Note: I do not want to appear insensitive to the plight of crazy people worldwide. This is just an anecdote.
So about three years ago I was waiting for the bus in Phoenix at Bell and Cave Creek. Nothing to do but sit in the sun when this little old lady wearing flourescent hot pants sits down next to me. Not too odd, in my opinion. Plenty of old ladies with no fashion sense to go around.
Then she starts talking.
Not talking to me, mind you. (We were the only people at the bus stop.) Nope, she just starts rambling on about whatever’s going on in her mind at the moment. Not wanting to be too obtrusive to her public privacy, I do my best to ignore her. I’m just waiting for the bus, that’s what I’m doing.
So this monologue keeps churning for the next five or so minutes. Not once am I actually tuning in to see what topics are dropping from the pulpit, but the volume keeps slowly growing louder. It’s when the speech breaches normal speaking voice that I hear this little tidbit that still keeps me awake at nights:
“She used to go around cutting men’s penises off. Oh, God. . .”
That tears it. Time to move to the other side of the bus stop.
Of course, that’s not a very extreme anecdote. Not even the most bizarre experience I’ve had with some of our planet’s stranger denizens, but it’s a real cute story. Anybody got anything else equally enlightening?
I was once waiting for an elevator in the school library when some girl walked up wearing headphones with her music turned up so loud that it could be heard throughout the library. Rude, but a normal sort of rude, so I wasn’t going to say anything. The elevator was taking a bit longer than usual to get down to our floor, and you could tell she was getting pissed off about the wait. Finally, the elevator arrives and the little bell dings, but it’s an old elevator, and the doors don’t open instantly. She starts banging on the doors with her fists (trying to get it to open, I guess). When the doors do open a couple seconds later, everyone inside looks slightly freaked out (What the hell was that noise?) and I’m starting to question the wisdom of getting on the elevator with this person. I did, and no further incidents occurred, except that I continued to see her walking throughout the library for the rest of the evening with her headphones on so loud, and to worry that she’d do something.
I guess that isn’t the freakiest or craziest thing anyone’s ever done, but if you had been there to see the look in her eyes…this girl definitely had a screw loose somewhere.
A lady I worked with came up to me out of the blue and started yelling and screaming at me for a bunch of stuff that had went wrong that I had no control of.
A guy from San Somewhere, California told me in all seriousness that he used to be a super-hero. You meet the darnedest people at convenience stores after midnight. Sort of like the Internet.
My mother works at a downtown library and man does she see some crazies. The one that’s most memorable these days, though, is this sixtyish guy with a long scraggly beard who wears a grubby white bathrobe and turban every day. He also wears philactories (sp?) on his forehead (above cats-eye glasses) and hands – I don’t know much about these, but my mother has said that these are normally only worn during prayer, certainly not out in public every day.
Lately he’s gotten stranger … he now wears a Barbie-type doll on the shoulder of his bathrobe. He dresses her up different all the time, and she’s got philactories like his. He talks to her, and pets her, while he looks at porn on the library internet terminals. One of the other homeless guys says Bathrobe Man sits on the bus and lifts the doll’s skirt up. :eek:
I once ran into an old lady at church. She seemed lonely, so, when she asked me to come round and visit her, I thought, well, why not, if she needs the company?
So, I go round to her place. And hear some of her woes. She needs to rent out the room at the top of the house (aha, says I to myself, I spy an ulterior motive here). Why? Because she’s not got much money, and she can’t claim any benefits, because she’s changed her name. She’s changed her name because otherwise her brother-in-law will use his connections in the drugs trade and the IRA to track her down and kill her. It’s all part of a plot to defraud her of her property, you see - by rights, she owns some notable percentage of Chipping Norton.
She has volumes of newspaper clippings that prove her story, if you read between the lines and (presumably) ignore the fnords. At one point, she leaves the room to go and get more “evidence”. Hmm, I think. She’s between me and the exit, how can I get out of here? Inspiration strikes! I reach for my mobile phone, planning to call a friend and get them to phone me back with an urgent message for me to come away at once… The house is in a dead spot, I can’t get a signal. And now she comes back, with carbon copies of all the letters she’s written to Tony Blair about the assassination of Princess Diana.
Five hours later, I managed to make my apologies and leave. No, I didn’t take the room. For that matter, I haven’t been back to that church since.
I was dragging some old chicken wire fencing down to the curb for garbage. It was all knotted up and rendered useless.
The garbage men showed up. The young guy says to me that they don’t accept stuff like that. I give him some charm and bat my eyes and he relents.
Then he says, " If you do it again, you’ll have to be my medieval slave."
I have no idea what this means to this day.
