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If you go crazy, I'll meet you there.
Jul. 13th, 2011 09:54 pmToday's madman was rather special. It all started innocently enough - innocuous even. The 28 drops us all at the county line and the good-guy driver hands out transfers and it's a good ritual in the mornings. When I worked at the highschool I had the same driver and I know him okay as a public servant and he's the sort of guy who will wait for you if you're not at the stop on time - a good person. And there's this cat riding today - he's all duffel bags and a haircut - maybe a madman? Maybe - he's got scuffed up shins and worn out $10 Reeboks like madmen and the elderly wear. But they match and he's got a haircut - he's a traveler - so interesting, a little.
We all get off and have our time waiting at the bank parking lot - I drink coffee and read and keep to myself except to sometimes ask the time or share a cigarette if someone is forthright or penitent enough in their asking. But in the main my demeanor is one of saturnine unapproachability - but that's just cause I don't feel like talking before 8 in the ante-meridian. So silence. It's usually pretty still anyway - often the short order cooks will lament to the nurses about how they hate LeBron, and usually enough the machinists and the towmotor operators will shake heads agreeing. Today the new guy holds court though. He even seems interesting after a spell - talking about the amtrak and how far he's gone on so little. I give him undoubting benefit and reason that perhaps later I'll speak to him, because the train and its ways interest me.
So later, and by that I mean immediately he's making conversation at me.
Now - I should say that on the 28 there was a notable madman - who has almost been forgotten because of the madman I'm now describing - this first-thing-in-the-morning madman was very mad indeed - he was of the variety of incoherent lecturing and periodic shouting. You could tell he was saying something people shouldn't say in public - holding forth opinions - but even though he was loud - he spoke with a thick madman accent so that I couldn't decipher what he was telling us. A fierce looking KFC cook who gets off a few stops after I get on was watching this guy with deadly eyes - killing eyes. As if the madman were saying a thing that personally offended him. Maybe he was just being vigilant against madmen - a wise pastime.
Anyway - the very over the top madman had dulled my expectations so that later, on the #2 I was talking to the Amtrak rider and learned his history.
Facts:
He had two strokes last year and the doctors say it is amazing that he can function - let alone live (he shows no lack of motor skill, no slurred speech, no sign of being a classic style stroke victim)
His wife is a satanist who turned his children against him and had been poisoning his medicine with belladonna.
Belladonna was used for 7,000 years by the ancient egyptians which he learned through careful study of the bible.
His wife wanted only his house and had contracted with her insidious neighbors to have his social security checks paid to her personally - robbing him doubly.
He was powerless against these forces because his wife's 4th husband, who had, it turns out - taken her last name (the name of the Amtrak Rider) is the leader of the Armed Forces of the United States - and so he must hide from her and him and all of them.
Nobody Fucks with you on Amtrak - You can ride in peace and silence
A polygraph will confirm all he has revealed - If I would go and get mine, I could test him to find out if what he had told me was true.
His only friend is Jesus Christ - The Bible reveals this- he is cursed like Job.
Now - my immediate interest was in not listening to much of what he had to tell me and returning to my book - Little Big by Crowley - which has just gotten really good after briefly being not great and before that being amazing. It's a good book - all about love and exile and I have been thinking about that - as I've previously mentioned - what with my assumption that I am exiled from the experience of romantic love. Which I am - but I read this book and maybe that's why I came to think of it. Young people meeting their heart-matches - people being pledged to one another by fairy pacts - &etc... All things that, were I younger - I would have expected for myself, but as an older fellow - deem to be fallen away, inaccessible - the true, real, storybook thing - which would have happened if it was going to happen - and no I'm not hurt or bitter or even envious - just: Wise. Anyway I want to read and think and maybe write because I'm writing a lot and mostly my own fairytales now.
Instead - a madman. A very extravagant madman to be sure - paranoid schizophrenia being - not particularly exotic - but certainly exotic in its demonstrated intensity this morning.
It is not yet 7 ante-meridian when I have learned these facts -the sun is entering a sky that doesn't yet know what kind of weather it will make today. The night is only just ended - barely ruins of itself. And I am told secret knowledge about the poisoner satanists of ancient Egypt.
I am thankful for that time, not so long ago, when I learned to tell when people are lying. Hint - it is when their lips are moving. But this man is not lying - I don't mind hearing his story - not at first.
Then I realize - this is a man, very troubled in his neurology - this is a man who's run away, probably from people, maybe even well meaning people, who hope to care for him, even if they are tired of his accusations - crazy, terrible accusations, maybe they are alarmed and hurt by his suspicions but soldier on, nevertheless, out of uxorial and filial devotion. Maybe they miss him and wish he would take his medicine. Maybe they are relieved, down in FLA, at last, that he's gone and left them alone to sort out their lives and make new starts and contemplate in horror the likelihood of inheriting his malady. Maybe they are frantic and searching for him.
