I’ve been hanging out with a guy I knew from high school lately and until last night we were becoming better friends. We went out drinking and he was acting like a real dick and hit me in the face with a pool cue. I told him I thought he was an asshole and to get away from me. When I left the bar about 20 minutes later he was waiting outside and started walking next to me trying to apologize and he was breathing very heavily so I knew he was angry underneath the apologetic exterior. I told him I didn’t give a shit about his apology and then he asked me if I wanted to fight, I just kept walking and ignoring him and went home.
The thing is this guy used to be nothing like the way he acts now. He used to be sort of shy but normal and kind of smart. While he was a student at Georgia Tech he tried this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimson_weed stuff and took the doses of 2-3 people instead of just one. I heard from other people about what happened and he has talked about it too. He was messed up for days and pissed himself, started putting his clothers in the freezer, thought a homeless guy in his bed, and kept talking about how Santa was the guy from Cheers, and also started slamming his head on a concrete floor repeatedly. When he finally recovered he didn’t remember any of it. Not long after this he failed out of school. I seriously think this guy has brain damage from that. His personality seems completely different. Everything he does seems to be completely random like misfirings in his head or something. Anyway I don’t plan on hanging out with him anymore.
So what are you looking for here? Sympathy? Support? Advice? Similar stories?
Don’t hang around with assholes.
A former friend of mine, while not going wacko insane like that, had obviously suffered a serious decline in intelligence since College. Some of that I can blame on drugs, some of that I blame on just plain laziness. You stop feeding your brain, it tends to atrophy.
He’d been going for a degree in Geology and was allegedly a smart man at the time. I dunno, I didn’t know him then. But in the time I knew him (12 years), I’d have to say that his IQ dropped by at least 30 points. By the time I wrote him off, the man didn’t have a clue about anything and didn’t want to.
Drugs sure can fuck with the mind*. There was an urban legend (I’m unsure as to it’s veracity) in my high school about someone called ‘Orange Juice Boy’. The short version is: He took some bad acid and had a bad trip. That never ended. He thinks, to this very day, that he is a cup of orange juice. He lives in a mental institution. If he falls over he’ll shout ‘I’m spilling! Oh no, I’m spilling!’ The upper classnem told me all about it, and when I was a senior I told all the underclassmen. I would not doubt that a senior right now (who I told this to when he was a freshman) is retelling the tale to a freshman right now. The obvious moral of the story: Don’t do drugs that are not booze.
A case in point: At this very moment alchohol is fucking with my abillity to spell and use good grammer.
There was a guy I knew freshman year of college (back in the days of heavy recreational chemistry) who dropped out and started using drugs constantly, mostly dropping acid as often as he could get away with it (if you drop acid too soon after your last trip, you won’t get any effects – the brain needs time to recover, I guess).
Anyway, two years later he showed up and hung around for a few days, looking for money or drugs or something. He had changed so much that it was truly awful – and he had gone from being a really nice guy, an “everybody’s big brother” type, to being scary and threatening.
Last I heard, his family had put him away in a mental institution.
pool, your “friend” sounds like a douche. However, I feel compelled to point out that the early 20’s are a very common time for schizophrenia to rear its ugly head, with or without drugs.
And I’ve never found mention of long term effects like you describe of jimson weed. I’d be more likely to suspect the repeated whacks to the head with concrete of causing multiple concussions and brain damage.
Not that it makes any difference to your story, but I’m just curious. Did he purposefully hit you with the cue? Like, wind up a la “Roadhouse”? Or did he just dickishly clunk you with it (maybe thinking he was being funny?)
Well he was about to make a shot and I was verbally trying to distract him but I didn’t touch him or anything and he quickly swung the stick with one hand and hit me in the mouth with the cue. Its one thing to mess around but hitting me in the mouth with a stick is definitely crossing the line.
Not a chance and this was not the only incident that happened that night.
The whole night we were kind of doing stuff to piss the other off back and forth. It was one of those situations where it was good-natured and funny at first but slowly got more serious. I called him today and we reconciled. Of course he probably won’t be the first person I call for a night of drinking though.
We only started hanging out recently and that was to jam. This is the first time we’ve gone out drinking together. I’ll still hang out with him to jam, but like I said the next time I go out on the town I likely won’t be calling him.