This man I used to work with was nice enough, for several years, although he was a little bit too into the hippy dippy spiritual stuff and was always going around saying namaste and he smoked way too much pot. One day I was sitting outside during lunch and was chatting with some other co-workers/friends about helping some other mutual friends of our find work. This guy just happened to walk by us and over heard me. For whatever reason he flew into a rage and started yelling at me and telling me how stupid I was for attempting to help anybody and then he started using epithets and flailing his arms. He totally lost his shit, and it didn’t make any sense. None of us, the 3 that were initially having the conversation, could figure out why he would be angry at any of us for talking about some work that was available for our friends that were looking for work. But he kept on screaming and told me to go to hell. The 3 of us were completely shocked. Finally I told him to fuck off. This was after about a 10 minute rant at me. The weird thing was that he knew all of the folks who we were talking about who were looking for work. It didn’t make any sense why he would be angry that we were discussing helping people that we knew.
Fast forward 9 months or so, and another friend (who had heard this whole story) and I were going out to lunch one day, and after we sat down, in walks this dude with another mutual friend of ours (who most likely had never been told of this incident) unfortunately we were too far into the restaurant for me to get up and leave before he saw us, which would have been my preference, but he eventually spotted us and walked over and leaned in and gave me a hug, while I kind of winced, and said hello with a serene look on his face. Me and my lunch companion just looked at each other like, WTF? I didn’t want to cause a scene, so we just finished up our lunch in a hurry and left.
This was about 4 years ago and I haven’t seen him since. I never knew what set him off in the first place, and I still couldn’t believe that he acted like he had not behaved like a total asshat the last time I saw him. The only thing I could think of was maybe he had been on some type of medication in the years that I had known him (most likely pot) and on that particular day that he flipped out, he had not been on the meds. Who knows.