DO NOT READ IF YOU'RE SENSITIVE TO THE PLIGHT OF THE FUCKING NUTS

Every town has its lunatics. If you live in a small enough town, you encounter the same ones over and over again. There used to be town drunks and before that village idiots. Now, local lunatics.

They're people so odd the government gives them a check to stay the way they are, apparently for my entertainment.

Being extremely eccentric is only possible if you're fabulously wealthy, like Michael Jackson was (shivers), or if someone else is footing the bill. Otherwise, you have to come out from under the bed, put your bra on INSIDE your shirt, and get your ass to fucking work like the rest of us.

A friend of mine calls their government hand-outs Stupid Checks, but this isn't accurate. They receive them because they have been defined as mentally ill, which is meaningless. In my experience, they seem fine, just really, really weird.

Also, for the record, I have no problem AT ALL with them getting money from the government. In fact, they should all get raises. I have no problem with anyone who isn't filthy rich getting money from the government. I know a woman who lies about how poor she is so her welfare check is bigger. Fuck yeah, I say. With the trillions of dollars our government forks over to rich corporate fucktards, there's no way padding your poverty for an extra hundred bucks a month is wrong. It's wrong if you don't, I say.

Here in my town, we have Gomez, who plays the lottery obsessively, who has a whole system for playing the lottery, who has this system all written out in dozens of notebooks, which he carries with him everywhere he goes in a dirty backpack, and which he tries to get everyone he comes across to look at.

He also has, for reasons unknown, a vendetta against the local mortician, whom he insists is a necrophiliac. If you won't listen to his lottery system, he'll talk about that, about necrophilia. Graphically. Right there in the pasta aisle of the supermarket.

This guy Gomez is paid by the government, because, like killing brown people and delivering the mail, being fucking nuts is a Federal job.

On Sunday I met a new lunatic, a barefoot woman in her 60s wearing a dirty pink babydoll dress. The dress, her make-up, her hairstyle (pigtails), all were frighteningly incongruous on a woman her age. It looked like she was in costume, but it was 8:30 in the morning.

I was coming out of the gas station and she was standing there looking into my car. I said hello to her as I approached.

"Do you know Destiny?" she asked me.

"No." I said. I wanted to get in and drive away, but she was standing right in front of the door. I thought about going around, getting in the passenger side, and sliding across the seat. My NUTdar was blaring.

"Are you sure?" She smiled at me playfully. She thought I was pulling her leg.

"Positive."

"This sure looks like Destiny's car."

"Nope. My car."

She began peering through the window again. "She likes to hide. She might be hiding in there."

"Nope," I said. I am a man of few words when talking to the insane. "Excuse me." I reached around her and pulled the door open, which moved her out of the way.

"Oh, well," she said as I climbed in. "If you see her tell her Candy says Hi."

"I'll do that."

"She's really small, Destiny is, so you have to keep your eyes open."

"I will be ever watchful for Destiny," I said.

"She likes to hide, too, so you might not even know she's there."

I drove away, watching her in my rearview mirror. She was laughing.