So, what’s your experience with weird people? I don’t mean socially awkward people, mind, I mean people that might actually be wizards or three aliens in a trench coat kind of weird.

When I lived in the poor part of Tulsa, there were people like this in spades. One old goat had the monicker of “crazy man Stan”. Stan had a way of just appearing, almost out of thin air. You never saw him coming, you’d just look over one way, and look back to find Stan there. There was a laundry list of other weird shit Stan was known for that I’ve since forgotten. One day, he fucked my mom’s truck up. She was sitting there, gabbing with a friend, when Stan does his presto-hobo apparition trick, leans in through the driver side window, and forces the turn signal switch back and forth as hard as he can for the few seconds it takes my mom to get over the shock and hit his crazy ass. Every time she hit the turn signal after that, the horn would beep in time with the light coming on. We had our last straw with Stan when a friend and I saw what looked a hell of a lot like Stan actually appearing in the middle of the street out of thin air one night. My mom declared that he must have been in league with the devil. My step dad had been putting up with Stan’s antics because it’s Oklahoma in the late 90’s, what else do you have going on? I don’t think he believed that devil stuff, but he was always pretty keen at figuring people out, and I think he reckoned that Stan was the kind of person that had trouble hanging around him like a cloud of flies. and decided he didn’t want any.

There was another guy we knew who would scry for random treasures on a map and did aura readings. Besides the claim to psychic abilities (he never referred to them as such, he was the type of Christian that believed he was given gifts due to the manifestation of the holy spirit in his heart), he usually had smart things to say, so he was sort of the shaman of the ghetto. I can’t speak for the aura readings, but everyone who ever went out with him on one of his adventures vouched for him finding something interesting. He never did it for money, so it wasn’t like it was some kind of scam he was running, at least as far as I could tell.