Some people say that for every person, there’s an ideal mate. I think for every person there are a number of ideal mates. And they’re all different. After all, there are a lot of people on this planet. I heard sometime in the ‘70s that half the people who had ever existed were alive. Doubt has been cast upon that factoid since then, but there’s no doubt there are more people today than ever, and that makes for more ideal mates, although attempting to set oneself up with a number of ideal mates simultaneously does not sound like any kind of ideal situation, although with the polyamory boom who knows?
But how many people can you be really close to? In the ‘90s, a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar suggested the number was determined by neocortex size and that the number was about 150. That turns out to be about the number of people in a Neolithic farming village, as well as the number of Roman soldiers in a legion, and the number of people in a military company from the 16th Century on. The Gore-Tex Company found that factories with more than 150 people didn’t work together as well as those around 150, so they set up in a number of 150-person factories. I’ve read that when a Neolithic village reached the 150-person point, a new village would split off, and that the military discovered 150 was about the number of people who could all be aware of each other and, consequently, have personal cohesion.
I’ve been thinking about each of our basic 150 people. Just as there is the possibility of an ideal mate for everyone, what about the possibility of a perfect 150. What to call them?
Kurt Vonnegut used the word “karass” to describe a group of people who, let’s say, belonged together. I just googled to check, and one definition of a karass is “A network of people that unknown to them, are somehow affiliated or linked, specifically to fulfill the will of God.” In Steven King’s Dark Tower series, the close-knit protagonist group is called a “ka-tet”. In Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, a science-fiction book taking place in the mid 21st Century, people are bonded in “krewes” (a term taken from groups parading in Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans). Sterling’s krewes are both economically and socially based. I especially liked that every krewe had a stylist. Theodore Sturgeon’s masterpiece, More Than Human, postulated the next evolutionary step was Homo Gestalt, a sort of deep five-person collaboration.
Some people believe that we have each experienced past lives, and that we are bonded with key people throughout the centuries. Antonia and I once went to a woman who claimed to be cognizant of other people’s past lives. She said that Antonia and I had been lovers in ancient Egypt, and that we had both been magicians. She said I practiced male magic and Antonia practiced female magic, the combining of which was forbidden. She said in this particular past life, we attempted to combine the two. She didn’t say if we ever pulled it off.
I am very dubious of the concept of past lives, but I heard that Neil Cassady, of On The Road and Merry Prankster Further bus fame––he was Jack Kerouac’s driver in the book and Ken Kesey’s on the bus––was told by two separate past-life readers that he was once a general in the Babylonian army. I’ve been meaning to see a couple past life readers to see if there was any kind of similarities in what I was told. Considering the number of people around, it would stand to reason that a number of souls would be first-timers. A real past-life reader, one would think, would sense a newbie soul.
Anyway, in my life, I’ve certainly met the right people to meet at the right time. The fact that Steve Weber, Robin Remaily and Michael Hurley all met in 11th grade in 1959 in Bucks County, PA at the same time I moved to New York seems a very odd and unlikely coincidence. But then, there’s the idea that god works through other people, and maybe it’s god’s plan for us to find the right people to be with, sort of like the ideal-mate idea writ larger. What if we all really do have ideal people to be with? Wouldn’t it make sense to try and find them?
I do this when I look for people to play music with. Come to think of it, that explains why I would keep adding people to my/our group, despite how unwieldy it could become. I finally resolve this by having an album be a sort of a review, featuring all those different people. This also allows me to be a sideman sometimes. I love that.
For years, there were always one or more musicians I was playing with that had varying degrees of character defects. I took that as a given. The joke a few decades back was every group has a Mike Love and/or a Courtney Love. Then, a little over ten years ago, something unexpected happened. At the time, I was playing with around eight people, one of who was a great player but had a tender ego and anger management problems. He also had a characteristic I’ve noticed often goes along with anger management problems, which was that he constantly repeated stories about how he was doing all these wonderful things for someone, and they kept doing terrible things to him. Finally, he sent me this letter about all the great things he was doing for me, and all the terrible things I had done to him, announcing that he was going to take “a sabbatical” for a year, after which I could ask if he wanted to play with me again, and he’d see how he felt.
