The difference a few years, a beard and a little randomness can make...

Here is a list of changes that made this little bit of social/cognitive dissonance possible...

1. Join a social club of sorts for a few years, be very active, garner respect, then quit all of a sudden.
   
2. Travel a bit, move several times, and lose touch with nearly everybody you once knew.
3. Grow a massive Bakunin-esque beard and don't get a hair cut for a few years.
4. Go back to your home town, stay with your folks for a bit, get totally disgusted with them and seek alternative living arrangements.
5. Find loving, wonderful woman and decide to buy a house together.
6. Find charming yet in need of some help house to make into a nice starter home.
7. Lose okay but still shitty job and start looking for a new one.
8. Realize that most employers (potential and otherwise) are petty, judgmental dicks that can't look past a little facial hair and a pony-tail.
9. Get a hair cut and shave (you freakin' hippy scum.)
10. Find out that your neighbor was a member of your former social club when he was younger and didn't recognize you with all the hair. (Needless to say, but you didn't recognize him either as he had grown up in the intervening years.)
    

So, really, this post has been several years in the making, little did I know. But, nevertheless, it is pertinent to the concept here and fairly interesting in it's own right.
So there I was, no shit man. (All BS stories start out this way if you didn't know.) I have recently become a clean cut and "respectable" job seeker. (Really it must be the market here, hell you'd think I was looking for work in Alabama or something.) Whatever. So, at any rate, since I moved into this house with my long time GF (about as close to being married as I ever want to be) I have had little to no interaction with the neighbors, any of them.
Until recently...
So, as it is, I shaved and got a hair cut. And really it has helped. No results as of yet, in the legitimate job search that is, but that is not important to this post. What it has helped is in the arena of grey work. So I think. But that is also not important here. What is important is the fact that I had no idea that I was living next to a person I had known as a kid who is now all grown up.
So, it is by way of all of these changes that yesterday I came to find out that my strange neighbor really isn't that strange at all. In fact, in another life, he was perfectly normal to me and it is indeed I who has become strange. The reality here is, firstly, shit happens, and secondly, your conceptions about the world can be completely turned upon ear with the slightest of changes. Ultimately, the lesson I have taken from all of this is that no matter what you expect in this life, you should learn to expect something completely different. Or at the very least be wary that the least likely outcome is still possible and in some cases is more than likely.

See also, Murphy's Law, sort of.