A Few Degrees Difference

So, I just got back from vacation to the States.  While it was fantastic to see everyone, I also sorta dreaded it because I wore myself out, driving all over creation to visit.  Still, when you live way far away, in a land where things explode from time to time, you appreciate those who make the effort to keep in touch; it's very easy for most people to abide by "out of sight, out of mind." I managed to put 500 miles or so on a rental car in the 12 days I was in SC driving from Charleston to Myrtle Beach to Hartsville to Columbia and back to Charleston. 

Since I like to be adventurous, but an SC trip is by no means an adventure, I figured I'd liven things up while I was driving around.  Thus it was that I picked up a hitchhiker as I was leaving Charleston for Myrtle Beach.  Nothing like the threat of being murdered to keep you on your toes and make you feel alive.  Besides, I figure the 'psychopath' part of hitchhiking is split about 50/50 between driver and hitchhiker.  Six years ago, when I was driving from Jacksonville to Lafayette, LA, I actually had a hitchhiker ask me to let him out early because I creeped him out, I figured. Or he might have seen my Desert Eagle tucked under my thigh.  Either way, he asked out 200 miles before his destination. Yeah, that's talent right there folks.

As for this guy, he was a big fella.  The car was a small Hyundai Elantra.  He took his sweet time getting to the car, which is not in keeping with the usual hitchhiker etiquette of at least feigning a jog to get up to the car that's pulled over for you.  I expected him to smell like a deer, which he did, but not unbearably so.  We got to talking.

I don't waste my time asking names because it's not as if I'll ever run across these people again.  I just ask questions and wait for crazy stories. For the sake of ease, we'll call this guy Bizarro White Trash Ajax.  Okay, maybe just Bizarro.

Bizarro was, like me, 32 years old.  He called himself, like me, an adventurer.  He claimed, unlike me, to have a 170 IQ (I happen to think that IQ tests are insufficient to effectively judge my historical brilliance).  He said he had a BA and MA in English and that he was writing a book on his travels.  He, on his own, said "You don't judge people by their words, but by their actions," something I've thought about obsessively these past few years. I was starting to wonder if this is what it would be like if you looked at your reflection in one of those distorted funhouse mirrors and it talked back to you.

Then, he went off the rails.  Now, while I'm "unusual", I'm not crazy, so to speak.  Bizarro clearly was.  Some people are crazy because they make no sense; others are crazy because they can't figure out how to live life and get in disastrous situations routinely.  I feel that if you're a spectacularly bad judge of character and make horrific decisions, that qualifies you for crazy.  My crazy label is harsh, but it is what it is.

Bizarro started telling me how he'd been hitchhiking for two and a half years but that he was going to finish up to get back to Indiana so he could get custody of his daughter.  Uh huh.  Right.  Because judges routinely grant custody to hobos...  Bizarro had thought of that though and he was putting all his eggs in the "my ex is a crazy disaster" basket.  They'd split up when he'd walked in on her having sex with another man in their marital bed.  That man was Bizarro's father.  Bizarro said, "That little skinny son of a bitch is lucky he was fast and got out that window or I'd have killed his skinny ass."

When someone says "That little skinny son of a bitch is lucky he was fast and got out that window or I'd have killed his skinny ass" about his father, who had sex with his wife, you don't need to gather more information.  You can make the determination right there.  Bizarro was crazy.

I know lots of crazy people though (some of my closest friends), so I just let him get it out.

Bizarro talked about how the wife tried to fix things with him but he wouldn't touch her after that, of course.  A month after their divorce had gone through, she'd married his dad.  This all happened in some small town in Indiana.  I have to think that place must be crawling with Talk Show recruiters.  Too bad for Bizarro that Jerry Springer isn't on air anymore.

Anyway, after the divorce, it turned out the wife was a bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, so Bizarro was pretty sure that, along with how @#$@ed up it was she married his daddy, should convince the judge that a disabled hobo (he claimed had some spinal injury and was on disability, though that didn't keep him from sleeping on the side of highways) should get custody of his seven year old daughter, though he admitted the judge might not take too kindly to the fact that Bizarro had been hitchhiking and hadn't attempted to talk to his daughter in two and a half years.

I bought Bizarro a burger and dropped him off on the outskirts of Myrtle Beach.  I rolled all the windows down to get rid of the funk.  As I drove on to my destination, I was very pleased and felt fortunate that I had not been hit in the head with a hammer, gained 70lbs, knocked up an insane woman at 25 years old, and been born to a trailer park life in Indiana, because, other than that, Bizarro and I were clearly the same person.