Unfriended by a Friendless Person Already!

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends,
Mmm I get high with a little help from my friends, - Lennon McCartney 1967

Oh, Village Voice nothing
New Yorker nothing
Sing Out and Folkways nothing
Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg
nothing, nothing, nothing - from The Nothing Song, the Fugs

It's nearly the end of a very eventful year. And what more of a fitting way for it to end than by being unfriended by a "Facebook friend".

It's not very nice to be unfriended. For starters, "unfriend" isn't even a word, let alone a verb! Having an ungrammatical thing done to one is disconcerting to say the least.

But all that aside, it's like being back in the schoolyard, behind the shelter-sheds in the early 1960s. Chewy-on-your-boot-I'm-not-your-friend-anymore sort of thing. But in the case of Facebook friends, you aren't even given a chance to say, "ASIF-I-care-I-never-liked-you-anyway-dickhead."

In Facebook, the unfriender has the last word.

A bit of me sort of wishes I'd unfriended this particular person first, several years ago in fact. But truth be told, I felt sorry for him, and like others thought I could help him. You see, his major gripe with the world appears to be that he has trouble making friends. And a bunch of us have been trying to give the guy some pointers.

But really, now I come to think about it, being able to make friends is not a teachable skill. We would have been better off steering him to Dale Carnegie's "How to Make Friends and Influence People".

I'm having a lateral moment! "Carnegie" - "Carnage". I just remembered - I was walking to my bus tonight in Manhattan and the movie "Carnage" was playing at a cinema near my stop. Its name was displayed on those neon tile things they put up on the outside of cinemas.

There was an out-of-town couple behind me while I was waiting at the lights. They seemed pretty knowledgeable and were obviously in New York to see a concert. I could hear them talking about Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, which was to be played at Carnegie Hall this evening by The New York String Orchestra. I was impressed! Until ...

"We'll never find it!" the woman was saying. I was HOPING she'd ask me "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" so that I could answer, "Practice!" but her husband suddenly shouted out, "It's here. We are here already darling. Look! (pointing at the cinema's tile display) C-A-R-N-A-G-E! Carnegie!!!"

End-of-Lateral_Moment and I kid you not.

Back to my tale. Yep, I was unfriended by a friendless person.

If I were a born-in-the-USA American I'd say "How ironic!"

But as I am not, I will just expand out in English words and say, "WTF!"

As Judge Judy often quotes, "No good deed goes unpunished".

I embedded the Fugs "Nothing Song" above, not just because parts of it epitomize the unfriender, but because of its humour. The Fugs, a New York band, a favorite of mine and of my brother.

So favorite, that their song "How Sweet I Roam'd From Field to Field" was chosen to be sung at his remembrance ceremony at Bear Gully, Australia, this month. I was fortunate enough to be able to fly out to attend.

As Tim's sons stood on the rocks at Bear Gully and sand William Blake's poem to the music of The Fugs I looked back. Only the immediate family were actually on the rocks. Behind us was a hill. The hill was literally covered with Tim's friends. They'd come to remember him.

Real friends.

Non-cyber friends.

My friends