Hmmm. I noticed that he was the only person I was playing with that I had any problems with. Everyone else was exemplary––talented, punctual, fun to talk to and hang with when not playing music, willing to try anything, willing to listen to the ideas of others and make excellent suggestions––and didn’t have any alcohol or substance abuse problems. Holy shit, I thought. All these people in the band––except this guy––are totally great! I’ve never been in a band where all the people were totally great! I never even considered that it would be possible to be in a band where everyone was totally great! Or that it was possible not to have to put up with anyone’s shit in a band! Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!
Unless you’re choosing to withdraw from society, you’re going to have some people like him in your life. That tends to start with family, a realm where there is no choice involved and no way to get away, beyond saying, “I’ll never speak to you again!” Decades ago, we started having a post-Thanksgiving Saturday party to make up for the often traumatic, family Thanksgivings friends were having. Yes, family is a given you have to deal with, unless you choose not to. But what about friends? Why not have the best ones you can? Why, in fact, should you have any jerks in your life at all? Or assholes?
As I’ve mentioned before, perhaps the thing about New York that most impressed me most the first year I spent here was that I met over a dozen people who I could say anything to, and it would be all right, and they could say anything to me, and that would be all right, too. Up to that point, I didn’t think there were a dozen people in the world about which that was true. Today, on the other hand, I could probably find over a dozen people of which that was true in any town with more than, what? Ten thousand? Fifty? Less? Depends like mad, I suppose.
This jerk/asshole avoidance strikes me, for starters, as being a reasonable model for finding friends. Let’s start with best friends. How many of those can one have? I did what I always do when questions like that come begging: I ask Ms. Google. One of my go-to phrases had been “Ms. Google, she know”, but recently Ms. Google has occasionally been full of shit.
But then again, Ms. Google brought me an excellent article by Maria Konnikova, entitled “The Limits of Friendship”, from the October 2014 issue of The New Yorker. She acknowledges the Dunbar number of 150 and found, from her own research, that most socially-involved people have about 100 to around 200 friends. New to me, her article also brought up “The Rule of Three”, which described with uncanny near precision how the number decreases and grows. Divide by three, you get 50 close friends, all of who one might invite to a dinner party. Not intimates, but people you see fairly often. Divide by three again, you get 15, people you can confide in and share sympathy with. The number five is the most intimate Dunbar number, your closest friends, usually including family members and best friends. Going the opposite direction, you have five hundred acquaintances and, that, times three is fifteen hundred. Triple that, and you hit the wall, with about 5000 people whose name and face you can maybe put together.
By the way, Dunbar researched how many Christmas cards people sent in the UK: average, 150.
The advent of social media might change all this, but the jury will be out until the generation that has known social media all their lives has grown up, which they’ve been doing for some time now. Hey! The jury should be coming in! So far, it looks like despite the possibility of having 5000 “friends”––and why is that the Facebook limit?––our social capital, the time we have for interactions, remains fixed.
I went on Facebook in January of 2010, out of curiosity. Besides the obvious of finding old acquaintances, a number of surprising things happened, which led to even more amazing surprises. My guideline then was, sure, you can be my friend, maybe I can sell you a CD or something.
So, when a woman from Knoxville wanted to friend me, I said sure. She asked if I had ever played there and I said, “no”. She wrote back, “You should”, and I asked her if she could line something up, and she did. She put me up with her family (I much prefer staying with fans when on the road instead of hotels), and I showed her son some banjo stuff. It turned out she sold and repaired violins, and I got a Chinese copy of a baroque bow from her. It was slightly shorter than the ones today, and the tip had an exaggerated point. It looked like an elf bow. But it needed a re-hairing. She suggested I do that in Chinatown, where it was cheaper, but I asked a fellow fiddler in New York and he recommended a place near Carnegie Hall.
