We’ve all been there. I entertained a purpose, certainly I’ll post something this morning…

Then, no matter the effort the Lenovo laptop would not link to the Starbucks wifi. My I-phone found the signal… And yes, I looked at the settings, and nothing was amiss. Having allowed such a circumstance to grow into a ball of frustration in the past, I decided to pivot and read an essay waiting for attention in the red folder.

The title of the 6.5 page piece composed by an anonymous substack writer is deceptively ordinary – An Existential Guide to: Making Friends. Almost terse, composed in ironic tone, friendship is posited as a rare, exotic sort of relationship between individuals, a condition that is possible, even if against the odds. I enjoyed the piece and wondered if the writer was not somehow channeling Nietzsche as he/she wrote.

Here are several choice segments:

You are a person, and people are creatures that rot if they are alone. To be human is to be an animal that needs witnesses. Someone has to see you eating cereal. Someone has to be there when you tell a bad joke. Otherwise you start twitching in public, you start growling in the supermarket. You start developing hobbies. This is the horror we call solitude.

…every self-help book tells you to “just be yourself.” But if you were yourself you wouldn’t need friends. “Yourself” is the exact person who sits alone at 2am scrolling through group photos of people who did not invite you. Yourself is unbearable. Yourself is the reason you need to invent a second self, and then a third, and send those versions out into the world, each of them a trial balloon, a mask, a ghoul, to see which one gets accepted. Friendship is basically the black market trade of masks. 

Go where hands do things. Bars are museums of speech; workshops are factories of friendship. Put your body where objects resist you. Clay classes, community gardens, picket lines, choir practice, soup kitchens, a Dungeons & Dragons table where the dungeon master is obviously power-mad: anywhere the third thing (soil, song, soup, dice) can stand between you and the other person like a kindly chaperone. You cannot stare each other into closeness; you can only arrive there while both of you are staring at something else and accidentally become co-conspirators.

Speak plainly when hurt; briefly when angry. A clean wound heals; a theatrical wound becomes a career. Name the specific sin, propose the small repair, and do not forward the minutes to the group chat. Apologies should be nouns (“I was cruel”), not weather reports (“things were said”).

DON’T BE A CASTAWAY. DO WHAT YOU CAN TO MAKE A FRIEND.