According to Facebook, I have 501 friends. (According to Levi, I have 501 jeans). According to Dunbar, I can only maintain real relationships with 100 -150 or so of them. If you want to know the honest to God truth, I think I have about 3, excluding my immediate family. A friend is somebody who comes whenever you call, according to me right now. According to Twitter, I have 150 followers, but I inflate. On none of these scales do I come remotely close to Tiger Woods.
I've always said of myself that I am unlike Tupac or any pop star who only wants and needs 17 dollars worth of respect, the price of a CD from a million people. Given the choice of 17 million dollars, I would rather have one million dollars worth of respect from 17 people. Whenever I attempt to be popular or market myself, something goes wrong with my motivation. One of my lifetime's favorite quotes went like this:
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.
I've always wanted to be the author of the noble, logical diagram. It is why I am a programmer. The integrity of the artifact - its order and beauty were always the aim. I have striven to create order out of chaos, but the ordered thing wasn't me, it was my creation. My perfection comes from my ability to perfect. So if I had the admiration of 17 millions, I want their dollar to be the price of admission into the place I built, I sure as hell don't want them to come ogle at me. I'm having steaks and bourbon with my 17 closest friends.
This is the context by which I am saying that Tiger Woods gets whatever is coming to him and deserves it. There is a point at which one capitalizes on one's friends, or followers and so is in their debt. That is the price of fame. Fame is sticky. Once remembered you cannot easily be forgotten even though once loved you can easily be hated.
'Fan' is short for fanatic. And so one must conform one's expectations of a fan base to a mass of fanatics. To gather people unto yourself who only care about your life because of the deficits in their own is to open one's house to friendly thieves. They come in full of compliment. They inevitably leave jealous, and if you live long enough, betrayed. And so they will take back what is rightfully theirs - all the furnishings financed by their overwrought attentions.
Cobb's Rule #24. Only be a fan of the dead.
Cobb's Rule #25. You ultimately get the audience you deserve.
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