime, I came across a fellow who was upside-down, doing a handstand on the corner. What made it odd is that his head was resting on a glass Coke bottle.
The true test of “seen everything in the city”-ness? I was wondering where he got the glass Coke bottle.
Nowhere on the scale of the previous posts, but my husband dropped a dime on the ground at the gas station and the guy next to him picked it up…and put it in his own pocket.
A few years ago, I was at a stoplight and noticed and older man on one of the corners making exagerated waving motions. I figured he was trying to get the attention of someone on one of the other corners, until the light changed and he started waving in a different direction. Yup, he thinks he’s directing traffic. Just stands out there and waves his arm back and forth in some random direction until the light changes then he does it in a different direction (not necesarily having anything to do with who has the right of way at that moment). He does this probably 50 hours a week, for the last few years.
Gotta wonder what made him start doing it.
Oh yeah, there’s the Pink Man in Santa Cruz. He walks comically slow, up and down the length of Pacific Ave (the main drag in SC). Usually has a big goofy smile on his face.
Remarkably, I haven’t seen any aberrant behaviour in quite some time. But then I’m far enough outside the downtown GTA core that I don’t see too many nutcases.
Schizoid mumblers and ravers aside, I do recall several years ago watching a guy walk down the street. He wasn’t muttering to himself or anything, but he walked like he had a grudge against gravity. He wasn’t quite stomping – his footfalls weren’t much louder than ordinary – but he was quite determinately leaning into each step with impressive vigor. His entire upper body bobbed dramatically with each foot plant. The comically exaggerated gait could have been an exemplar for the ideal graduate of The Ministry of Silly Walks.
There is this one guy that lives in my area though. He’s a rather stocky black guy who appears to be perfectly harmless to all but the eyes, for his mode of dress is what I can only describe as Shaman Pimp Couture. Adorned in some kind of robe in an LA riot of colours and cloth tassles festooned with various grigri bags and baubles, he often has wood and bead necklaces around his neck, a dozen rings of varying shapes, sizes and colours on his fingers, and a round cap, also a chromatic nightmare. Oddly however, as if in stark contrast, the main attraction was the dark, gnarled wooden staff he walked around with. Not that it wasn’t without its squeals of colour; there were bright feathers and other dangly bits attached to its knobby top. It was otherwise a plain, stained oak brown, and clearly decorative rather than functional, seeming to suggest that he ran out of places on his person from to hang things. He didn’t act strange – no preaching or prophetic declarations of impending doom, and he didn’t stop random passersby to tell them of the times and manners of their future demise. Indeed he seemed to have friends, or at least acquaintances, with whom he interacted with pretty normally. Whatever his eccentricities, they all seemed to be projected outward.
I was in Ventura last month desperately searching for a bathroom. I spotted one in a park (I know, I know) and went to saunter into the ladies’, when a bum dressed like George Clinton’s white counterpart (dreads, tophat and all) came out pushing a cart. I don’t know what he was doing in there and I don’t want to know. I pretty much managed to hold it til Santa Paula.
That was just the weirdest bum incarnation of the day; we’ve come to refer to Ventura as “Bum Town” and now avoid it like the plague.
Johnny is somewhat of an icon in Adelaide. He’s harmless, friendly and likes to walk up and down our central shopping mall in speedos and gumboots (galoshes/wellies). And he’s got a fan club.
As a matter of fact, just today I saw this car cruising down the road BILLOWING huge amounts of smoke, like a frigging coal factory, with a police cruiser chasing it. Not that unusual in L.A. really, but it was kind of a neat sight.
Once, at O’Hare airport in Chicago, I was waiting for a friend’s plane. There were a number of other folks around as well. Two were an older couple. They looked perfectly ordinary, like someone’s grandparents.
She stood up beside his chair and with a pair of small scissors began clipping his ear hairs! Then, when done, he tilted his head backwards and she began clipping his nose hairs!!!
