“The honey from my bees is simply not enough,” he would write to me in letters, and I felt for him but also hoped that he was not doing anything weird to the honey as he had given me a large jar of it for Christmas. So he set himself to finding a Mrs. Hamil. At first his strategy involved approaching lone female hikers up in the Sierra’s where he would nervously blurt out, “A NICE DAY FOR HIKING. A BETTER DAY FOR BEES.” And then would perform a trick where bees would come flying out of his sleeves, Mike having read that girls are impressed by magic. Needless to say this scared off more than a couple of women and accidentally sent one into anaphylactic shock whom Mike then chivalrously carried to a nearby ranger’s station.

After the ensuing legal troubles in which Mike was labeled “The Bee Mountain Maniac” he had even more trouble finding a girl. He tried everything, even dating online but found that very few women were interested in his cute e-mail signatures such as “bee mine” or “let’s get buzzed” or “you’ve stung me and now my heart is swollen with bee venom.” Eventually, he went crazy and filled the corpse of a grizzly bear with honey.

The thing you really have to keep in mind is that when you’re friends with someone you’re not allowed to actively sabotage them. The irony though is that friends make the most tempting targets since they’re constantly exposed, letting you into their houses where you can just start putting stuff in your pockets until all three of your jackets are bursting with nick-nacks and expensive items from the pantry. And then they say, “hey I thought you were only wearing three ties when you came in here? Isn’t that one mine?” at which point you should ask for their car keys. Wait, that was the old me. The me that lost all of my friends and is no longer invited to social functions with free shrimp and alcohol, the new me would have given back the tie and sent a card somewhat like the following

I have been told that you cannot exploit your friends because that would jeopardize the friendship but if your friend has something which makes you jealous, it is not acceptable to destroy the object even if it would save the friendship to do so. So how is that consistent? What I now know is that there are many rules when it comes to friendship and someone should really publish a book detailing them. I’m probably not qualified to write that book as long as I still have everyone’s social security cards in my junk drawer but maybe this is a start

Everything I have learned about friendship:
1) Just because your friend is an organ donor does not make you “first in line”
2) Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, which means you are allowed to call your friend anytime of night and ask for a car ride, however this does not apply to rides from your house to a separate location
3) Publicly ranking your birthday presents is considered to be in poor taste
4) Never title a facebook photo album, “fat people I’m friends with”
5) Friends do not like it when you try to get them to fight each other to the death and become even more resentful if you tell them about an analogous event between your pet scorpion and a spider and how entertaining that was at the time
6) It is surprisingly difficult to throw a bird into a pool
7) Never let a friend into your junk drawer