the most bizarre person i ever met

naturally this person was someone i came across during life in cali. i'm trying to come up with a great, creative, and bizarre enough alias for her...gimme a minute...

ok, she will be heretofore known as just plain ol marilyn because there are just no words that do her justice.

marilyn was the smartest person i have ever met. she was off the charts in the brains department. i met her through an ad in the classifieds. i was seeking some part-time employment with flexible hours that paid decent wages - hard to do! anyhow, i found this ad about a single mom who was working on her doctorate and in need of a personal assistant... i called and went for an interview.

i showed up dressed in what i thought of as personal assistant attire to meet with a doctorate student. in my messy mind, i figured she must be someone of at least partial class, smarts, and stability. wrong.  as i pulled up in front of her home, i was thinking "oh my gawd. what the hell is going on here?" her home was in a very nice neighborhood but it didn't fit in. it was a MASSIVE two-story tudor style with severely chipped paint, rotten wood, and a yard that hadn't been mowed in probably 163 years at least. and what was that awful smell? hard to tell for sure... there was more crap laying around the unmowed grass than one could find in the best of city dumps.

i know i have a tendency to exaggerate things in an effort to find humor, but this is only the slightest of exaggerations. i promise. would i tell you an un-truth? no,not me!

i dug my way through the dump to find the front door... at this point i'm thinking this won't be the job for me, but my curiosity has gotten the best of me. i MUST find out what kind of single mom studying for her doctorate would be living in such conditions.... wouldn't you want to know? (i wished for rubber boots though)

the door was promptly answered by a boy of about 12 years. he was a rotund lad but appeared fairly clean and put together. he led me to where his mother was studying. the foyer of the house was not real bad... a few  stacks of old newspapers, magazines, and other random papers - and the floor was a tad sticky but not too bad. i did notice that the odor from outside followed me in... must have been sucked in through the open door i thought.

to our immediate right is what most NORMAL people would consider a dining room, and it was complete with a beautiful (i think) china cabinet and a massive dining table fit for kings. now this room was not in such good shape as the foyer. as we enter, i hear a woman welcoming me but i can't see her... this is because there are the biggest mounds of paper and books i have ever seen my entire life piled up on the table... and the floor, and the chairs, and the floor, and the beautiful china cabinet was overflowing with the same stuff!

i make my way around the room and find marilyn sitting amongst the chaos... and was she a site.. she was about 5'11 SKINNY (!) and fish-belly white - that's really white for those of you who aren't sure... she has this albert einsteinish hair going on... wiry, black, and going in every direction.... further, she had a 4 inch white streak of hair running along the left side of head... and her hair was about 12 inches long! i wish i had a picture because the words just don't do it justice.

her clothes.... she was wearing what i think were once black skinny jeans with holes of wear all over, and dirt...lots and lots of dirt on them. she had a flannel shirt that was a few sizes too small... and converse shoes.... her hands were filthy! gauging by the blackness of her fingernails, i have to assume she rummages through the front yard frequently...

and then she begins to talk... and she is so on another level of thinking than the rest of the civilized world. i didn't comprehend anything she said! i knew most of the words but for the life of me couldn't figure out the context of her words. as i weeded my through what she was saying, my responses were several minutes delayed because i had to try and figure out what she was saying...

in the end, i decided this woman needed me. what the hell was i thinking? i accepted the job. i think it was an offer anyway. i was to start work the following day.

i show up for my first day of work and marilyn tells me she has a hard time focusing on her research in the chaos she has created in her home. she would like for me to help her get things cleaned up and straightened so she can work better. ok. she says she would like me to start in the living room..... holy hell! the furniture is an old couch most likely rescued from the trash somewhere, a TV and two children's potty chairs (the kind used for toilet training)

several paragraphs ago i mentioned the lad who was about 12.... and i found out there was a daughter who was 14 or so. these are the two lovelies that use the potty chairs! what??!!  apparently they get so caught up in watching TV or playing games that they simply cannot leave the room to use the grown up potty... what??!! and the really horrid thing? they don't EMPTY the potty chairs....

the kitchen.... i think they used every dish in the house since about 972 AD and had resorted to using whatever available surface they could to eat on. i'm not kidding folks. there was evidence of a recent spaghetti meal that was eaten from the countertop.... yes. put the noodles on the counter, drizzle them with sauce, mix it all up and eat it.... there were layers and layers and layers of meals on the counter top.... never cleaned up, or wiped off... just wait til it's crusty and serve the next meal on top....

i won't go into any description of the rest of the home....it's just too gross ( thousands of times worse than what i've already said here) for example, they were very creative and would paint on the walls.... with shit, blood, or whatever other soft squishy substance they could fingerpaint with.... yep. uh huh. can you say CRAZY?

speaking of CRAZY, i worked there for a little over a year, until marilyn got her PhD... in psychology.... wow.

she is a very profound, and well-known clinical psychologist. unbelievable.

she and her kids were so freakin smart that they had no idea what NORMAL was. they had couldn't tie their shoes, didn't know how, so they just yanked the laces out.

'nuff said....