Use this trick to become popular.
Well, popular might be the wrong word.
You all want to be wildly popular and to have a thousand friends, right? Just like me. I’m very popular.
Well, I say that. I don’t have many friends. At least, I’m not sure whether I do. I don’t ask them. I’m too afraid that they’ll say something dreadful to me. Something like, “Yeah. You’re great. Stick around.” If they ever said that I’d probably feel obliged to run away, so I never ask.
So I hope that I do, but I never know for sure.
Also, popular might be the wrong word. When I say “popular” what I really mean is allowed in public.
We all want friends, right? And there’s only two good ways to make friends that I know of. You can either feed them or flatter them. Those are your basic options. I’ll talk about flattering some other time. Let’s talk about feeding.
First of all, you have to suit your choices to your style, right? You can’t make friends by feeding people freshly hunted roast boar unless it goes with your personality. Boar is great if you’re a large, bearded, metrosexual sailor, with a voice made of sex and eyes the windswept blue of tomorrow’s promise. We can’t all be like that. Although if you are like that, you can just about feed me anything you’d like, honestly. I’d pretty much do anything you said, so long as I could just gape and admire. Unless you are like that you might want to choose more subtle snacks. Or more bombastic, if that’s your angle. Snacks that go with your personality. That’s the point.
I think I’m losing my thread.
What I’m saying is that you’ve got to suit your feeding strategy to go with your personality. As the sayings guy says, play to your strengths.
Just keep things under control. Food is powerful. You don’t want it getting out of hand. If emotions can undermine logic — which they can, as every rhetorician knows — then you have to be extra cautious with food, because chocolate undermines everything.
If you’re not careful with food then you might feed people and find you’ve accidentally caused them to knock you down and make love to you, even though they just met you. Make love to you or to the pot roast you fed them. Doesn’t matter. In their mind, overcome as it is with the chemistry of irrational affection instilled by the excitement of gravy and potatoes, it’s all the same. You — the pot roast — the aroma of cakes to come. All the same. In the wise words of a wise man, cake is the language of love.
Or war. But that’s another topic.
You have to be careful with this stuff.
So what I do to make friends is…
First off, I can be very lazy.
So what I do is I go to the supermarket, and I get one of those huge things of bite-sized brownies. Brand new. Unopened. This will become important. Take notes. Then I walk around public places inviting strangers to come try one. I make sure to show them that they’re brand new and unopened. Got to keep them comfortable. You can’t trust strangers these days, or that’s what the strangers keep telling me.
Then they’re there chewing the brownie bite. We’ve had a bit of a conversation, and I can see it in their eyes how the chocolate’s working its way into their pleasure centers, overcoming their biological mistrust of strangers and enabling them to build feelings of comfort and trust toward me. You can watch that happen in the eyes of people who eat chocolate. Unless they’re allergic, but the blush that rises in their cheeks does look similar.
I watch that warmth grow in their eyes. Then, just as they’re about to smile and get another brownie, I introduce the topic of shopping for marijuana in the area.
There’s a reason I don’t have many friends.
