I had a friend that took our Knowledge Bowl team in High School to State all four years he was on the team. He is one of those that could likely win jeopardy pretty easily with the sheer amount of rote knowledge he had. Yet he was a science, and math whiz too. He excelled at all his classes. He was a guy that walked into our Trigonometry class forgetting we had a test and aced it and the extra credit. He was usually done with any assignments in that class by the end of the class if we knew about the assignments early enough.

Yet, I was the one coming up with all the weird ideas and things to try. He would do them with me and could think of things that likely would take me awhile to solve if they were tied to normal knowledge. Yet, he wasn't as inspired to do such things. I'd get Cs and Ds in Physics mainly because I was always writing about other ideas in a notebook, whether it was cryptography, robots, programming, etc. My notebook was full of that stuff. Later in life I kind of gave my classes the attention necessary to get through them while I was busy teaching myself other things. Hindsight as far as grades and GPA go, had I focused my life likely would have gone some other path. It wasn't that I couldn't do it. Most of the time I thought it was easy. I just had discovered computers at an early age and I devoted a ton of my mental time to them, even while sitting in say an English class. :p

Anyway, this friend did receive a full ride scholarship to Caltech. We live in Colorado.

He called me once from there talking about Acid (LSD) and such as though I'd be interested. I had friends that did LSD in H.S. I may have been a long haired metal head, but I didn't do drugs, I didn't drink alcohol, etc. I still don't. I figured he knew me well enough to know this, so I was surprised he called me talking about these things. I was actually surprised he called me, as we didn't really hang out outside of School and this was several years after I had last seen him. At least I knew I meant something to him. Though I do remember being concerned.

When I last saw him I wouldn't have been surprised to see some think tank flying him around in a helicopter.

A couple of years after that LSD incident I encountered him at a local grocery store bagging my food. I'd see him in various departments in that store over the years. Life did not go how I thought it would for him. In his case, he is one of those that he likely got into experimenting at drugs at the wrong time. He got into it during a time he probably needed to be most focused.

He went from being someone I thought would be one of the main assets in some think tank, to bagging groceries.

The only positive I saw is he was still smiling and seemed cheerful every time I saw him. So he may have been content. If that is the case then I can at least be happy for him in that way.

I also don't know exactly what he did outside of work. I was a father and had a family by then.