I was talking to my friend Reggie yesterday. I was talking about how we always hear about cities becoming gentrified and how bad a thing it is.

I wonder where the offending gentrifiers came from, did they leave anything nice behind for the prolz who were forced out?

Are there farms upstate consisting solely of people who were priced out of Brooklyn?

Does Argyle NY have city dwellers now tending cattle, milking, haying?

Maybe gentrification isn't so much a bad thing as it is a sort of socio-natural force of nature - a house swap on city scale.

Hay anyone ever done a study on "Where are they now?" for the displaced?

Maybe when gentrification occurs, the previously poor move and are no longer poor?  

That would explain why you never hear their stories.

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Social Mathematics: *Or The LAW OF PROPINQUITY

In my life I've probably met 100,000 people. One of those is my best friend.

If I met 1,000,000 people, would I have a different best friend?  Would I have 10 best friends?

What if I only met 10,000 people and my best friend wasn't one of them?

I think we must be programmed to believe that we just happen to be surrounded by all the people worth knowing and that everyone else sucks.

Maybe that is why it's no big deal to hear about tsunamis and earthquakes and war and famine.

Can you imagine how your reaction to war would be different if your Uncle Kevin were on the front line?

I can't imagine a better spouse and team-mate than my wife, but I only dated about 20-25 girls between the ages of 12 and 18.

That is to say...while I was between those ages, proportionate with the girls ages respectively.

What if I dated 100? Are there 3 other equally amazing people out there? Hard to believe.

When did I stop meeting new friends?

I must have made new friends at some point...or maybe they are like rust or limescale and friends build up over time.

Maybe we stop making friends when we realize we don't like most of the friends we already have.

Why do I want more of these?  I have plenty.

Then things happen, life changes and friends move or die, or you move or die.

Then you have less friends and maybe you think

 "I need new friends, but how do you make friends when you don't even know how you ended up with the ones you already have?"

I wonder who has the most friends?

If the accretion theory made any sense, then old people would have the most friends, but old people usually suck and are scary and don't have lots of friends.

You know who has lots of friends?  Little kids, like the littler the better.  

They'll be friends with anybody, with everybody.

They like kids that look the same, kids that look weird, they like older kids and adults.

Shit, little kids even like old people.

I guess it's probably true that the happiest people on the planet are little kids.

As they get older something happens and they stop being friends.

Sure, you can blame parents or society, but its more than that.

Kids have distinct personalities, and they eventually clash, and they stop being kids and start becoming regular shitty humans, like us.

Do people who travel make more friends because they are exposed to more people?

I don't think that's true because most of the people I know who travel a ton are douches.

Something about experiencing other cultures makes them somehow wicked fucking smug and annoying.

I'm going to Ireland in October.

Propinquity - Wikipedia 

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You know we had a saying back in the park...

"You can take the kid out of the trailer, but you can't take the lead exposure out of them except without expensive chelation therapy"