It's been a strange strange week.

First, a close family member did something extremely stupid and I ended up sitting in the hosital emergency room for 12 hours on Sunday. Fun.

Now, this Hurricane Rita that is expected to hit somewhere between Galveston and Corpus Christy, Texas. My favorite aunt lives right there, somewhere in between Galveston and Corpus Christy, Texas. I made sure she was leaving, she's heading up to my mom & dad's house in Oklahoma (thank God). I think if I had anything else to worry about this week my brain would meltdown and leak out my ears.

On the bright side, I was at SABHC (Savannah Area Behavioral Health) yesterday with the extremely stupid family member, and while they were in the back I was in the waiting room. Now that place is a mine of great blog fodder. There was a teeny tiny little old man there, probably in his 60s, but hard to tell. He stood at about 5' tall. He was dressed in winter clothes (even though it was 90 degrees outside), with a long, black leather trench coat over his thick, heavy sweater. He was very polite, he said please, thank you, and yes ma'am everytime he was spoken to. He is also out of his gourd (obviously the reason he was there). He was talking about his $160,000 per year job. The job that he gets paid all of that to sit on his ass and smoke cigarettes all day. The job that he couldn't quit because he won't "disappoint the President." He was also going on about a married woman that really wanted him, but her husband knew she wanted him so he politely declined, no hard feelings and all. He was harmless. I could have sat there and talked to him all day. Who knows, maybe that stuff was true. ;-)

That got me wondering about people like him, people with that air of hopelessness around them, people that you can tell were raised right, but something went wrong somewhere. What went wrong? What separates him and people like him from the rest of the general population, the ones that didn't go crazy, the ones that have their feet planted firmly in reality. What was their defining moment?

I've been thinking about that a lot.