Stoking the Friendly Fire

If pressed, I would have to admit a certain, uh, inner conflict over the idea of friendship. Seriously, what the fuck is a friend anyway? It's really just another in a long line of nebulous ideas in life that seem to take on such monumental importance without any of us actually really agreeing on what it is.

With the advent of the whole social networking phenomenon, it is amazing to see just how easy it has become for us to expand the boundaries of what a "friend" means.

I have always thought myself clever for telling people that I have almost no friends and a lot of acquaintances, which, while being accurate, is not really that clever, and is really more pathetic than anything else.

Still, at the end of the day, how many people can I claim as someone I could rely on, as someone I could trust to tell something deeply personal without being embarrassed or concerned that it would somehow be used against me later on? Would I even need fingers to count that low?

It all started with MySpace. I was getting in touch with "friends" I hadn't spoken with in years, and while that in itself is interesting, it's also a little dubious. There is a certain novelty to seeing pictures and personal information about people you lost touch with but maybe have wondered about on occasion. It's cool to see that this person is now fat and has a billion kids, and it's cool to see that so and so is now the king of a small island country, but really, how superficial?

It seems as though Facebook is now eclipsing MySpace as the place for wasting mountains of time for the folks I have known over the years. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but it may be the semi-anarchic nature of the way Facebook works. Unlike MySpace, there is not a ton of options when it comes to personalizing the look of your homepage. In fact, everyone's page pretty much looks the same. The difference is that each page contains different sorts of information. You can put as much or as little about yourself up there as you wish, and it is all laid out in a sort of chronological list of updates that all network together on your screen. You get a running tally of whatever nonsense your "Friends" are doing at any given moment as long as they too keep up the ruse.

In all fairness, I have had the opportunity to get back in touch with some people I have cared about in my own retarded way and in that sense I am pleased with Facebook for that reason alone. Beyond that, I have also located and in some cases, contacted people who I more or less don't really give a shit about at all.

And I should also add that I am not a great friend to anyone. I can admit that. I know that I am hard to get in touch with, and hard to remain close to. This is something I cultivate, truth be told, and I do so because being too close to damn near anyone is something I pretty much find to be repellent. While this says more about me and my misanthropy than anything, I am well aware that this rends me fairly unappetizing as someone anybody would waste too much time bothering with.

It's not quite that black and white, but for the sake of argument it'll do.

We're all getting older. Nothing to be done about that, ask Heather Locklear. She'll tell you, were she an honest woman, that the best thing to do is to roll with it and not to fight kicking and screaming all the way to the plastic surgeon like she has obviously done. Having the opportunity to surreptitiously reconnect with your past without having to get your fingers dirty is a fantastically alluring way to sample the wares without buying anything, and in this world, that is like an axiomatic principle for daily life.

It's no wonder Facebook has captured the imagination and the free time of the entire galaxy. Facebook is a buffet of sociological flotsam drifting around just waiting to be skimmed from the surface.

When I think back over the years and remember how easy it has been for some of my supposedly closest friends to shut me out when things were maybe too uncomfortable or uneasy, or for that matter how easy it is for me to simply drop off the face of the earth, I realize that someone needs to start a new sort of networking site. The new site could have all the stupid as shit games and contests and mindless fan pages and useless discussion boards and whatever else that gives us a reason to mill about looking for a mildly entertaining diversion, but it would all be centered around people you know, not people who are your "friends," because really, who the fuck really has any actual friends, and why in god's name would they want to share anything about that with the entire galaxy?

Whenever you are actually hoping for a little galactic inspiration, look no further than Star Wars. As any self-respecting nerd will tell you, everything you need to know is wrapped up in the world sprung forth from George Lucas' fevered ego. The rest, as they say, is doo-doo.