The sign language of the mad

So among my Christmas gifts I received this shirt from my sister-in-law so in honor of the shirt I will post the most recent installment of “mixing with the crazies.” I should also mention that my friend Stacy received a similar shirt since she is in this story as well.

Ok so I had gone to Henry’s downtown with friends to grab a beer and after the bar closed everybody took off but Stacy and I decided we would just move to a different bar since we didn’t have anything going on and we were having a good time. We moved over to the Mcmenimans on Burnside sometime around 1 am. We grabbed a booth by the window and ordered drinks. We had been there awhile when this guy walking by outside stops outside our window gives us a huge smile, blows Stacy a kiss and begins to attempt an involved conversation with us via hand motions. Now I can tell you for sure it wasn’t sign language, there was no swiftness, no economy to the hand movements the motions were sloppy, wide, imprecise things that bore no resemblance to any common hand signals. It was as if he were attempting to elucidate Hegel’s’ notion of freedom using interpretative hand gestures periodically thanking us the audience by blowing the odd kiss. We stared at him blankly, completely lost and he, feeling that his point had been made, he gave us one last smile a nod as if to say “there you understand, I knew you would” and turned and continued down the street. That by itself would make a convincing argument that we deserve those shirts but wait...it gets better.
About 30 to 40 minutes latter a guy who had been sitting with his back to us at the bar got up and shambled somewhat unsteadily out the door and proceeded up the street. When he got level with our window he stopped and looked in at us and broke into a huge completely inexplicable beaming smile. His hands flew together and then apart towards us in a motion that looked something like he was trying to make shadow puppet doves and spoke of him being stirred by some great and completely unfathomable emotion. We stared at him blankly in shock that it was happening again and he blearily began his own hopelessly obtuse instructive lesson. Like the other guy even though we gave him no encouragement he never repeated a single hand motion to him apparently we were totally on the same page. He too talked at us for awhile and then with a final hand gesture and beaming smile walked on down the road. I to this day have no clue what they thought they were saying. But hey what can you do. It’s just one more night with the crazies.
I think part of it is Stacy and I both on our own attract nuts so with our forces combined we were a magnet that would suffer no crazy person to pass us by without paying homage.

wow thats a unflattering picture