Assault of the Crazy People

Today while I was working on getting the monkey grass transplanted, I had a chance encounter with a total lunatic. He was about a block away from me and began yelling about pedophiliac baby-rapers and blasphemers and what-not. I kept my head down. Naturally, he walked towards me. This is my life.

As he got closer, he continued screaming---not at me, luckily, but nevertheless to me. He continued to scream about 2,000-year-old child rapist cover-ups and sinners burning in the Lake of Fire. He looked angry, and he looked rough. Picture every burnt-out Vietnam veteran who's had a lifetime of hard luck before breakfast that morning; this guy looked even worse.

Anyways, he went on mindlessly lecturing me about whatever it was that had pissed him off. I guessed he had seen a Catholic priest or something, though I never could divine just what had irked his ire. He yelled: "It's been fuckin twenty-one centuries of baby-raping and hiding behind a false fuckin god and they're burnin in the lake of fuckin fire!"

Oh, I thought. He's an angry Protestant! He hates Catholics. Nothing new there.

Now, obviously, it would have been remiss of me to mention my Catholic upbringing at this point, so I did what I always do when absolute psychos start yelling at me: I lapsed into my Piedmont patois and began a litany of, "Yessir, nosir, yessir, nosir." When you're dealing with crazy folk, if you don't want to get into a fight, you should probably respond with "Yessir" or "Nosir" until they go away; that's what I do. If it's a hard-looking white boy, I bring out the country twang. It seems to calm them.

So he was an angry Protestant. But then he started yelling about how for 2,000 years "they" had worshipped a false god that had been nailed to a tree, and they were all blasphemers, and Christianity was a ridiculous corrupt doctrine. Note that there was no talk about the Whore of Babylon, or Papist mackerel-snappers, or anything like that; his nonsensical rant had suddenly transitioned from anti-Catholicism to out-and-out condemnation of any church that deals in Christ.

Oh, I thought now. An angry Jew! Whatever. He didn't look Jewish, but then again who am I to judge? I continued working. "Our grandmothers," he then said to me, "and our great-grandmothers, are not burning in the Lake of Fire! Not them!"

"Nosir," I said. This was a bit confusing; the Lake of Fire is a distinctly non-Jewish concept of eternal punishment, so I wasn't sure exactly what he was at this point. Wiccan? Shinto? In any case, regardless of what religion he was, he was certifiably insane. So I kept nodding and running the horseshoe rake.

He began to walk away, and then he turned back. My heart sunk. "The black heart of Africa will not be silenced!" he screamed. "Everyone is burning in the Lake of Fire! Allah will not be demeaned! Fuckin baby-raping pederasts!"

Oh, I thought. He's Muslim! 

Then he went away. For five minutes after he left I could still hear him screaming his head off. As I was finishing up forty minutes later, I saw him hovering around a few blocks away. I got the hell out of there real fast. I don't truck with crazy people if I can avoid it.