While he was single and enjoying life, Mr. Ujest and his buddies use to spend their extra energy (when too broke to go to the bar) by walking around the 24 hour Megalomart.
They noticed a woman who had a baking sheet under her shirt and a metal colander on her head.
They followed her around, sure she was shoplifting, even in the most ineffective manner.
Told the security guard. He smiled, " Oh, that’s Mildred, she wears the colander on her head to keep the aliens from reading her thoughts. Other than that, she’s harmless."
So, naturally, having no more mastadons to hunt and being young and full of too much energy, they decide to follow her home (by car). She lived about 10 miles away, and at 3am, there are not alot of cars out, so she must have figured it out. She pulls up into her drive in front of the crappiest house on a quiet older section of town, turns towards the guys (who are doing a drive by by now) and *crackles * at them.
Every time we go back this section of town, we do a drive by Mildred’s house and it looks like she has not been abducted by aliens yet.
Originally posted by Mephisto
A lady I worked with came up to me out of the blue and started yelling and screaming at me for a bunch of stuff that had went wrong that I had no control of.
I live in the Land of Loons, and a stroll up the road that abutts my street will bring me into encounters with some of the most off-the=planet people in Melbourne. Depending on my mood, it will either make me glad to live in such a psychiatrically-diverse area, or conversely, it will depress the hell out of me as I worry about the future of these folk, (and sometimes my own sanity for understanding what they are talking about!!)
Come visit Fitzroy, Melbourne, for a healthy dose of unreality.
My older brother has pretty much lost touch with reality and still lives with my mom.
Over the July 4th weekend, I went home and ate dinner with them, and he didn’t say a word. Then when I got up to leave, he held up this battered envelope.
HIM: Did you send me this?
ME: I don’t know, I can’t tell what it is.
HIM: It’s got your name and return address on it
ME: Is it your birthday card? (His birthday was back in March, and he had been carrying the envelope around in his back pocket since)
HIM: I don’t know. It came after my birthday. I didn’t trust it. Did you put Anthrax in it?
ME: No, they ran out of it at Eckerd’s.
Then he opens the envelope, opens the card, acts like he’s just been hit in the face with Anthrax, then says, “Oh. It says happy birthday.”
Knowed Out, has your brother gotten help? Just reading your post, I would guess he might be paranoid. I mean that in the medical sense; I’m not trying to be a smartass. Not being a psychiatrist, I obviously know nothing, but unless he has reason to think you’re prone to trying to kill him, that seems a little bit beyond normal sibling antagonism.
There is a slightly crazy guy that goes in my buddy’s coffee shop every day. He wears a huge camouflage jacket, dirty jeans, and a camouflage hat. He always carries a big bag filled with random stuff.
He also carries a piece of string with him. The other day, he put the piece of string in the door of the coffee shop, walked to the bathroom, and then to the counter. Apparently, the piece of string is attached to a spool, as he used it to find his way back to the door. He is not blind, nor does he have trouble seeing the menu posted up on the wall above the counter. He just has trouble finding the door.
Then there is Plastic Outfit Man[sup]TM[/sup]. He wears a black and white checkerboard suit, made out of plastic. He also wears a bowler-style hat, made out of green plastic. (Think St. Patrick’s Day accessory.) The suit looks like either a Halloween costume gone bad, or some sort of rain-jacket/pants ensemble. I’ve never seen him wear regular clothes. He used to come into the bar where I worked, order a Coke, tell a few little-kid style jokes, and STARE at customers. Just a tad bit freaky.
We’ve also got the One-Man-Marching-Band. This is the nickname he’s been given by my little brother. He’s this guy that walks around downtown, always by himself. He has a very pronounced walk, similar to the goose-step, but only on one side. He sat down next to me one night in the bar, and proceded to tell me that he thinks it should be legal for him to marry his daughter. He thinks that no man will ever be nice to her or treat her as well as he could, or provide for her like he could, since he gets a fat check from the government. When he started talking about how well he could treat her in bed, I walked away. :eek: (Someone reproduced with this man?) He usually sits and drinks cheap beer, then walks around until the people who take care of him pick him up. There are two stories behind this guy: A.) he was in a concentration camp in WW2 (which I don’t think is plausible, unless he was a fetus) and B.) he got hit by a bus when he was younger. I vote for the bus theory. In any case, I avoid him since the daughter/marriage spiel.
And, ha ha! Finally the perfect thread to post my sig.
One day back in the early '90s I had just picked up my laundry, and was approached by an old man in the parking lot, who asked if I could give him a ride home.
I’m not in the habit of picking up hitchhikers, but this was a pretty short, paunchy guy probably in his early 70s, so I didn’t figure he was much of a threat, and I decided to help out. It was about a 5 mile trip to a motel where he said he and his wife lived.
