Not a topic of conversation but a person
Have you even been with a group of friends/acquaintainces, with one oddball in the fringes of that group? Freaky Tom was that oddball. During my MASSIVE DRUGS period in the post-graduating period of my life, my friends and I were all sharing crappy flats and working McJobs, or trying our best not to, while often ingesting large amounts of weed, the odd pill, vat of mushroom brew and etc. We had a pretty big social circle of about a dozen-twenty people, and we'd go round to each other's flats to smoke dope, making buckets, bongs, and bagpipes and generally getting shitfaced. (Groovy, huh?)

We often went round to my mate Stuart's flat, and he had two flatmates: Bill, a paranoid delusional who owned the flat and installed cameras in the hallway (for "security"), and who slept with a machete under his pillow, and Freaky Tom, who made Bill look normal. Freaky Tom was a programmer (inevitably), tall and skinny from hours hunched over his computer and existing on Coke and Doritos, who seemed to have zero social skills. He would come into Stuart's room, where a bunch of us would be monged out discussing the finer points of Stephen Hawking's black hole theory or singing Junglebook songs, but he would just stand in the corner, like a big awkward potted plant. Intially I felt sorry for the poor bastard, figuring he was just shy and needed a bit of coaxing, and would invite him into the room, away from the corner. But no, he'd decline and just stand there.

Okayy... After several attempts at friendliness, we eventually came to realise that he wasn't just shy, he was actually rather strange. When we went out to the local indie fleapit nightclub, he wouldn't come with us, but turned up later, alone; when dancing to the Stone Roses or whatever generic late-90s tunes, he would suddenly appear, which would the prompt for the girls to edge away, then everyone else to do so, one by one.

Later, he decided to re-arrange his bedroom. He moved his bed so it prevented the door from closing, and slept with his head at the door-end of the bed. Anyone passing by at night time (which was of course the kind of hours we were keeping), to go to the toilet or bravely venture into the doss of a kitchen, would see his head lying there, as though disembodied, looking as if it had just rolled there from a guillotine. If you passed by, he would open his eyes and say "Hello" - you can imagine how disconcerting that was, if you were massively stoned.

Afer that, any time he appeared, a dread silence descended; church bells tolled and wolves howled in the middle distance. And that is Freaky Tom the conversation killer. Wonder what he's doing now.
(McChinaman banned, Fri 13 May 2011, 14:55, Reply)