Sunday, April 03, 2005

Crazy People

They're out there in droves. Some are crazy like Michael Jackson (backed by a bit of talent and money) and some are crazy because of heartbreak and bad luck. Some just don't fit in to society.
I used to live very close to Central Station in Sydney. Some days I would see the same lady near the phone boxes. She would shout down the telephone lines in Vietnamese, sometimes crying, always distressed. I often think about what had happened to her to make her lose reality. Perhaps she was shell-shocked from the war, had been a refugee, had lost her children. I'll never know.
I have my own story about Central Station. I was travelling around Australia and I ran out of money in Sydney, so had to find some work to fund further travels. I was living above a crusty old pub in a fairly decent serviced room just two blocks from Central Station. Because I had been doing a lot of travelling and had a lot of friends living and working overseas at the time, I would often go down to Central Station to make phone calls on the credit card phone at odd hours of the night, to fit in with overseas time zones. One particular night I couldn't get through to anybody, I had tried half a dozen different people all to no avail. The night cleaner came past and started hurling abuse at me. I started to question what he was talking about and he proceeded to hose me with an industrial hose! I wasn't terribly happy, I can tell you! I walked home dripping wet and down in the dumps!