He did most of the talking on the way. He was pleasant, and fairly clear-spoken, but rambled quite a bit. I don’t remember much of what he said, but I’ve always kept the following bit of wisdom:
He: “I see you’re driving someone else’s car.”
Me: “What?”
He: “These days you drive someone else’s car. You don’t, they take you with them.”
My favourites are the ones who make REALLY STUPID homophobic comments. The ordinary homophobic comments I’m used to, but… well, one night Hamish and I dressed up in goth, totally goth from head to toe, the makeup, the jewellery, nail polish, whole nine yards. We looked fabulous. We went to Goth Night at the late Fetish Café. When we left, we were walking down this street in the damn Village and this old drunk guy looked up at us and went, “Faggots!”
What a smart man! I bet he took one look at me and knew I was white, too!
A screaming maniac on 42nd Street once told me he was either going to “kill me with kindness,” or “kill me with cannons.” His enunciation wasn’t what it might have been, so I was somewhat unsure.
Fresno, California has (or had, I haven’t seen this guy in a while) a local character called “The Spinning Guy” because…you guessed it-he spins everywhere.
My home town had two. “Loco Ray” and “Bicycle Annie.” Ray was a very short man who walked very quickly around town cussing to himself. As a young, insensitive, pubescent, we would ride our bikes by him and yell “Hey Ray” at which point he would chase us (thus the bikes) yelling obscenities the entire time. Great fun. Annie simply rode a bike everywhere. She wasn’t nearly as amusing as she never said anything and wouldn’t chase anybody.
During college, I worked at a deli/bagel place. I mainly worked evenings until it closed. Not too much business at night. As it was across the street from the university and we sold espresso we had a regular group of caffene junkies who inhabited the place at night. So it was pretty low-key. Our duties were mainly to get the store ready for the next morning. Anyways, one afternoon a guy comes in who bears a startling resemblance to Jeffrey Dahmer. He doesn’t buy anything, just sits in a table in the corner until we close, about five hours later. He started to show up every evening about the same time and would sit, never buying anything or talking to anybody, until we close. He was ususally there for at least a couple of hours, sometimes more. It got to the point where I would come in after my days off and the first thing I would enquire about was if “Dahmer” had come in. This went on for a month or so and then…he spoke. He came to the counter and asked if we had any cheesecake. We didn’t. He went and sat down and returned to the counter about an hour later and bought two containers of apricot cream cheese and asked for a spoon. He then went back to his corner and ate two tubs of straight apricot cream cheese. That was the only time he ever said anything. When I finally quit he was stilling coming in about three nights a week and sitting in the corner. He never ordered any more cream cheese.
My favorite encounter was with the E.T. rocks guy. I’m sitting in the Metro station, waiting for the train, when a middle-aged guy streams past, holding up his finger and wailing “E.T. phone home!! E.T. phone hoooome! Does anybody have a phone?”
Interpreting (correctly) that he needed to make a phone call, I showed him where the pay phone was. He was apparently so grateful that when the train pulled up, he plopped next to me and said “Do you want to see my rocks?” Before I had a chance to respond, he pulls the cover off the box he’s carrying, revealing a number of very ordinary-looking (the kind you find in your front yard) rocks, each of which apparently has a long saga pertaining to the finding thereof. It also transpires that he was distraught about being on time to give a lecture on the topic of rocks. He had a little giggling tic, and aside from the conversation topic seemed quite nice, though nutty.
Waaay back in the eighties, my girlfriend had a housemate who was a really quiet french-canadian fella.
He was at the end of his rope because he was having difficulty finding gainful employment. When we suggested that he might have better luck if he didn’t apply makeup before his interviews, he would simply say “But I have to look my best.” His “best” was startlingly dark rouge applied asymmetrically, and either green or blue eye-shadow which started on his eyelids, but then continued on up to meet his receding hairline. He never wore makeup at any other time.
He also used to retire to his room and scream and throw things for little fits of twenty-minutes or so. When I asked him what he was so angry about, he explained that he wasn’t angry, but that when he was a teen, he was kidnapped by the government, who used him to create a number of clones, and that the clones were connected by satellite through brain-implants. Although he had managed to escape, they were torturing his clones in order to force him to go back, and he could feel their pain.
Poor fella.
Also, I once made a service call (while employed at a copier company) to some folks who insisted that they knew that we were in cahoots with the Czech government, and that the copier was rigged to transmit everything they copied to Prague, and further that the Czechs could make the copier jam “by remote control” if they tried to make copies of anything critical of them. The walls of the place were decked with poorly-executed oil-paintings of their teenaged daughter in the nude. The scary part? The guy was a mental-health professional, with a doctorate and everything.
