cargo cult.

As the butterfly flutters each person who we encounter offers the opportunity to have meaning within the fabric of our whole, or at least a temporal segue. There are people who thrive on those moments of first glance, first touch, and falling in love. I feel their social equivalents must exist. They are the people who must meet new people, steadily adding to that base of their acquaintance stew, in a matter to make themselves feel more prepared for their own social apocalypse.

I once had a whopping 500 friends taking up residence on my FACEBOOK account. That's more people than fill the House of Representatives. It's five hundred people having five hundred first names and five hundred birthdays, experiencing five hundred different life stories. No one can have five hundred friends. Not all at once, anyway. For a brief time this all made perfect sense, as the ticker inched its way up and up in seeming social surplus. This was a period fraught with frequent forecasts of heavy flurries of named strangers, notable passersby, and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS-sized MIA returns of those once known.

A body at rest tends to stay at rest. The collective we operate the same way. Human stasis can grow roots or it can grow mold. There is a wonderfully misleading warmth gained from surrounding oneself with a multitude of familiar faces, in the way that there's a heightened excitement upon starting a movie with an all-star cast. Unfortunately commonly these films are overwrought, clumsily assembled, tipped over by ego, and lacking in pure soul as everything rides on its empty star power.

I'll admit it. Taking out social insurance has its benefits. Sometimes that conversation we have at the local pub with a limited view acquaintance who staggers far on the outskirts of our orbit or that out-and-out stranger who puts a word in edgewise can have more meaning then all of that recalling, recounting, and nostalgia bullshit played out with someone with whom we now share zilch.

Real life more often resembles a subway terminal with people passing one another, sharing little more than a nod or a brief communal acceptance of the weather. We share in these small moments together more out of necessity and coincidence than out of a single thread of connection. We weave in and out of one another's worlds at such a high rate that most relationships in our lives can be chit-marked off as failure.