There’s this guy who hangs out at our local coffeeshop. He’s one of our regular crazies. I mean this as affectionately as possible, as he’s an endearing form of crazy. He’s small and heavily tattooed in tiny little self-made, prison-looking blue symbols. There’s writing on his knuckles, a tiny tattoo in the corner of his hairline, and writing up his forearms. He wears baggy white pants, a large beige windbreaker, and carries pieces of paper with him. He enters the shop, always giggling, head ducked down and bobbing occasionally, as if agreeing with himself. He’ll take a seat and write for hours at a time. He keeps laughing and nodding, scribbling and agreeing with himself. He is, for some reason, usually sweating. He’ll occasionally go outside for a cigarette, stubbing it out carefully under on the bottom of his shoe, before coming back in to sit and work on his scribblings for a while.

It’s hard to know which one of us is on the other’s turf. Chances are he’s lived in this town longer than we have. Maybe when he walks in he thinks, “Oh, there’s that couple with the matching everything who sit side by side and take up an entire booth here where I could be working on my tiny manifesto.” But then he laughs, because that’s what he does every fifteen seconds, and he walks over to pretend to buy some coffee, which maybe he thinks of as a cup of ponies. Who knows.

But he just passed me a couple of seconds ago, giggling about something, and as I was wondering what he was thinking about (as I’ve been trying for the past five minutes to come up with something even slightly funny for this script I’m working on) my iPod changed to a Todd Barry track, one I hadn’t heard before. It was a joke with the words “Mercury Rev” as a punchline, and I started laughing.

And that’s when giggling, over-tattooed manifesto guy and giggling, over-caffeinated script girl had an awkward moment of eye-contact. I’m now, officially, one of the coffee shop weirdos.