Yeah, yeah, the title of this post is politically incorrect. I should've called it "Dealing with Crazies." Whatever.

Anyway, at the newspaper today (I'm the editor of my college's paper) we had a crazy guy call up. Now, this is fairly common at newspapers, and from what I understand moreso at the bigger newspapers. We get all sorts of weird people that show up or send us letters. But this guy takes the cake.

I guess he's been calling since last semester and leaving messages that were ignored. My adviser said he'd been bugging us a while ago, and a meeting was arranged but he never showed up. The point is he's apparently been calling us for a while but this was the first time that I talked to him.

The man clearly has serious mental problems. I can't really recreate for you what he told me, because I understood only about a fifth of what he said. The gist is that he was a student at my school in the '70s, when he was some kind of star athlete and a member of the wrestling team. He pinned some other star wrestler twice, and this upset some Dark Power which is involved in drug trafficking (he implied that this same conspiracy runs my school, a Navy hospital, law enforcement and every other paper in town).

As revenge for beating their wrestler, they created a device which sent out "interference" to his car, causing him to run his car off a 300-foot cliff. While in the hospital, the evil doctors made it look like he had brain damage (I wonder if perhaps that is the source of his trouble; it's hard to know) to discredit his testimony. Since that time, he's been dedicated to rooting out this evil conspiracy.

I think that, rather recently, some people involved with running my school had his parents killed because they knew about the drugs (something about $150 million worth of marijuana the school is growing). He wasn't too clear on this.

That's about the extent of his story that I listened to. When I realized that he was not sane, I told him to simply write down everything he had to say, with specific dates and names, and send it to us. He wanted to meet with me; I turned him down.

I'm not entirely certain I handled it right -- I don't want to "lead him on" by suggesting we'll write a story about him or anything, but I don't want to tell him he's a crackpot either. I have no way of knowing if he's dangerous or not, but he certainly has a very extensive fantasy world, so I'm slightly afraid. My adviser said I handled it fairly well, but I'm curious if any of you have any suggestions or anything on what to do.

Obviously, he needs medical help but I doubt there's much I can do about that (I'd be very surprised if he hasn't been in some kind of treatment in the past as he is so delusional). Any suggestions or comments?

Ste "And, yeah, it's pretty funny in a sick way" phen