For behold, I have laid down my testament among thee
So I finally got around to fulfilling my promise to creepy neighbor guy to spend some time with him and read his manuscript. All I can say is that creepy neighbor man just got renamed to crazy neighbor man.
His apartment is sparsely furnished, and what little he does have appears to be scrounged from construction sites. Covering an entire wall, he has a shelving unit made from cinder blocks and wooden planks. I'll not begrudge a poor man using what materials come to hand (although in this case, perhaps illegally) to spruce up his home, but every single space on that massive group of shelves was occupied with ceramic figurines. And most of them were clowns.
I had originally thought that reading Mr. Creepy neighbor man's manuscript would be a long and boring process (what with it being more than 200 pages and all), but I was in luck. As it turns out, he writes only on wide-ruled paper, skipping lines, and only on one side of a sheet. Already that takes his 200 pages down to something far more managable.
I would have still been hesitant to spend my time reading that lessened manuscript if the writing had been, in any way, competent. Again, luckily for me, he failed to disappoint. The writing style seemed aimed for very young children in terms of sentence structure and repetition, but the content of the sentences themselves were clearly not intended for young children.
An example of an exerpt might be something like this:
"Loren wanted to go get ice cream. Loren liked chocolate the best. Loren had sausage and eggs for breakfast, and his mother made him wash the dishes afterwards. Loren rode in the car with his Mom and Dad and Cousin to the ice cream store. Loren saw houses and trees on the way. Loren's cousin started fondly [sic] his manhood. Loren ate his ice cream quietly. The ice cream was delicious and cold. Little league practice that day was fun."
Note the clever use of completely unrelated details to what was obviously the traumatic event he tried to describe in this vignette. Apparently, his cousin either groped himself or, possibly, "Loren" (not creepy neighbor's real name, but the one he uses for the book) on a car ride when he was little. But the discussion of what he had for breakfast that morning, or the subsequent reference to Little League do little to further the narration of the message he was trying to convey, and do not seem to put the sexual issues into any sort of context.
The entire book (if you can call it that now), is composed of short stories rarely longer than what I printed above. They appear to be in no particular order, with what appear to be gigantic time-jumps in between the chapters. New characters are mentioned (like Fergy, Schuyler, Annie, and Bruce) with no introductions to who these people are, nor indications of how they are related to the main character (Loren). Frequently, previous 'chapters' only made sense after gleaning some detail from 30 pages later (like that Annie was his first wife).
He recounts what seem to be auditory hallucinations. At one point while he was the CEO of his Fortune 500 company (don't shoot the messenger, I'm only reporting what was in his manuscript), he heard the voice of God tell him that he would be punished for his extravagent lifestyle. He found out later that day that Annie was cheating on him with his buddy, Bruce, and continued on to recount Bruce describing in lurid (and unrepeatable) detail the sexual proclivities of "Loren's" former spouse. After Annie files for a divorce and throws "Loren" out on the streets, Loren is homeless and again hears the voice of God telling him which semi-truck to try to get a ride from (to go to Washington D.C. for reasons not given). I guess the voice of God also told him to perform sexual favors on the trucker as fare for the ride, because that was also described in the book using the childish sentence structure as above.
He recounts what seem to be visual hallucinations. When he died (he claims to have died twice already), he claims to have seen the moving black shadows just like at the end of the movie Ghost, and that he walked into the bright white light away from the shadows, but ordered God to send him back to complete his task, and God relented each time. He discusses how he traveled across some open fields one night, chasing a softly white 'orb' of light that sang to him with his mother's voice. He discusses when he first saw the devil in Oskaloosa. A small ceramic frog which sits on a table by his window apparently gets up and dances periodically as well.
He appears to have delusions of grandeur, saying that his message (which he ostensibly recounts as the idea that a loving God exists and that people should learn to listen to that God) is unique and novel, and that when his book is published it will revolutionize the world. Aside from the fact that books with this message are neither unique nor novel (Barnes & Noble have have a gigantic section devoted to religious books with similar themes), that message fails to appear even once from within what he has written.