The woman there asked if I would like to wait while she did the job, and I said, “Sure.” It was a high-end store, and I mentioned I had been to Fred Oster’s shop, where he let me play a $250K violin and a $750K one––the “cheaper” one had a haunting, mysterious sound, which I found much more attractive than the “expensive” one, which was louder, a prime desirable attribute for a classical violin. “That’s just like here”, she said. “We have an Amati and a Stradivarius, and the Amati sounds much better. Would you like to try them out while you’re waiting?” I almost fell on the floor. I had long dreamed to play a Strad, but thought that was as unlikely as me taking a trip around the world. The Amati cost around one million, the Strad was around six million. The Amati by far blew the Strad away. But the Strad had the bigger name.
I recently read an article that attempted to determine how first-rate contemporary violins are compared to the one built by the old masters in 18th-century Cremona, Italy. They had blindfolded violinists play violins they could not identify listened to by violin experts who were in another room. A true blind test. By and large, the modern ones were comparable to the 18th-century ones, which were mostly the best by a small margin, except for the Stradivarius, which was one of the lowest-rated of all. But good lord, I go on Facebook out of curiosity and to maybe sell CDs, and I get to play two primo 18th-century violins. Beyond worth the price of admission.
Something similar happened in 2014. A Facebook “friend” from St. Petersburg, Russia, invited me to play in a music festival there, all expenses paid and $1000. I had never dreamed it would be possible to see Russia. All because I’m a Facebook whore who will do it, be friends, with anybody, although I’m getting too close to 5000 to let everyone who wants to be a “friend” be one. But still, my site isn’t closed, so you don’t have to be a “friend” to go there.
I wrote all this about four years ago. I went on after this, but it got wastepaperbasketed. So, to conclude, listen to The Roche’s song, “Weeded Out”, as in what one should do with toxic people. I just read about the world’s oldest man. His advice was simple: don’t have anything to do with toxic people. And last week I read about a study of 100-year-olds, trying to determine what they had in common, which turned out to be that they all had a much higher number of close friends than most people.
How weird is it that through the justifiably-much-maligned Facebook I have found two of my closest friends. File that under God’s Mysterious Ways. Around 2006, I noticed that the people I was playing with were in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. I loved the fact that our perspectives covered seven decades. Today, everyone I’m playing with is in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. We could use someone in their 20s. 
The Holy Modal Rounders opened for the Grateful Dead at the Café Au Go Go on Bleeker Street in the Village in 1970. Back then you could still see almost all the biggest bands in very small venues. I got this strange singular vibe from the Grateful Dead. I had never seen a group of people who looked more like they belonged together than they did. Thinking about it now, the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who looked that way, too, but I had never seen them up close. Maybe not so much the Stones at the time, because they were all off on Brian Jones. Antonia and I met the GTOs about then. The GTOs (Girls Together Only or Girls Together Outrageously, they explained in the notes of their sole, Zappa-produced, album) were an UR-Groupie singing group who had been sort of put together by Frank Zappa around 1968. The GTOs were very down on the Stones because “they were all beating Brian up.” They brought brownies they had baked when they visited. Really good ones.
I’ve found most of my close, non-family, relationships have been through music. I’ve met my bands, except for a few recently added members, in the aughties and tens and I hope our relationships last as long as I, or they, do. The last two acquaintances (also musicians) who had annoying character flaws have been gone form my life for over a decade. Both had anger management issues and, interestingly, both would go on and on about all the wonderful things they did for people and all the awful things people did to them.
So, to conclude, let’s play Let’s Pretend. Let’s pretend

That God gives an Actual Fuck.
That God has a very specific plan for each of us.
That following that path will lead us to God.
That God’s plan is for us to find our karass.
That God’s plan, more specifically, is for us to find an evolved and enlightened form of our karass, in which all the people involved are conscientiously aware of their connection.
That our most important job as humans is find these people.

Anyway, as you know, I’ve been praying my ass off for over 35 years, crudely insisting: “Show me my goddamn path, for crissake!”, and I think He/She/It has finally delivered. So, I’m adding a new last line to my daily prayers:

God, please help us find the people You know we need.

And what if God really sends all those people to everyone and everyone found them all?

Heaven on Earth.