On Friendship

Everyone thinks the same thoughts over and over and over, and what's worse, they say them out loud, often at cocktail parties. That would certainly explain the wild, downright out-of-proportion success of the Harry Potter books, none of which I have read but, being a sighted and hearing person on planet Earth, know contain wizards, potions, witches, goblins, cauldrons, mean boarding school headmistresses with warts, toads, flying humans and chambers of deadly secrets--all the dark and dismal doings that don't happen in real life--and thus offer escape from those same thoughts I mentioned at the outset. I mean, come on: a theme park at Disney World?

Anyway, I try to think new things and then I discover that the thing I thought was new has already been thought. Or else I think new thoughts that cannot become reality, like my fabulous, must-have Dream Machine, which I have written about before in this space. In a nutshell, you hook it up to your head when you go to sleep and it records your dreams, which you can then watch on a DVD the next morning! How cool would that be? (If you have a PhD in physics, call me.) Or I think thoughts that are too awful to repeat, like Barack "If I had a son he would look just like Trayvon" Obama was behind the whole Zimmerman-Martin thing so he could rally the African Americans to vote for him in November, since many of them may have forgotten by now that he is black. Well, half black. Stuff like that.

However, one new thought I clearly understand today is that friendships exist to offer relief from the burdens of life; some last a lifetime and others are over in a flash, and neither is of lesser or greater value. The short ones were not failures because they ended, they were just short ones-- and that's that.