When I was living in Maryland with my girlfriend at the time, I had an old friend come to visit me from my home state of Texas for the two weeks leading up to New Years. He had been a good friend of mine for nearly a decade prior to my moving to the East Coast, but I hadn't seen him in several years.
Now, this guy was a weirdo, you see. I mean, I KNEW he was a weirdo, but I guess that when I was younger, and we used to hang out together, it was alright that he was a weirdo. I was kind of a weirdo too. We got together and did weird shit. Anyway, when he came to Maryland, he brought a huge bag of prescription medicine, a set of huge juggling knives, a bunch of magic tricks, and a suit he had created which would allow him to set himself on fire without harming his body. His plan was to have an incredible magic show and variety hour for our guests at our New Years party, with a grand finale that involved him setting himself on fire at exactly midnight in front of stunned, yet thoroughly overjoyed visitors who would revere him as a genius entertainer. It didn't turn out that way, however.
On his first day at my house, I noticed his huge bag-o-pills. When I nonchalantly asked him about it, he basically told me that he had acquired some very severe psychiatric disorders since I left Texas, and he needed the pills to keep him "level". Now, keep in mind that when I say "a bag of pills," I mean that he literally had an entire duffel bag filled with prescription medication. Fucking psychiatric medication. And to make things even worse, he kept dropping subtle hints during the first few days that the reason he developed so many mental problems was because I had left Texas, and he didn't have any other friends. When I privately confronted him about this, he called me "abandoner", and subsequently used this word to address me for the rest of his time there. And it wasn't like he was saying it with some sort of anger - he was just casually calling me that. In front of others. Like, "Hey, abandoner, could you grab me a beer while you're up?" like it was totally reasonable and not crazy to address me like this. At this point, people were starting to get the idea that my friend was a little off.
Now, in the two weeks that followed, he did so much crazy shit that it would take a book to catalog it all, but here are the highlights: he spread rumors about my girlfriend having STDs to all of my friends (people he had never met before), was caught by my girlfriend trying to feed his pills to our cats, he dug several deep holes in our backyard late at night (and couldn't provide an explanation as to why, other than "I'm an entertainer, it's funny."), he stole my phone and collected all my contacts, whom he "prank called" late at night for fun, and was abusing his medication for the entirety of his stay at my house. He was a goddamn ticking time bomb, and my girlfriend was so terrified of him that she would take the cats upstairs and lock herself with them in our bedroom with a knife and canister of pepper spray. She stayed up there all day long. By the time New Years came around, basically nobody was on speaking terms with my friend from Texas, and I had to cancel the party because everyone (I mean EVERYONE) told me they would not be attending because they were scared of him. At the time, I guess I didn't understand the full extent of what he was doing, and I know that some people here will inevitably ask me why I didn't send him home immediately, and I don't really have an answer for that... the guy was my friend, and even though he was acting like a lunatic, I still considered him a friend.
The last straw, however, was on New Years. 2008. Since we couldn't have the party at my house, my girlfriend found a party through one of her old high school friends. We all ended up attending the party. Me, crazy friend, my girlfriend, and my brother. My crazy friend brought his bag of entertainment (not the pills, though) and insisted upon arriving at the party that we locate the owner of the house so we can ask him where he should set up his magic show. Basically, he planned to do his magic/comedy routine there at the house. Despite all of us urging him to just leave his stupid bag of tricks in the car and enjoy the party, he insisted on doing his show. Powerless to stop him, we just sort of let him go about his way, and he eventually located the guy who was throwing the party. My crazy friend asked the guy if he could do a magic show, inside the house, which involved him setting himself on fire at midnight. The guy said no.
My friend did it anyway. But the show didn't go as planned. He managed, close to midnight, to get a small gathering of drunken partygoers to follow him outside, where he set up his show. The entire show was awful. He started out by juggling his huge set of knives and ended up dropping them all and nearly slicing his own fingers off. After that act bombed, he did a puppet show, complete with a miniature ventriloquist who made jokes about gay anal sex and child molestation. At this point people were booing him, and I actually thought he was going to get beat up. He says "BUT WAIT!" and starts gearing up for his grand finale. He slowly starts to dress himself up in this homemade flame-retardant suit and chooses this incredibly drunk guy to act as his "fire extinguisher". He gave the guy a blanket and instructed him to throw it over him exactly ten seconds after the fire was started. His plan was to set himself on fire at midnight, go up in a blaze of flames, and then he would drop down on the ground, roll, and the drunk guy would throw the blanket over him and pat the fire out. Now, as he was dressing himself up, and wrapping his head with gauze, my crazy friend was doing this lecture about fire safety and how serious the whole thing was, but his ridiculous flame-retardant stunt-suit thing made him look like some sort of incredibly deranged serial killer (think Jason Vorhees) that was speaking seriously on the subject of safely setting yourself on fire. It was very funny, and everyone was very drunk, so they all started laughing. Hysterically. They were laughing AT him, not WITH him.
And he just lost it. I mean, he went fucking ballistic. He was screaming, "It's NOT funny! It's VERY serious!! I could DIE tonight!!!", but his getting upset albout the laughter and his assertion of the seriousness of the situation just made everyone laugh even more. So finally he lunged into the crowd of onlookers, dressed like a fucking horror movie villain, gauze wrapped around his face. On lots and lots of pills.
And they beat the living shit out of him.