He appears to have paranoid episodes as well, suggesting that his rambling autobiography will "piss off the churches, the FBI, the cops, and the President" and that after his book is published, they will attempt to kill him. He even decided on the ending for his book while I was there, reading and making comments about the work. Apparently, it will end with the book being published, and Loren will walk out of the publisher's office to a crowd of people. He will then simply end it with the sentence "And there was blood in the streets that day." He said he likes it to be up in the air as to which group kills Loren, or whether Loren in fact fights back and wins against all odds (as an act of redemption). Either way, I found that to be a little on the disturbing side.
He believes that he has ESP, and can read minds, but yet still believes that I hail from Iowa, am a Roman Catholic, and thinks that we share some sort of intimate connection because we both lived on an Indian burial ground (which I've never done to my knowledge).
He seems to have a loose grip on the meanings of several terms which makes understanding him a bit more difficult than it otherwise would. He told me about his son (Schuyler in the book, though that is not his real name either) and how his son liked to eat rattlesnakes. I thought surreal could barely go beyond this: "They don't have much meat on them, but they're a real delicatessan, so I made three." But after that, he told me about how his son was a member of the Topeka "Insane Clown Posse," and asked me if I was a member too.
In addition to general weirdness, he described additional troubling incidents. After his divorce from 'Annie' he visited a divorcee support group, where a younger woman asked him to walk her out to her car afterward. He writes that they hugged as a goodbye, but that his 'hug' was a little different and that it led to her alleging sexual assault against him. He eventually decides that this woman is an agent of his ex-wife trying to ruin him. In another story, he rides the bus from Topeka to Washington, D.C. (again for reasons not given), and sits next to another young woman. They share a blanket and he 'only barely' resists the temptation to "do things to her" under the blanket while she sleeps.
I'm a security conscious individual, and always keep my door locked. I think this guy just ensured that I double-check that lock before I head to bed each night. If I end up dead sometime, you might want to have the cops take a good hard look at Creepy/crazy neighbor guy from Apt 20.
His apartment is sparsely furnished, and what little he does have appears to be scrounged from construction sites. Covering an entire wall, he has a shelving unit made from cinder blocks and wooden planks. I'll not begrudge a poor man using what materials come to hand (although in this case, perhaps illegally) to spruce up his home, but every single space on that massive group of shelves was occupied with ceramic figurines. And most of them were clowns.
I had originally thought that reading Mr. Creepy neighbor man's manuscript would be a long and boring process (what with it being more than 200 pages and all), but I was in luck. As it turns out, he writes only on wide-ruled paper, skipping lines, and only on one side of a sheet. Already that takes his 200 pages down to something far more managable.
I would have still been hesitant to spend my time reading that lessened manuscript if the writing had been, in any way, competent. Again, luckily for me, he failed to disappoint. The writing style seemed aimed for very young children in terms of sentence structure and repetition, but the content of the sentences themselves were clearly not intended for young children.
An example of an exerpt might be something like this:
"Loren wanted to go get ice cream. Loren liked chocolate the best. Loren had sausage and eggs for breakfast, and his mother made him wash the dishes afterwards. Loren rode in the car with his Mom and Dad and Cousin to the ice cream store. Loren saw houses and trees on the way. Loren's cousin started fondly [sic] his manhood. Loren ate his ice cream quietly. The ice cream was delicious and cold. Little league practice that day was fun."
Note the clever use of completely unrelated details to what was obviously the traumatic event he tried to describe in this vignette. Apparently, his cousin either groped himself or, possibly, "Loren" (not creepy neighbor's real name, but the one he uses for the book) on a car ride when he was little. But the discussion of what he had for breakfast that morning, or the subsequent reference to Little League do little to further the narration of the message he was trying to convey, and do not seem to put the sexual issues into any sort of context.
