For your pleasure flock together

Call me Crazy, up this hour, but I've been working. Not as extreme if you consider that I took a two hour nap in the early evening, yet maybe Stupid because I went to bed when Thumper told me to after pushing, pushing, pushing it with an early rise, hitting the road, hopping from gallery to gallery, then a meeting with my new employer/editor, all the while mainlining caffeine. Excitable boy.



Reminds me of a story. When I was in high school, the gym-basketball coach/Civic-Economics Teacher, knowing that I lived on the grounds of the local state hospital told of person getting a flat tire along the road in front of that institution on a rainy day. Having removed the damaged tire and retrieved the spare from the trunk, he found that he has somehow kicked the lugs into the water in the ditch and cannot find them in the murk and mud. At about this time a mental patient strolls by and asks the matter.

"I've lost the lugs and I'm now in a fix."

"No problem." the resident says, "Just remove a lug from each of the other tires and put them on where three of the five you lost would go. That'll get you back into town."

"Hey, what a great idea! I never would have thought of that. And, if you don't mind me asking, then, why is a smart guy like yourself in a mental institution?"

To which the patient replied, "I may be crazy but I'm not stupid."

Heard that one before, have you? It loses its subtlety the older I get.

I know crazy when I see it. I can almost smell it and can spot a Thorazine shuffle from three blocks away. So, this is a gimme:

Worth a chuckle, perhaps. Without clicking on the picture, let me describe the finer parts. There are KEEP OUT signs in both the car and house windows. An old mattress springs and what's left of a mattress frame lean against the tailgate of the car. The windows have a grating on the inside and one is boarded over with a piece of plywood.

I have driven past this house many times. On occasion I have seen the car full of stuff. I mean full, not only as it sat in the driveway but around town. The woman who lives there sometimes sits outside and reads a book. I've assumed that she has a couple problems, one being paranoia and the other, because of the car filled with stuff, a problem with hoarding.

This is a small town and the adage holds true. It took asking one person... only one... about who this woman was. My mechanic. "She comes in and buys her spark plugs from me, then goes up to D&W to get a distributor cap and the wires she buys at NAPA. Doesn't want folks to know what she's up to, I imagine."

He also told me the car is sometimes filled because she removes all of what she perceives as valuable from her house whenever she goes someplace. Knowing this, among other things, the person I asked told me that she parks the way she does because of him.

"I was out test-driving a repair one day and I saw B down from her house about 200 feet talking to neighbor, so I pulled into her driveway and sat there long enough to make sure she saw that someone was in her drive. Ever since that day...

The "among other things?" She is supposedly writing a novel based on the history of the area. I told him should he speak to her again, to tell her he knows a writer who would be very interested in the manuscript.

I would.