Last Saturday was all going so well. I met some great people who were selling records in the same row, like Dave who works in drug and alcohol counselling, and Zac and Clarissa, a young couple who were selling their records to help save for their honeymoon next year in Sicily. I ran into Ngāruawāhia legend Dujon Cullingford. To say he is the man helping to host a breaking (breakdancing) event in Hamilton on March 5, an important step towards selecting the New Zealand breaking team who will compete at the Paris 2024 Olympics, is to only scratch the surface. Awesome guy, very caring; he said afterwards, “Man, are you okay?”
Last Saturday went somewhere strange. A man appeared in my front of my table carrying a plastic bag, and said in a very loud voice, “Murderer!” I looked at him, waiting for the joke. He had long hair and wore a hat. He shouted, “You’re a murderer!” I had a feeling he wasn’t joking. He was in his 40s and looked like he was familiar with life lived on an edge. He screamed, “You’re guilty of mass murder!” Everyone was staring and Zac stood next to him and asked him to calm down but he got louder, really went off, and I thought maybe I knew him and had done something bad to him along the way, but mainly I was thinking I was frightened. He kept yelling, and then he said, “Speak!” I had been stunned into silence. He repeated, “Speak!” I said I didn’t know who he was or what he was talking about but he shouted that I knew both these things, and he advanced a step closer, still on the theme of mass murder - but then he took a step sideways and parted with a message about how I was also responsible for 9/11.
Last Saturday’s incident was just one of those things, a passer-by who had wandered into the Auckland Record Fair recognised that I was a journalist, and gave voice to a head full of ideas (vaccines, 9/11) driving him insane. The misinformation project in real life, not in the deep space of social media. Yeah, frightening; I was afraid he might lunge forward. But he wandered away. No harm done. I drank my coffee, and sold all my records.