He is gone - riding the rails, on the bus, far away from home - bold and brave, at wits end, fleeing - fleeing to Painesville.
And after all - aren't we all running away to Painesville -each in our own way?
We all get off and have our time waiting at the bank parking lot - I drink coffee and read and keep to myself except to sometimes ask the time or share a cigarette if someone is forthright or penitent enough in their asking. But in the main my demeanor is one of saturnine unapproachability - but that's just cause I don't feel like talking before 8 in the ante-meridian. So silence. It's usually pretty still anyway - often the short order cooks will lament to the nurses about how they hate LeBron, and usually enough the machinists and the towmotor operators will shake heads agreeing. Today the new guy holds court though. He even seems interesting after a spell - talking about the amtrak and how far he's gone on so little. I give him undoubting benefit and reason that perhaps later I'll speak to him, because the train and its ways interest me.
So later, and by that I mean immediately he's making conversation at me.
Now - I should say that on the 28 there was a notable madman - who has almost been forgotten because of the madman I'm now describing - this first-thing-in-the-morning madman was very mad indeed - he was of the variety of incoherent lecturing and periodic shouting. You could tell he was saying something people shouldn't say in public - holding forth opinions - but even though he was loud - he spoke with a thick madman accent so that I couldn't decipher what he was telling us. A fierce looking KFC cook who gets off a few stops after I get on was watching this guy with deadly eyes - killing eyes. As if the madman were saying a thing that personally offended him. Maybe he was just being vigilant against madmen - a wise pastime.
Anyway - the very over the top madman had dulled my expectations so that later, on the #2 I was talking to the Amtrak rider and learned his history.
Facts:
He had two strokes last year and the doctors say it is amazing that he can function - let alone live (he shows no lack of motor skill, no slurred speech, no sign of being a classic style stroke victim)
His wife is a satanist who turned his children against him and had been poisoning his medicine with belladonna.
Belladonna was used for 7,000 years by the ancient egyptians which he learned through careful study of the bible.
His wife wanted only his house and had contracted with her insidious neighbors to have his social security checks paid to her personally - robbing him doubly.
He was powerless against these forces because his wife's 4th husband, who had, it turns out - taken her last name (the name of the Amtrak Rider) is the leader of the Armed Forces of the United States - and so he must hide from her and him and all of them.
Nobody Fucks with you on Amtrak - You can ride in peace and silence
A polygraph will confirm all he has revealed - If I would go and get mine, I could test him to find out if what he had told me was true.
His only friend is Jesus Christ - The Bible reveals this- he is cursed like Job.
Now - my immediate interest was in not listening to much of what he had to tell me and returning to my book - Little Big by Crowley - which has just gotten really good after briefly being not great and before that being amazing. It's a good book - all about love and exile and I have been thinking about that - as I've previously mentioned - what with my assumption that I am exiled from the experience of romantic love. Which I am - but I read this book and maybe that's why I came to think of it. Young people meeting their heart-matches - people being pledged to one another by fairy pacts - &etc... All things that, were I younger - I would have expected for myself, but as an older fellow - deem to be fallen away, inaccessible - the true, real, storybook thing - which would have happened if it was going to happen - and no I'm not hurt or bitter or even envious - just: Wise. Anyway I want to read and think and maybe write because I'm writing a lot and mostly my own fairytales now.
Instead - a madman. A very extravagant madman to be sure - paranoid schizophrenia being - not particularly exotic - but certainly exotic in its demonstrated intensity this morning.
It is not yet 7 ante-meridian when I have learned these facts -the sun is entering a sky that doesn't yet know what kind of weather it will make today. The night is only just ended - barely ruins of itself. And I am told secret knowledge about the poisoner satanists of ancient Egypt.
I am thankful for that time, not so long ago, when I learned to tell when people are lying. Hint - it is when their lips are moving. But this man is not lying - I don't mind hearing his story - not at first.
Then I realize - this is a man, very troubled in his neurology - this is a man who's run away, probably from people, maybe even well meaning people, who hope to care for him, even if they are tired of his accusations - crazy, terrible accusations, maybe they are alarmed and hurt by his suspicions but soldier on, nevertheless, out of uxorial and filial devotion. Maybe they miss him and wish he would take his medicine. Maybe they are relieved, down in FLA, at last, that he's gone and left them alone to sort out their lives and make new starts and contemplate in horror the likelihood of inheriting his malady. Maybe they are frantic and searching for him.
He is gone - riding the rails, on the bus, far away from home - bold and brave, at wits end, fleeing - fleeing to Painesville.
And after all - aren't we all running away to Painesville -each in our own way?
