Weirdos. You can’t live with ‘em, you can’t live without ‘em. Okay, yes you can, but it’s not nearly as much fun. My initial weirdo was Timothy McGovern in the first grade. One day, Timothy climbed up on the class window sill, opened the window, saluted, yelled “Goodbye, cruel world!” and jumped. Of course, it was only the first floor, but he still made quite an impression---on us, if not the new sod down below. A few days later later, they came and took Timmy away, but we never forgot him.
Then, in fourth grade, we got Leo Monte. He transferred in from points north and west, maybe Des Moines. Leo might have been Charles Schultz’ model for Pigpen in his Peanuts strips, he carried a cloud of dirt with him wherever he went. On his first day in class, Sister Mary Lawrence sent him to the bathroom to wash his hands. When he came back, they looked exactly the same. He usually wore the same torn shirt and stained pants every day, and no socks. Sister ML told him, “Leo, you have to change your clothes now and then.” Leo looked up and said “Why?” And no, he wasn’t poor---his father ran a construction crew and his mother was an attorney. We used to write essays in fourth grade which the nuns called “compositions,” about such things as what we did on our Summer vacations. Leo’s first composition was about the neighborhood coal yard, his fascination with anthracite and bituminous. We kids thought he was pretty cool after that.
Beam Me Up, Scotty!
Anyone who has ever been to the Waffle House at three a.m. can tell you about weirdos. They cluster there in the pre-dawn hours with the drug dealers, winding-down musicians and nerds who couldn’t get a date, skulking down in their booths gobbling All-Star Special pecan waffles and hash browns and making strange noises. Any sane person in need of eggs just before sunrise looks around and thinks, Jesus---I didn’t know there were so many grubby lunatics living in the neighborhood. Good news! They’re not just from down the block. Some of them may have teleported in.
Weirdos like FEMA official Gregg Phillips, who claimed on a podcast he was teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House near Rome, Georgia. Hold your horses before condemning Greg, he claims it was not his idea. Somewhere in the remote reaches of the universe, the Cosmic Arbiter plunked his Magic Twanger and sent Mr. Phillips adrift through the friendly skies of the Peach State. On the podcast, Gregg swore that his car was “lifted up” while he was driving and transported to the eatery.
“I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House. This was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was,” Phillips swore on the podcast Onward, co-hosted by right-wing activist Catherine Engelbrecht.
“And they asked, ‘Where are you?’ and I told them and they said ‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ And let me tell you, teleporting is no fun. You know it’s happening and you can’t do anything about it, so you just let go, you just go with the ride.”
Listen, Gregg, it could be worse. The ultimate bummer would be if you bounced through the stratosphere, finally got there and the Waffle House was closed. Do you sit down in the parking lot and sulk or do you get back in the car, close your eyes and hope for a lusty trip to Aunt Jemima’s?
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| "See--there I am right there talking to G.W.!" |
Back To The Future
For the last 22 years, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been making the claim that he time-traveled between the ages of seven and twelve, when most self-respecting lads were playing whiffleball and dunking girls’ braids in their inkwells. It wasn’t his idea, of course, he was recruited by a secret government program called DARPA for an experiment called Project Pegasus. Basiago claimed the project used children to carry out their experiments because the kids would be more adaptable to changes in space-time. He said he was the first child to take the leap. The Portal to Anywhere was described as looking like two parentheses-shaped booms which were 8 feet tall and about 10 feet apart. He described the computer configuration from which the portal was controlled as rudimentary and plugged into the wall with a power cord.
Upon activation, the machine created a “vortal tunnel” from radiant energy that was capable of “bending the fabric of reality,” according to Andrew. (“Radiant Energy” was discovered by Nikola Tesla, whose schematic was posthumously discovered by the government in a New York apartment in 1943.) The technology was parlayed into what Basiago calls a plasma confinement chamber, which a user jumps into before being transported to a different place in time and space to meet historical and future dignitaries, as well as various extraterrestrial entities and maybe even Dick Clark.
Andrew’s first journey transported him to the state capital of New Mexico, though he remained in the same time period. Basiago claimed the capital building was a common location DARPA used and a woman friend saw people materialize there frequently. He continued his training by traveling back in time just a few hours to get the gist of it. Eventually, he was able to travel back to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and check out George Washington’s tent during the Revolutionary War. Finally, he was ready to meet Jesus, which went off without a hitch, earning him a rare visit to the future. Basiago traveled to 2045, where he was “transported to a building made of emerald and tungsten steel.” There he was given a canister of microfilm to be brought back to his mentors. Supposedly, it contained a wealth of knowledge of every historical event up until that time. Apparently, everything will not be digitized in the future.
