SEE MY FRIENDS

I was interested to read in The Star this week that “Brangelina” have no friends.  More specifically, Brad has some chums, sort of (you can’t really tell the exact degree and strength of his affiliations with such worthies as George Clooney, Jonah Hill, Giovanni Ribisi and Chris Cornell and this is The Star), but:

 “Angie has admitted that she doesn’t really have any friends at all.  ‘I’ll talk to my family.  I’ll talk to Brad,’ she has said, ‘But I don’t know.  I don’t have a lot of friends I talk to.  He’s really the only person I talk to.’”

I understand and can definitely relate to this and so, I think, can most people I know.  Friendship bonds seem to weaken over time like dissipating natural forces; inertia, entropy and solitude replace and supplant them.  So many songs have been written about this (Ray Davies achieved laureate status aeons ago) and their popularity attests to the universality of the phenomenon.  

A former friend told me about a dinner party she once attended where she was table-mate to The Man Who Broke The Bank Of England, native Esperanto speaker George Soros.  The international man of mystery with the sour demeanor and palindromic last name was newspaper-grey, gloomy, and dour.  Like Angelina, Soros confided to her that he had no friends.  He said he accepted this as a fact of life, although it seemed to make him sad, and their sector of the soirée settled into a long and awkward silence.   

I think my acquaintance really missed her chance to establish, at the very least, a relationship with someone who might have been an interesting occasional lunch or theater companion and a source of great investment advice. I would have said:  I will be your friend, how about it?  But she's basically self-involved and unsociable, always underplaying or overplaying her hand.  

I would like to introduce you to a few of my precious friends.  

        

Big Star: Thank You Friends (Live Link)