Craziness in Zingem

My luck in the last two kermesses hasn’t been the best. Flat tire in the one last week before Wervik (on lap 3) and a broken shifter in the other one yesterday (also on lap 3). I managed to hang on for a lap of yesterday’s race after the shifter broke by spinning at 140rpm for while stuck in the 53×21. Not the best gear for a flat race, but I got to see what it’s like to pedal junior gears in a grown man’s race. After the disappointing race and the stressful drive to get there due to a massive amount of road work, Jake and I returned home to more stress. The “Greek”, the 40 something year old from South Africa and is only Greek because his parents are Greek, is downright insane. Here’s a quick paraphrased quote I took from him last week:

Michael (AKA The Greek): “You want to know how I know when the FBI is following me?”
Me: “Oh my God yes.”
Michael: “It’s when the blacks, the gangs, the mexicans the asians, the chinese–it’s when they aren’t following me. That’s when the whites are following me. It’s so easy to decode it’s a joke. The whites, the FBI, they track you with credit cards and cell phones and the internet. These things are so easy it’s a joke. Once you get a few pieces of the puzzle you can solve it. Human beings are tribal. I’m not paranoid. I can tell when someone is following me. When the mexicans, the chinese are following me they act really giddy and laugh a lot like in the show Beavis and Butthead, you know heheheheh. It’s very simple. But chip away at Whitey…” It went on for a long time.

10 minutes later in part of another conversation:

Michael: “I’m very, very fast. I’m getting very fit. You know how I know this? My pulse is down to 50.”
Justin: “Let’s try to get it down to zero.”
Michael: “I’m very fast you know. I could beat you in a sprint. You want to go out and do a sprint now? hahaha”

He later exclaimed that the MTV interview on Beyonce we watched was all scripted material that she and they stole from him. “Information” that took him 29 years to think up. “It’s all stolen from me. I don’t know how they got it, but it’s word for word all my work.” (Beyonce talking about her life and her recent albums).

Despite knowing he’s not very smart he believes he’s a genuine genius, he believes he’s faster than any professional cyclist, believes that he has the ability to play the stock market if he wanted to and make millions of dollars, and he believes the entire world is out to get him.

Michael confronted me with a grim face as we came in and sat down in the living room. He accused me of poisoning his food last night because he felt sick this morning. Poisoning his food. Yeah. I told him to shut up and fuck off because I wasn’t in the mood for it. But he wasn’t his normal, goofy self this time. He had anger in his stomach (and the poison I’d used on him of course) and he wanted a fight. We spent the next five minutes arguing until it escalated into a shouting match, him telling me if I told him to shut up one more time, “just see what happens. You tell me to shut up one more time and we’ll have a fight.” I told him to shut up of course. Two more times.

Now you have to understand that I didn’t necessarily want to get in a fist fight with him, duh. For one, he has genuine crazy person strength. I’m not trying to be crude or anything, but that is NOT a myth. He’s also 6’5″ and outweighs me by about 40-50 pounds, though I have quite a bit more rage on my side, especially after my shifter breaking in the race. But Michael being insane changes things. What would happen after the fight for example, if there was one,–that would be the worrisome part. If a normal person thought I’d sabotaged them in some way and we’d fought, we’d be angry at each other for the next month. That’s it. With a crazy person, you have no idea what they’re going to do next. They could sneak into your room and stab you in the forehead with a spoon. They could get back at you by taking a shit in the fridge, accidentally shitting on their own loaf of bread, later forgetting that they did it, and then blame you. They could secretly steal tiny portions of your toothpaste until it finally runs out in three months without you knowing they were doing it. There’s no end to the madness a mad person can come up with!

Anyways, he was more bark than bight and he ended up sitting down on the couch next to me to watch some boring TV. Cortisol levels fell.