Friends

So, I hit a milestone today....500 friends on fb.  Of course, fb friends are fickle and I could be losing one right now because of my political/religious outbursts or even just liking someone else's outbursts--I'm kind of lazy, so probably the latter.  If something makes me laugh I like it even if I don't agree with it that's how intellectually lazy and non-committed I am. 500 friends is quite a gift and I'm trying to figure out how to cap on this gift.  Economically, if I asked everyone of them to send me a dollar a week, I would be sitting pretty, but at least 450 of them would claim they don't actually know me that they're only trying to sell me real estate or tell me about their gig or poetry reading so the ratio of actual readers to homeless people just crashing in the warm or air-conditioned book store is more in the favor of readers who might actually buy something and keep the cycle of impoverished artists spinning.  And about 10 of them are relatives who are notoriously tight with a buck.  Oh, wait, I'm friends with about 5 politicians too, but I notice that whenever I say, "way to go!" or "got my vote!" my comment is deleted, so I'm guessing that my endorsement is more of a negative than a positive and that we're not actually friends per se.  So that's 35 more or less real friends at a buck a week.  But even then I would have to learn to keep my mouth shut on fb to keep that trickle of cash coming in. "Like" cats.  "Like" canned wisdom.  Can't go wrong with cats.  When Einstein my cat came to live with us five years ago-- and it was the first non-human creature I lived with-- I was astounded to discover that we shared about 80% of our behaviors and we got along just fine without the conversation part probably better than I get along with most humanoids because there isn't all that misunderstanding of gerunds and present conditional participles and continuous ambiguous tenses and the disagreement over whether you are an actor in my life or vice versa.  But Einstein and I:  we don't chat and maybe that's why we stayed friends for 5 years.  If I want to keep these 500 fb friends I guess I have to do that with them too.