Of The Mentally Instable and the Squrriels in my Brain. ( Or a Writer's Mind All The Time)

I went to get a cup of real coffee from one of the Book Store/Coffee Shop chains Friday after work. I would give it a free plug here but the service sucks so they don't get their name mentioned. Worse yet, this is the place that became a dumping ground for the mentally challenged. Three or four caregivers would take their charges to this store when it opened and just leave them there until the store closed. As long as these guys had enough money to buy a cup of coffee they could hang out in the store as long as they wanted. At least one of the men was verbally abusive to other customers, and there was one who would interject himself into conversations between customers. Alas! It began a much more dire situation than anyone could have imagined! After several cups of  coffee one of the men began having digestive problems and started having "accidents".  After one particularly gruesome scene one of them men wandered the store wearing....well, nevermind, you get the idea don't you? I stopped going to the store after that, and after several months, the issue seems to have been resolved.

Don't get me wrong here. There ought to be a place that people of all abilities can go and socialize with people of all other abilities. I'm not about to argue any sort of Draconian "separate but equal" philosophy but there are people who need guidance from their caretakers and not some retail clerk making minimum wage. But all of this is nowhere near the story I started out telling, which makes my point very succinctly.

There was one man sitting in an overstuffed chair when I sat down. He was a little past middle aged, pot bellied and heavy set. He wore an old straw cowboy hat that sat high on his head. He also wore sunglasses even though it was a cloudy day outside and even darker inside. He kept on hand on his cane as if it were a weapon. If there was ever a character actor picked to play the part of an Old South chain gang guard Captain or Old South Plantation Overseer this man would be perfect. I could see him carrying a long barreled shotgun at his side and maybe a riding crop, too. Cruel and heartless, this would be the man that pushed a human being into death by despair.

Of course, as far as I really know, he could be a great person. He could have saved a busload of children from a flaming wreck. He could be a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The man could be anything else but what I've imagined him as, but that isn't how the mind of a writer works. And my mind was just getting cranked up.

I sat down in an overstuff chair near him and he kinda nodded at me, and I kinda nodded back. I was trying to flesh out his character a bit, give him a name, perhaps, and a personally trait uniquely wicked, like he killed someone with a whip on the anniversary of his mother's death each year or the fact that he had killed a prisoner one time by having other prisoners bury the man alive after he had fallen out during heat stroke.  The story was forming, yes, and all of a sudden he spoke to me and it damn near scared me to death. See, this is how my mind is. The poor man is sitting there minding his own damn business and the guy next to him is transmogrifying him into a monster.

"How many squirrels would have to attack you at one time to kill you?" The man asks.

Okay, when he said it that's what I heard. It's an odd question, really. I'm pretty sure I could fend off a few of them, but what if there were a dozen or so bent on killing me? What if they attacked me at night? Can squirrels see at night? I have this image of city squirrels at night attacking people and the next day all the bodies....

"I have no idea what time I'll be home. I'm in Valdosta right now." The man says and I realize he talking on a cell phone attached to his ear.

Now I'm screwed. I want to ask him what the hell was he really saying when he asked about squirrels. My mind cannot come up with a homophone for whatever it was that he said. How many girls would have to act out at one time to thrill you? How many pearls would have to attach at one time to thrill you? It doesn't work. So how many squirrels would it take?

I'm on the very verge of asking him what he said just a moment ago when I realize that he might think that I was one of those guys that interject themselves into other people's conversations. If I asked him would he go home and say, "Yeah, that damn place is still full of those weird guys, this one was babbling about squirrels killing him."

So in the end, my ability to enter and leave the store without any bodily function mishaps was about the only real different between the other crazy guys and me. Maybe they're all writers. Maybe they all just have brains that push into weirdness like my mind does but they just don't mind asking about things.

I try to remember the last thing one of them asked me, and I wonder if the squirrels attacked would I have on gloves.

Take Care,

Mike