Weirdness is a sickness. I mean, it's okay to be a little...off. I think every one of us has that weird grandmother that serves pig's feet as the main course at Christmas dinner, or the co-worker who sneezes on the keyboards while surreptitiously surfing porn sites. These people surround us, and except for their few peculiarities they're otherwise normal so we cut them some slack.

Then there are the pure nut-jobs. The people with whom we avoid direct eye contact at all costs. They can usually be seen hanging out in the seafood section of the grocery store madly rubbing their eyes while holding deep, insightful conversations with the live lobsters as they climb in slow motion on top of each other like high-altitude mountain climbers in the final yards of a particularly difficult summit, scrambling in the far corner of the tank to find some sort of shelter from the babbling bobbling head on the other side of the thin aquarium glass.

This is the scene I witnessed today, and I can't get it out of my head.

After getting what I have to say is the best haircut I've received in many months, I decided to quickly duck into Albertsons (for those of you in Illinois, Albertsons is the west coast's version of your Piggly Wiggly) to restock on foodstuffs when I saw this guy wearing tattered sneakers, pressed khakis, a white T-Shirt, and a rumpled librarian sweater pacing back and forth in front of the lobster tank while violently rubbing his eyes with the balls of his dirty hands. After several paces he squatted down in front of the tank, pointed accusingly at the fleeing crustaceans and yelled "I'm not it! I'm not it! You're green! You're green and hate hate HATE you!!! Go green! Go green! Hate you!". He then stood up, mumbled something to his shoes, then began pacing once again and rubbing his eyes.

Stunned, I looked around and saw a good 20 other shoppers standing silently, frozen like clothing-store mannequinis, staring frightfully at the pacing loon in the tattered sneakers. It was oddly quiet, save for the low mumblings of sweater man. This odd, bad creepiness was a out of place for this normally flaccid, upscale neighborhood. Turning a sharp left I made my way to the cereal isle, grabbed two boxes of Golden Grahams (two for one!), then bee-lined it to the "15 And Under" checkout.

The automatic doors swooshed open and as I exited a police car rolled up to the main entrance and came to a lurching stop in the red zone. In a series of moves that I'm sure must have been practiced over many cop years, the officer quickly and fluidly exited his vehicle, placed one hand over the butt of his gun, grabbed the mic hanging on his shoulder, and quickly walked past me in an authoritative cop manner as he made his way deep into the florescent-lit bowels of Albertsons.

What seemed so out of place about this whole scenario was not the fact that an obviously disturbed individual was venting his frustrations out on some helpless, hapless bottom-feeders, but rather that this guy was wearing a pair of freshly pressed Dockers. It's that little detail that keeps running through my head.