I got to thinking about this guy this morning. When I used to hang at Weatherstone's, there was this guy that used to come around a couple of times a month. He never sat down and drank coffee. He would say, "hi," to a couple of guys, and then he would engage in a short conversation with one or two of the regular hangers -- like he knew them. He was always smiling, very pleasant, very clean, but he seemed different somehow.
One day a friend and I got to talking about him. This guy told me that he and that guy used to be meth freaks. He told me some of the things they did. He found the guy one morning passed out on the hood of a car -- his feet on the ground, his chest and head on the hood, dried puke under his face. That's just an example.
He then said that there came a time when he didn't see the guy for a very long time. Then one morning, there he was. He said he looked so weird, so different. He asked him what had happened. The guy said, "I got cleaned up."
"Yeah, I know, but WHAT happened?"
"I got cleaned up."
The guy I was talking to thought the guy meant that he had taken a bath or something, but that wouldn't account for his radical appearance. Finally my friend said he got it through his thick skull that the guy meant that he no longer took drugs, and that THAT was what accounted for his radical appearance.
He had met the guy when they both were on drugs, so to him this was an entirely new and strange person. He had had no idea that doing drugs made that big a difference.
This guy that I was talking to, I never suspected that he had been a druggie, not for a moment. What had happened I guess, was that the guy's shocking appearance had so impressed my friend that he too got off drugs. I then realized that what the guy had been doing, and now it made perfect sense, and in hindsight, I kind of suspected something like that, that he was trolling for users, using himself as an example of what one could become. He never preached. He just "presented himself." He was a role model. One of the best I have ever seen. A lot better than Donald Trump, lemme tell you.
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