Andrew Basiago later made news by claiming that Barack Obama was a fellow time-traveler who went by the name “Barry Soetero.” Barack/Barry was supposedly transported to Mars at the age of 19 to communicate with Martian animals and extraterrestrials. Basiago claimed in a 2012 speech that he had definitive photographic evidence of intelligent life on the red planet, but of course it was a little blurry. He also insists that he will be installed as President of the U.S.A. sometime between now and 2028 (hurry up, Andrew). Unlike other candidates, Basiago has posted a very detailed layout of his presidential platform and the 100 policies he intends to enact once in the White House. His first measure will be to declassify and reveal all technology related to quantum transportation, including the chronovisor and the holographic transportation machine he used to speak to George Washington. Then, thank God, he will get rid of all atomic weapons, which “could create a tear in the fabric of space-time, of which there is nothing worse we could be doing. The extraterrestrials don’t like it one bit.”
We don’t know about you, but we’re thinking we might be voting for Andrew. He didn’t say one word about immigration, Haitians eating cats and dogs or Joe Biden causing world hunger. And he says he has a critical message from Janis Joplin which he will reveal on New Year’s Day of 2030. Andrew Basiago---the man for the Big Chair in the next big shootout. Hey, you could do a lot worse. You already did.
The All-Star Team
History calls them eccentrics, AI dubs them outliers, but we know they’re just plain weirdos. Herewith, the Cream of the Crop:
1. Yongmei, bigamist. This woman got around. Enough to marry over 900 men in just over two decades. She made Elizabeth Taylor look like a piker. Her husband-hunting spree began in 1993, when she realized she could make a quick buck by dragging suckers to the altar. Yongmei would marry men, usually poor farmers, then divorce them a few days later. The victims would have to pay her a small amount each time, but after awhile it began adding up. At her peak, she was making about $8000 a month before she was arrested in 2011. Hey, it beats playing piano at the Holiday Inn for tips.
2. Marina David, zythophile. For 34 years (1851-1885) Marina consumed only beer. That’s it. No water, no food, nothing but beer. She was reputed to insist on the strongest and most bitter beers available. How she survived is a bit of a mystery. Some say her diet caused her to produce stomach acid, which in turn helped her to break down and digest the sugars in the beer. Others contended she suffered from a condition that left her unable to absorb nutrients from other food sources. Despite her proclivities, David led a relatively normal life, leading beer enthusiasts to eschew moderation. Norm, of Cheers, had a shrine to Marina in his breezeway.
3. Lillian Alling, wanderer. Alling was an Eastern European immigrant who became famous in the 1920s for attempting to return by foot to her homeland. That’s right, by foot. Frequently ridiculed for her foolishness, Lillian was unruffled. She began a four-year journey in New York, then traveled westward across Canada, then north through British Columbia, the Yukon, then west again to Alaska by 1929, usually walking about 30 miles a day. In Hazelton, B.C., a telegraph lineman noticed Alling’s tattered and malnourished appearance and phoned authorities, who arrested her for vagrancy to protect her from the elements. When searched, she was found with two ten-dollar bills and an iron bar with which to “ward off bad-intentioned men, not animals.” Lillian was kept in jail for two months, then spent the rest of the winter working in a Vancouver restaurant to save enough money to continue her trip. Records have her reaching the Bering Sea, where all communication with her was lost. While working in Hazelton, she answered critics with a single sentence: “Don’t think of me as a weirdo---think of me as a through-hiker.”
4. Shia LaBeouf, performance artist. Shia is probably best known for his 2014 stint sitting in an L.A. art gallery wearing a paper bag on his head that read “I Am Not Famous Anymore” and crying in front of visitors. 2014 was a big year for LaBouef---he also ran 144 laps around the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam wearing bright green leggings and was escorted out of the musical Cabaret in New York for disruptive behavior and spitting at police. He also pulled out one of his own teeth, cut his face and refused to shower to truly experience the life of a World War II soldier. Earlier, in 2013, he took LSD to prepare for a movie scene and later had to be pulled off the director while choking him. In 2020, LaBeouf tattooed his entire torso and aligned himself with the Westside Harpys street gang.
In May, 2016, Shia launched an open-sourced month-long cross-country journey called TakeMeAnywhere, in which he tweeted out his geographic coordinates daily, allowing fans to pick him up and take him…well, anywhere. And do just about anything with him in the process. Some fans were impressed. “Usually, when you meet your heroes they’re a disappointment,” said one. But this guy is different. He was just an amazing guy. He was incredibly receptive to what we wanted to do and very conversational. I think he’s a true artist.”
But still…a weirdo.
That’s all, folks….
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