Through my many travels and escapades I have stumbled across (other than myself, of course) countless individuals whom one might describe as being 'special beyond the standard definition'.  Special, as in weird.  Weird, as in disturbed.  Disturbed, as in "(insert word of choice here) in the head."  We're not talking about people who are just quirky, eccentric, or idiosyncratic, no no.  We're talking about the cheese sliding off the proverbial cracker here.

The story begins in a little town called Hamilton.  During my time in the "Tron", my primary places of residence were university dorms and boarding lodges.  I spent a year in two dorms at Waikato University, half a year in a private boarding hostel called Dey Street Campus, and another four and a half years in a place that is infamous for its ability to attract such individuals, Hill Street Lodge.  Whether it was the affordability of the place, the girl's high school just across the road from it, or even the subsidized all-you-can-eat electricity, who knows.  What is known is that the place attracted nutters like flies to the proverbial turd.

Anyhow, we begin the history lesson starting with the Dey Street Campus back in 2001.  At this point, I came across two compulsive liars, one of whom was an alcoholic, the other who insisted he was fair dinkum about taking Transrail to court for one million dollars.  Including the latter, I would hear plenty of stories and tall tales that would secretly amuse me, some of which reared their factually misaligned heads on a more frequent basis than others.  Not that it mattered, really.  I always reveled with much delight in their slightly inadvertent fibs.  And even if I did get bored of hearing their fabricated drivel, being alcoholics, and being Hamilton, I was always guaranteed free grog, even if it was the staple choice of alcoholics - Rheineck and Double Brown.  So of course, I never complained.

Come March 2002, and I would move into the Hill Street Lodge on Hill Street, where I would reside for a record 4.5 years.  I had many wild adventures there, mostly involving drugs and alcohol of course, and met and befriended some of the most decent, honest people you would ever want to meet.  They were good times, memorable times.  Except for the ones where I was completely trashed, because I was too drunk to remember them.

But of course, the most memorable part of the experience was the nutters that moved in from time to time.  The best one was a middle-aged guy, who, for all intents and purposes, shall be named 'C'.  A very friendly guy, C was somebody you could chat away with for hours on end.  Until he stopped taking his meds, that is.  Or flushed them down the toilet, blocking it in the process.  As he did.  Later on in the afternoon, I would find him in the lounge holding a 'bible meeting.'  With bibles, cups of black tea and plates of toast and marmalade with cheese laid out in numbers on the coffee table and benches, I knew straight away that he had lost the plot.  Later on, another flatmate would catch him in the bathroom dressed in a raincoat, wearing a shower cap, with his foot dressed in iodine and marked out in black vivid for "surgery" - he had evidently injured his foot and was trying to perform surgery on himself.  And lastly, he was going around the rooms in the apartment hugging everyone and telling them that he was going to America.  He even had his luggage packed and everything.  Which kind of worked out for him, really because he would be committed later on that night.

Another prominent nutter I affectionately called "Corn on the Cob."  This was due to two reasons; he had a penchant for eating corn raw, and was usually dressed in a yellow shirt with green stubbies and no footwear.  Also, he would often sit at the kitchen window muttering racial slurs and derogatory comments at passers by, and use shower cubicles and his own mattress for a toilet.  He also allegedly walked into the nearby BP servo and wet himself while standing in the middle of the shop.

There was also the petrol sniffer who would run up and down the hallways screaming, and a middle- aged woman called "J" who was caught in the foyer getting changed with a shopping cart.  Of course, none of these people lasted particularly long at the place and were usually evicted within weeks of moving in.

There are many other examples of fruity people doing fruity things at the Hill Street Lodge, but to mention them all would be beyond the scope of this blog.  And even though the place had its entertaining 'nutcase' side to it, it had its fair share of normal people too.  Which admittedly, excludes me.