old friends

Old Dog would not touch facebook with a ten foot pole even if he was sinking in quicksand at the time and only the grip of some old high school buddy or some workmate or long ago beer drinking buddy could pull him from an agonizing death underwater.  Beagles joined only because he wanted to keep track of his daughter and possibly other relatives. He never comments, and I think he only looks through it on weekends where he drops likes here and there.  Myself, posting my works of deathless art get a prim like for each one, but I feel like he is only being polite,

There are plenty of people who are heavier users of fb than me but I have to admit I am a pretty heavy user.  One of the things I love is getting in touch with people I haven't heard from in like fifty years.  Just something I would like to know.  Fellini's 8 1/2 ends with a scene where the central character meets every woman he had ever known in his life.  I would like to have that and what the hell, all the men too.  

And that is what it is like when you first join fb.  You friend a couple of people, probably the ones who urged you to join, and likely friends of theirs know you too, and friends of friends and it is a little like that last scene in 8 1/2.

Well that is how the Institute was born.  I friended some of my Champaign buddies and then other Champaign buddies saw that I was on their friends' pages so they friended me, and so on.

And somewhere in there was Suzie who was a waitress at Chin's.  And strangely enough she had an older brother who I had attended high school with.  We didn't hang out together much, but when time came for us to fly the coop, there was strong pressure from the school to go on to college and make something of ourselves and Carl was one of the few who refused.  I didn't think it was a good decision,  but I highly approved of him standing up to The Man.

And then I got his email and it turned out that he was a crazed right winger, but that was ok with me because I like to argue, and then we exchanged emails daily and then Beagles got the blog and so on and blah, blah, blah, and I have told this story many times before, but, you know, people aren't always listening.

There are a lot of shellfish that start out life as a free swimming organism, seeing the world free as a breeze but then at some point attaching themselves to a rock and growing some kind of shell and that is where they will be the whole rest of their lives.

I think it's true with people too.  We have our free swimming youth, a time when anything could happen, and at some point we settle down and nothing much happens till the day we die.  Well not exactly like that but pretty close I think.

Last Friday I got one of those friend requests from an old Champaign pal who I haven't heard from in over fifty years is what brought this all up.  But I have to move on this morning, more later probably.