Crazy Guy at the library

Category: dribblings

The public library is a magnet for mental illness. I don’t know why. Probably because it’s open and there’s chairs available.

There’s a guy that’s been coming in for a couple of months now, and he’s pretty crazy. He goes and talks to the fish in the fish tank, and he’s not doing it in the way that you or I would do it. For instance if I’m feeding the fish I may say something stupid like, “Eat up, you stupid fish.” No, he goes over and starts whispering secrets to the fish.
I pretend that he’s whispering an escape plan to them.

Also, he’ll walk up to the end of a bookcase and start pressing a series of imaginary buttons. He often goes into this spontateous Tai Chi-like stance, and will then blow air out of his mouth very noisily. He walks on his tip toes. He’ll pick up the end of a table, like he’s doing exercise.

As a bonus, he often stares at me. To be fair, I totally stare at him because I’m waiting for him to bother someone so we can get rid of him.

I know, I’m cold-hearted. But while this level of crazy (sometimes he stands up and becomes a maestro to an orchestra that only he can hear/see, complete with arm waving movements.) seems mostly harmless, I don’t want it to become a full-on crazy breakdown, he has a backpack with him and I have no idea what all is in that backpack. If he ever hurt a patron, or scared a kid, I’d feel so guilty. Like, I should’ve gotten rid of that guy sooner kind of thing, right?

Anyway, whatever, that’s the public in public library. Last night he takes out some papers from his backpack and starts spreading them out over the big reference table. It looks like a bunch of maps and stuff. Then he gets some of out atlases off the shelf and it looks like he’s comparing things and taking note or whatnot.

After he leaves (a couple of hours later) I go and clean up around the table and search terminals and there’s a folded up map that’s been left behind. Groan. Crazy Guy left a map. I could tell it was a weird map, kinda old but not like a real map (no lat. or long., looked kinda hand drawn, but it was printed.) I figured it was a treasure map from a box of cereal or something. I had to open it. I was wrong.

It was a map of Middle Earth.

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