The entire book (if you can call it that now), is composed of short stories rarely longer than what I printed above. They appear to be in no particular order, with what appear to be gigantic time-jumps in between the chapters. New characters are mentioned (like Fergy, Schuyler, Annie, and Bruce) with no introductions to who these people are, nor indications of how they are related to the main character (Loren). Frequently, previous 'chapters' only made sense after gleaning some detail from 30 pages later (like that Annie was his first wife).
He recounts what seem to be auditory hallucinations. At one point while he was the CEO of his Fortune 500 company (don't shoot the messenger, I'm only reporting what was in his manuscript), he heard the voice of God tell him that he would be punished for his extravagent lifestyle. He found out later that day that Annie was cheating on him with his buddy, Bruce, and continued on to recount Bruce describing in lurid (and unrepeatable) detail the sexual proclivities of "Loren's" former spouse. After Annie files for a divorce and throws "Loren" out on the streets, Loren is homeless and again hears the voice of God telling him which semi-truck to try to get a ride from (to go to Washington D.C. for reasons not given). I guess the voice of God also told him to perform sexual favors on the trucker as fare for the ride, because that was also described in the book using the childish sentence structure as above.
He recounts what seem to be visual hallucinations. When he died (he claims to have died twice already), he claims to have seen the moving black shadows just like at the end of the movie Ghost, and that he walked into the bright white light away from the shadows, but ordered God to send him back to complete his task, and God relented each time. He discusses how he traveled across some open fields one night, chasing a softly white 'orb' of light that sang to him with his mother's voice. He discusses when he first saw the devil in Oskaloosa. A small ceramic frog which sits on a table by his window apparently gets up and dances periodically as well.
He appears to have delusions of grandeur, saying that his message (which he ostensibly recounts as the idea that a loving God exists and that people should learn to listen to that God) is unique and novel, and that when his book is published it will revolutionize the world. Aside from the fact that books with this message are neither unique nor novel (Barnes & Noble have have a gigantic section devoted to religious books with similar themes), that message fails to appear even once from within what he has written.
He appears to have paranoid episodes as well, suggesting that his rambling autobiography will "piss off the churches, the FBI, the cops, and the President" and that after his book is published, they will attempt to kill him. He even decided on the ending for his book while I was there, reading and making comments about the work. Apparently, it will end with the book being published, and Loren will walk out of the publisher's office to a crowd of people. He will then simply end it with the sentence "And there was blood in the streets that day." He said he likes it to be up in the air as to which group kills Loren, or whether Loren in fact fights back and wins against all odds (as an act of redemption). Either way, I found that to be a little on the disturbing side.
He believes that he has ESP, and can read minds, but yet still believes that I hail from Iowa, am a Roman Catholic, and thinks that we share some sort of intimate connection because we both lived on an Indian burial ground (which I've never done to my knowledge).
He seems to have a loose grip on the meanings of several terms which makes understanding him a bit more difficult than it otherwise would. He told me about his son (Schuyler in the book, though that is not his real name either) and how his son liked to eat rattlesnakes. I thought surreal could barely go beyond this: "They don't have much meat on them, but they're a real delicatessan, so I made three." But after that, he told me about how his son was a member of the Topeka "Insane Clown Posse," and asked me if I was a member too.
In addition to general weirdness, he described additional troubling incidents. After his divorce from 'Annie' he visited a divorcee support group, where a younger woman asked him to walk her out to her car afterward. He writes that they hugged as a goodbye, but that his 'hug' was a little different and that it led to her alleging sexual assault against him. He eventually decides that this woman is an agent of his ex-wife trying to ruin him. In another story, he rides the bus from Topeka to Washington, D.C. (again for reasons not given), and sits next to another young woman. They share a blanket and he 'only barely' resists the temptation to "do things to her" under the blanket while she sleeps.
I'm a security conscious individual, and always keep my door locked. I think this guy just ensured that I double-check that lock before I head to bed each night. If I end up dead sometime, you might want to have the cops take a good hard look at Creepy/crazy neighbor guy from Apt 20.
posted by The Academian | 8:41 AM
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