By the cold reckoning of the computer, and after a weekend of indifferent puttering, I now have 116 friends. Because I have been somewhat selective in my choices, they are mostly people who I have actually met, at least for a drink at a convention, perhaps on the telephone, occasionally only by e-mail; it is also the case that one or two are people who think they know me or want to know me or feel sorry for me because they used to read my magazine, and I hadn't the heart to deny them.
That said, the number of those 116 friends who would, should the need unexpectedly arise, come to this remote outpost to attend my funeral -- and I realize this is a peculiar measurement of friendship, but it all seems open to question just now -- is very small. It would be a null set, except that a couple of my newly minted friends actually live in the neighborhood.
And the people who I consider to be my closest friends, they oddly enough don't even have Facebook pages. Now...I realize Facebook is hardly a new phenomenon (with, what, 35-million subscribers?), but I am just now reading a new book (it comes out in April) called The Thoreau You Don't Know by a man named Robert Sullivan, and it has me thinking. Which is, usually (sometimes) a good thing.
The definition of friendship I used to use was fairly simple. A friend is someone who will help you move, or take you to the airport. And since I'm a fellow who has owned pickup trucks occasionally (among many other wrecks; it took me years to realize that thousand dollar cars were suited only to owners with mechanical aptitude and greater fortitude), these are transactions to which I have become accustomed.
But I have spent fragments of the weekend going through the detritus of memory seeking old friends and acquaintances. Not because I feel any great need to do so, but because someone (and, yes, she's a "friend" now) who knows about such things suggested this was the path niche marketing now takes (I've LinkedIn, too, whatever that is), and I've not yet given up on my fascination with dead tree projects.
So I've pulled names out of somewhere and gone searching. Professional acquaintances are easy, because they're all on each other's lists (and Facebook allows you to see their friends even if they haven't yet "friended" you and allowed you to see their homepage). Others become sport. The high school girlfriend who became a sex therapist? Yeah, she's smart enough not to be out there. The college girlfriend who's now a prosecuting attorney? Yeah, she's not out there, either. (But, really, I'm not stalking...they just both have distinctive names.) The old roommate who's mostly homeless these days? Well, he's not there, or maybe he is but his name is too common and I don't know the side of what river he's living on these days, and, anyway, I still have his cell phone number but he never answers when I call. His daughter, though, my goodness, she's about to be a high school senior and I was in his wedding. And she has a lot of friends, almost 500 of 'em. And she's grown up to be a beautiful child, but we knew she would, and there's payback in that for him. I think about "friending" her for a moment, and then don't because I suspect explaining an old guy with a cartoon avatar to the rest of her friends would be difficult, and I also suspect explaining her dad -- to whom she is dearly attached, but... -- is also difficult.
No matter. What strikes me, as I page past all these carefully provocative very happy pictures of strangers, is two things. First, I have no idea what my old high school buddies look like now (and if I cared I'd have gone to our 30th reunion, anyhow). And second, once having found and "friended" them, what of it?
We can now tell what each other is doing on our wall, on which one records whatever one is doing (or has just done, or is about to do) whilst drifting through Facebook to check on what everybody else is do. So I record that I've cut fallen branches from the winter storms that went through even my safe corner of Kentucky. And that my daughter was served two desserts at a birthday party. Why do I record these things? Because I have always been a confessional writer, and this curious kind of haiku is a temporary challenge.
At least I guess this is why I dabble. It is, of course, slightly addictive, in the same way that Astroids was once a huge time-suck. And it is, I guess, a little bit nostalgic (some of my "friends" were people I met long ago in an AOL folder, after all, one of whom introduced me to my wife). It also asks for a different definition of what is meant by friend, and I mean not to struggle with the bowdlerization of language, simply to note the transition.
The thing is, I'm going to go down to the coffeeshop in a bit, and there I'll see my real friends. The people who would help me move or drive me to the airport, or help clear a fallen tree if I needed it. And in the meantime, I'm going to go back to my Facebook page and note that I wrote a blog over here, and wait to see if anybody else understands this brave new world.
Epiloque: 'tis kind to have been rescued, again. I suspect that, as always, I wrote this too hastily, and painted with too broad a brush. And I fear the funeral bit has played the wrong way. So it goes. Thanks, regardless.