Crazy People

There is one thing I'm noticing more and more about my local area of ol’ Finsbury Park. Is there a mental home round here? Apart from my own? I say this because, there seems to a serious amount of very mental people in my hood. Where do they live? Some of these people seem capable of dressing themselves and interacting with the public, and some of them don’t.

Here's a couple of examples of section eights that I had the pleasure to interact with in the last few days. On the bus on Thursday night coming home from work, I hopped on the bus at Angel. As I sat down, I noticed a guy talking quite loud to what seemed to be a well-heeled man in a suit. But I noticed then he wasn't speaking back. I looked at the man, and he looked really scared. I stretched to see the guy that was yakking next to him. He seemed normal. A shock of white hair, semi balding, an expensive Hugo Boss Leather jacket, clean shaven, no dribbles, no visible can of booze. I then scanned downwards, because I find shoes are a dead giveaway, when it comes to crazy people. Nice shoes. Hmmm. Aha, there it is, I neaerly missed it. His jeans came to his shins. Odd socks too. No biggie, the odd socks, but the knickerbocker jeans, well thats a different story. But it didn't seem to warrant the fear that I saw in this business man. Then I saw what scared him. As this guy turned his head, I saw his eyes. One of his eyes was fully bloodshot. Like the whole white of his eye was blood red. It looked really fucking freaky. There was a few scratches around his eye, but he was the only person who didn't seem to notice it. What got me was that he again seemed to be talking total sense. Very articulate. I was kicking myself that I didn't have a tape recorder.

I'll try and convey the snippets of what I managed to overhear. If some one had say a large bag and was getting on the bus, he would pipe up and say "You could take a bloody eye out with that" and then springboard into a 2 minute rant about how important eyes were. Then when he noticed no one was replying to him, he'd bellow "Well, no one has even got the intelligence of acknowlegement". Brilliant! By this stage I was hanging off this nutter's every word. He must of seen an Indian woman, and started going off about Basmati rice, and it's origins. It started to get a bit racist, and I thought he was going to get his head kicked. But then he ended a sentence with the word "white". Then started with "Fish is more tasty than red fish like salmon, but I don't like fish anyway, I'm a beef man, oh, I like a bit of beef." Then he saw a large man getting up to get off the bus and continued with "Beefy man there, thinks he's a tough cunt for using the stairs". He was running every sentence into each other. A classic case of psycosis. (He sounded like a guy who has been up for a week on speed). By this stage it was my stop. Part of me wanted to stay on the bus and follow this guy, but part of me said, better go dude, this guy is fucking radio rental. I got off the bus. I noticed he was going to get off at the next stop. I wondered if I should discreetly follow him, see where he went. Don't ask me why I even wanted to do this, maybe I'm spastic too? I just find insane people really interesting. Anyway I watched the guy go down the stairs and walk off the bus, while the bus was still moving. He landed on the back of a hatchback car and set off the alarm. I watched him get up, brush himself off, and walk away. He would have had concussion, but I'm thinking this would have made no difference to this guy's grey matter. That was Thursdays head case kamikaze.

Friday's spinner was tame compared to him, but is worth a mention none the less. Late on Friday I stopped to get a burger (which is an entire post by itself, but I wont go into that right this minute), there was a old guy in a blue pinstripe who came sucking on a can of cola-cola. This made me think, well he might not be an alky. But as I found out, it didn't stop him from being nuts. Which he was. Bigtime. he didn't seem a threat, so I let him start to blether away at me. Turns out he's a Scotsman visiting his sister in Finsbury Park. He's just been let out of hospital, on heavy medication, and to celebrate his new found freedom, go out on a bender. I ask him what was he in hospital for. Schizophrenia. Great. I tell him that he shouldn't mix alcohol with medication. (Well I drank on antibiotics once and got super-fucked-up, so I thought schizophrenia medicine but be at least as bad, or good, what ever you base your fucked-up-ness on.) This didn't seem to phase him at all, come to think of it, it didn't seem to phase me either. I kept talking to him just to see if I could see when his other personas might come through. But he seemed to just be on a loop, rabbiting on about his condition, if his sister was going to let him in the house. My burger was ready. He then pleaded at me to buy him a kebab. Which I did. Kind of felt sorry for him. A few days later I told my flatmate about pinstripe guy. It seems he's a local, and pulls that stunt on everyone. Typical, I got sucked in for a kebab by a fruitcake. Maybe he is schizophrenic? Maybe that's one of his personalities? The kebab scammer? Can't wait to run into him again, and see what he has got to say.