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This may sound a bit like a rant, but to me it is more like an elegy for dear friends I have lost among the living. I am referring to attrition by virtue of selfishness.

We are free to be as selfish as we like. Our friends will not pursue us very far into our selfishness. After a while they will just let us be… selfish. The problem with aggressively selfish souls is that they miss a lot, and frequently we miss them as friends.

This is most apparent to me in the nearly famous. I have a little bit of Forrest Gump in me in that I seem to verge on the fringe of famous people, what we call the "Almost Famous," like the movie of the same name.

These near-famous people, more often than not, have lost their receivers and are now all transmitters. They can broadcast, but they no longer receive. They can talk, but no longer enjoy listening. Obviously I can't have a real conversation with them because there are not two people there, only the transmitter. I am, de facto, left out of their conversations, only they don't even know it. They talk on and seem to be unaware that they have tuned out the person they are talking to. They are talking just to hear themselves talk. Probably we all do this a bit.

I could give them some crap (because I care for them), but as pointed out, they would not even hear it, so why bother. I give them my blessings and send them on their way, wrapped in the intrigue of their own selfishness. Again: what a waste of a good friend.

I am all for selfishness, but mostly for learning what the self is and seeing through it to, well, something other than the self. If not known, the self is wickedly recursive.

As mentioned, I have friends out there that are unapproachable due to their selfishness and don't even know it. It is they who close the door, and I am not one to force it open. Sometimes I see this as sad, but at other times I see that this is just life. My old friend is wrapped in a cocoon of his or her own making, lost in infinite self-reference that precludes any access. I can but send them my best wishes and wave them on in their journey of getting to know their self. They are absorbed in a conversation with no none other than themselves and don't need people like me interfering.

Those of us who know ourselves even a little know there is not much about the self that we don't already know because we created it and have somehow forgotten our own creation. It is not that we will learn anything new. If our self is somehow special, it is because we declared it so and have fallen to worshiping our own image. At some level this has to be funny, right?

For my own part, I like someone with a bright, fascinating, and shining self, provided that it is transparent, meaning I can see them through it, and they me!

For those out there with self-cataracts, I regret that you cannot see the rest of us and that science does not yet have laser surgery for self-obscurations. Self-attachment is the original Catch-22. It is almost liek some kind of incest.

[Photo I just took of some juvenile Echinacea in my yard.]