He would come home with hitchhikers and play them that one tune they had been hoping to find since they last heard it when they were 16 on the radio. He played it to them on vinyl. Blindly dug up out of one of the largest and messiest vinyl record collections in the world. Most of them bought for pennies at flea markets, some now worth hundreds of dollars, but he’d never sell them. Except in summer he wears a Brittish fighter pilot’s jacket, also indoors and heats up the largest room of the house with good old coal, for the family, but he himself goes reading the newspaper in the cold attic. His entire life all his insurance policies are handled by the worst alcoholic to ever be vice-president of a large Italian owned insurance company and every time this guy visits, he has a stone bottle for him of the agent’s favorite drink, some rather potent liquid called Jenever. Once every five years or so the agent pretends disaster struck and the man gets a modest payout for something that never happened. The man spends the money on gifts for family and friends, usually from old shops about to be wiped out by international chains. From time to time, when the TV dissapoints and a guy who’s never had a real job thinks he’s telling you what you want to hear so you’ll vote him straight to a fat paycheck, he runs out with a bag full of wine bottles and finds some homeless people at the train station and listens to their life stories.

At work he repeatedly refuses a promotion to a manager position stating he doesn’t want to be paid to yell at others they have to work faster. To get out of his obligatory army service he goes to one of the wildest carnival celebrations in the world, doesn’t sleep, parties for four days with no sleep, only drinks, doesn’t need eat. The recruiter immediately dismisses him the moment he walks into the door. The first time his kids drink alcohol they do it with him present, as he explains the many downsides, and the not always insignificant upsides if you time and dose it well. At the same time he talks so often about the ills of Coca Cola and such, that his kids will never ever touch a sugary lemonade in their entire life.

On election day he traditionally votes for one of the smallest parties and makes a habit of enthousiastically greeting everyone he passes, so they look at him like he’s a politician. When he’s hospitalized he smuggles hundreds of tin soldiers into his room and creates the battle of Azaingcourt on the floor and to everyone’s surpise the doctor on duty walks in, gets down on his knees and they start playing, he takes the English, the doctor takes the French, not realizing the scenario is bound to end badly for the French side. His method to fix broken appliances is to give them a gentle, intuitive kick, which works about 30 percent of the time.

For some reason he addresses store clerks as ‘master’, which usually gets him some sort of discount or some extra nice service, but occassionaly also a terrified look on the face of the puzzled cashier. From time to time he jumps into his car and takes the whole family for a long drive all the way to the beach, where they take a 30 minute walk, buy shrimp, and drive all the way back to make tomate crevette at home with his signature home made mayonaise and frightfully oversized French fries which are something of a curiosity in the neighbourhood as are his extremely thick pancakes.

He lifts weights and gets really buffed, without juicing, unless you count the insanely spicy soup he makes with escargots, yup, snails, a poor man’s food that reminds him of his childhood. The whole neighbourhood eats a bowl of his escargots at least once a year, diplomatically never asking how he actually prepares them or where he even gets them. Local lore has it that you can’t get a cold up until six month after ingesting this peculiar treat. At 53 dies of heart defect which flew under the radar his entire life, but boy, did he live and how he lives on, with full sparkling madness, in several others he had the pleasure to ignite… I have it on good authority that one of the last things he did in this life was doing the horizontal woogie boogie with the woman he was married to for exactly 29 years and five months.

One of his favorite quotes went: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Jack Kerouac

One of his own quotes goes: ‘Better to die of what you loved doing most than of dying doing what you hated.’

I could go on and one about this unusual man, but I have already taxed modern day attention spans far too selfishly and greedily. Go have your sparks flying all around the place now. Have someone call you crazy this week, in a good way, in your way, in the best way.