I Rule You's Friends

I'm mad, you're mad, we're all mad here.
I was sitting in a coffee shop, writing, when an elderly man- late 50's, early 60's came up and sat down with me. He appeared to be drunk. His posture was wobbly, and his speech was a little slurred and difficult to make out. Other than that, he looked quite normal. I had watched him attempt to engage other random people in the coffee shop, all of whom responded with the "excuse me? no, sorry, mr. drunk/crazy man, I am busy" routine. I decided to indulge him in conversation. He denied being drunk.

He said something about WWIII, and "...before I die...", and physics, so I entertained the thought that he was a scientist or something who had just stumbled across secret news that the world is about to explode, and who had decided to get utterly smashed and talk to people in a coffee shop. Hell, who could blame him? He confessed his profound love for me several times. It's so easy to just look at people who are behaving strangely and shrug it off, saying "oh he's just crazy". But I have no idea what being "crazy" is like, or what the word even means sometimes. Out of curiosity, I opened myself up to empathy and let his pattern imprint upon mine so that I could perhaps get an impression of what it was like to be him. I know what it's like to feel profound love for strangers. I also know what it's like to be contemplating the immediacy of my own death. Much of his words were so quiet or slurred or disconnected that I had a lot of trouble understanding the flow of his conversation. I often got the feeling that he was paying very little attention to my actual person- unable to read my obviously confused, slightly bemused and a little uncomfortable body language. Yet, I suspect he was able to read my openness and inquisitiveness. He stared deep into my eyes and told me that we share the same heart. I know what he's saying. So I then began to entertain the thought that he's some wandering drunken Taoist sage who's here to test me. He told me that he had a trust fund of $10 million. He asked me for one wish. I've never met a genie in the flesh before, but I know that it's safest to give a genie very little of your trust. I wished to "never worry about money again", but refused to give him my hand because that wish really really sucked.

He asked me for my address and phone number so he could give me his trust fund money.
He told me I had 15 minutes to live.
He told me that when he was a young man, he used to kill people- used to destroy people.
He explained his name was "Slaughter", and showed the driver's license of a man who was obviously not him named Robert Slaughter.
At this point, I was visualizing the weak points in his body's structure and what general movements I would take to diffuse a potentially bloody situation. He kept telling me how much he loved me and would be utterly broken if he ever heard that something bad happened to me. When I refused to let him fund my martial arts school, he asked me why I didn't trust him. I explained to him exactly why I found him to be creepy: he's really bad at seeing what makes people feel comfortable or uncomfortable. In essence, he seemed to be almost entirely disconnected from me. To his mind, the world was some melodramatic movie script, and I was playing the character of some young, bright university student with huge potential who he was going to take under his wing before he died. When I told him I didn't trust him, he got up and left.

He may not have necessarily been absorbed in any more of a fantasy land than the rest of us, its just that his fantasy land did not depend upon the world's feedback as much as the rest of ours does. He seemed rather more disconnected from the world than most (but not all) of us are.

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