"Hey, You Seem Like a Nice Guy"

Saturday night I was out at the bars, as I am so often fond of doing. However, there was another semi-regular occurrence that I'm not quite as fond of: some incredibly odd, probably drugged-out gentleman came up to me outside the bar and dragged me through about fifteen minutes of odd chatter in which I couldn't exactly get a word in to either engage the person or dislodge myself from the conversational vice-grip this man held me in.

I listened to stories about his growing up in San Francisco, his grandfather, who was some kind of trailblazing pioneer, apparently. I learned about how he thought it was fine to steal a bicycle as long as you needed it but how you had to be careful about the bikes you stole, because he stole one that turned out to be a fixie, and he didn't realize it until he was approaching a busy intersection and couldn't find the brakes. I heard about his new interest in panting, how he loved to repair bikes, and how his brother was a wildly successful community college baseball coach.

And why did I find this out? Because I was standing there.

This would have been fine if it were an isolated occurrence, but I swear to you, crazy people have an incredible knack for finding me. Friends tell me it's because I look like a nice guy and am approachable, but I think I must put off some crazy person pheromone or something, because seriously, this shit is a little out of hand. So I will provide you with some highlights of the vast ocean of crazy person knowledge that I have gleaned in my years on this planet.

• From the crazy chain-smoking bum on Greyhound: "Don't smoke. heh heh heh Don't smoke don't smoke don'tsmokedon'tsmoke ahahhahahhahhaha" I proceeded to see him chain smoke six cigarettes in the fifteen minute stopover, all the while coughing some awful sound that resembled a car trying to start and backfiring.

• A woman outside Annie's Social Club kept informing me that I was the supervisor, that I knew a vast list of names that she began to rattle off, that I was definitely that muthafuckin supervisor, wasn't I? Also, that my friend and drummer Taylor was on his last strike. Mmm mmm mm, and he better look out, because you KNOW what happen when he get that last strike. Mmmm mmm. Supervisor man gonna have to deal with that. And supervisor man can't be bothered with that, because he's such good friends with (some name I have no idea about that apparently I was good friends with).

• Some crunk in the Boom-Boom Room wisely informed me that the problem with the Fillmore neighborhood is that it went to shit because there were no more "corner bums". See, back in the days, if kids were screwing up and causing trouble, there was a bum down on the corner who knew everyone, and he would narc the kids out to their parents. Nowadays that we got no corner bums, we got nobody keeping these damn kids in check.

• An unfortunate soul who happened to be leaning on my car after I left band practice down in the Tenderloin spent a long, long time laboriously explaining to me what had gone wrong with his life, why he couldn't get a job, the best way to lift weights, why you have to be good at lifting weights if you're going to prison, why you should love your family, and how he was going to get back on his feet in no time. He was also convinced that I'd just walked out from playing a gig at the Warfield, so I'm not sure he was quite all together.

• A very standoff-ish person in the Inner Sunset informed a group of friends and myself that us damn kids have no sense of respect, and that's why the world is in its current state. It was entirely our fault, and if us damn kids couldn't show some respect, we could just go straight to hell and stop being cruel. "Us damn kids" were all 28-32 years old.

• A happy-go-lucky gent approached myself and a friend simply to tell us that his personal definition of a psychopath is someone who starts laughing at their own joke as a means of making other people laugh, rather than letting the joke be the reason for the laughter. He proceeded not only to break his own rule a number of times via random interruptions of conversation, but he also claimed that I was exempt from this rule, because I "was already a pretty upbeat guy" so apparently I couldn't be a psychopath.

The list goes on and on, but those are a few of the highlights. Somehow they flock to me, and everyone tells me it's because I seem like a nice guy. Here's my problem and curiosity: if I am apparently such a friendly and approachable guy, why is it that I mainly tend to draw in and interact with people who are completely fucknuggets crazy, but not cute girls? Damn universe.