You can't make this s**t up

Norms is a time machine. Step into 1965 decor wise anyway.
The food is decent/good and this one is handy to my store.
Yeah we can do lunch sometime.

Was the wackball kind of a tall, thin guy with a smoking habit and a piercing stare?

I think you may have found a Dave.

I call them Daves because that’s what the one I saw called himself. [del]I was on my way to a wedding[/del] I was picking through a cast-off sale at a college library when Dave walked up beside me and started talking. At this late remove, I can’t remember the narrative thread, only some specific knots: Weather-controlling devices; UFOs as intrusions of higher-dimensional objects into our three-dimensional space; he met Reagan in the men’s room in a secluded rest stop; a love of survivalist literature; and a warm personality that just didn’t allow for the idea you’d leave.

They may be involved in a conspiracy. They are most assuredly here, man.

I’ve eaten at that Norm’s – once for Christmas dinner, because every other place I went was closed.

I ate at The Penguin too, before it became a dentist’s office.

I have run into SO many of these guys in Bangkok’s bars.

Could you hook me up? I really REALLY need to disconnect from reality for a day or two, but I’m not up to dealing with the Zetas to get that way.

If this type of person uses Usenet, they’re called Science Kooks.

In fact they’re about all that’s holding Usenet together these days.

I used to work at a coffee shop near a mental health halfway house. Caffeine and psychiatric medication made for an interesting mix…

Wait, Stranger works at JPL? How did I not know that?

Sure. I shall be glad to hand out your e-mail address to them. :smiley:

Maybe he was pitching a movie idea to be a vehicle to get Britney’s career back on track?

While I disapprove of the slight to Daves, who in my experience are upstanding people without exception, I think I have met one too! Why do they all look like this?

My guy sat down next to me on the bus and started telling me how he’s the only white person in the world who can walk up to 50Cent and say “what up my nigga” without getting shot, and how he owns half of New York, which is really impressive coming from a guy with stained clothes on a bus in Australia. But the kicker was his story about how he developed a device that deactivates gunpowder in a 100-metre radius; just by pressing a button, any bullet that flies into that 100-metre radius drops harmlessly onto the ground.

Fortunately this was while I was studying the chemistry of gunpowder for my Honours degree and I was actually reading an article about it at the time; I just held up the article and said, dead-pan, “gunpowder does not work that way”. The guy just got up and sat in an empty seat across the aisle, and my side of the bus gave a little applause :smiley:

Not as spectacular as Rick’s crazy guy, but still a hilarious Daveing.

Years ago I was talking to a guy who developed a perfect system for winning at the track. I mean, perfect, can’t lose, guaranteed to make you a millionaire overnight. I never did get a chance to try it out. Apparently, neither did he.

And scientists (mad or otherwise) on travel rent cars from Hz.

It’s amazing how many self-confessed geniuses ride the bus. Also how many guys who are rich/were rich/are about to become rich. And all of them have a proximity switch. The moment someone steps within range, they start talking.

Please tell me he left in a DeLorean.

I went back for lunch today, but he wasn’t there. :frowning:

There used to be a guy who rode the number 41 bus in Albuquerque endlessly. He told stories in response to anything he heard another person say, so the other riders soon learned that he had a seeing eye alligator and a seeing eye Bengal tiger (never mind that he could see perfectly well himself), that he had been to Alaska where he had become the leader of a pack of wolves, that he had been in Vietnam where he was just about to whip the entire Vietcong but was prevented from doing so because Nixon decided to pull the troops out, and that he had killed a cop in Oklahoma. This last act led to the death penalty–he was put in the gas chamber but just got high, so then he was electrocuted but that just made him high, so finally they gave him a lethal injection and guess what, he just got high. At which point they pardoned him.

He always had his arm in a sling and would talk about accidents he had which he claimed had given him brain damage. I believed the part about the brain damage. That said, he was actually a pretty nice guy. Once when I felt ill and started spitting up on the bus, everyone else looked at me like I was some kind of mutant but he called out to the driver and managed to procure a paper towel so I could wipe my mouth.

I shared a cab with a guy like this earlier this year. Started telling the driver and me how he and his son owned a robotics company but they could never get the precision parts they needed so now they have a shed full of aluminum parts that his son is trying to auction off on ebay so they can make their money back not hat he needs money what with being given the Medal of Honor and his generous hero’s pension that he was given for being special Ops in Vietnam and he gets a chunk o’ change for each bullet he took but that’s nothing compared to the amount of times he was shot as a cop and he didn’t even care and stopped wearing his vest and how he had a house worth a half-a-mil but he sold it because it was too much space and he’s just a humble guy and then we pulled up to his 1/1 bungalow in a 55s-and-over community.

THE END

How… how is it that there are these people who can just talk and talk in a way that suggests a certain facility with language, not to mention intelligence and education… How is it that they can go on and on about stuff that is completely, bizarrely impossible this way? Obviously their brains know how to contruct complex sentences, but the information they are relating has no bearing on any reality. They must have been normal enough when they were kids, right? And then something just went haywire.

Because schizophrenia (which is what most of these sound like) is a thought disorder. It messes with the way you think, unlike mood disorders which mess with your mood.

Often schizophrenia doesn’t show symptoms until your 20s or 30s, so yes, they may indeed have been “normal” as kids until their schizophrenia started presenting symptoms.

Why? We’re not entirely sure. It seems to have something to do with excess dopamine produced or recepted (is that a word?) in the brain, based on the observation that patients with thought disorders who are put on medications which interfere with dopamine production or reception have fewer disordered thoughts.

Schizophrenia seems to have a genetic component (having a first degree relative with schizophrenia makes it more likely for a person to have it), maybe some viral factors (if your mom had certain viral illnesses while pregnant with you, you’re more likely to have schizophrenia), perhaps social or parenting issues (very controversial subject!) and maybe substance abuse (increased substance abuse at a young age in correlated with schizophrenia, but there’s sort of a chicken-or-the-egg thing there; do street drugs *cause *schizophrenia to develop in genetically susceptible individuals, or are early, high functioning schizophrenic kids self medicating with street drugs?).

Schizophrenics actually tend to be very bright, and very creative in their delusions, while at the same time being very concrete thinkers who don’t handle idiom well. I observed a patient yesterday talking to a nursing student who expressed admiration at his dancing ability and she said, “I can’t dance - I have two left feet!” He said, “REALLY?!” and bent down to examine her feet! It was so hard not to laugh. But he wasn’t dumb at all, just very concrete in his thinking. He was looking for two feet that had big toes on the right!