Shoot, a lifetime of choices

There are some to be had...like to continue breathing, give coins to the solicitor (so lucky! when there's a choice, if you don't have the requisite amount, you can give what you are able to at the moment.)
Some other choices have to do with glamour vs. friendship for some people. Do you get dazzled by glamour, ever? Even for a smidgen of a second. Some people are decorated. It's profitable for others to decorate them with heroism, for this or that. They get coated with fondant, silver balls, sparkle dust, sugar crystals. Very nice, and almost everyone likes it. But usually it's more satisfying to have a friend then to take the arm of a walking cake.
Is a stranger ever like "the friend you never met yet."
(I got that idea from a story in I Thought My Father Was God about a woman who allowed her disabled daughter to be taken off to a frat party, by some guy coated in condiments, to the consternation of her 13 year old son. It worked out okay in the end for them. It was a disturbing story. At the end I saw she was from Lexington, Virginia. I went, oh, that makes sense. I attended a very few--like maybe two--in that very town. They were, more or less "safe." But so? So what if some of the soldiers were "nice?" Some of them weren't. And so? What's to be done?)