Of Dying Friendships and Friendships That Need To Die

The dogs are back!

They're howling into the night as I write this, it's making me very happy. They're different dogs though so I need to be careful about feeding them. I don't want to lose a finger to goodwill. You typically only lose sweaters to those. 

There's something about writing in Times New Roman that's soooo nostalgic. It's only in the editor but I still enjoy it. I think I wrote all my college papers in Times New Roman, so this is bringing back all sorts of memories right now. This and the fact that it's five in the morning and I'm just sitting there typing my heart out and paper rocketing it into the giant black maw of the uncaring internet. 

I've been thinking about writing a book again...as soon as my writer's block is gone. Who am I kidding it's going to take years of just prepping myself up for this. I've always wanted to write scripts too but I doubt that any of it will see light of day even if I spend every waking moment writing stuff for Netflix. This writing project has been taking up a lot of thought though so maybe, just maybe, I'll go through with it. figured I'd start off with writing here again until the cogs in my big old noodle are properly greased. 

I missed the show today, I ended up sleeping it off, but I got a big day tomorrow. Lots of things happening. Interview in the morning, a women's summit in the afternoon and about five shows that I need to choose from in the evening, all in different sides of town. I haven't slept yet because I woke up at 7 pm and this is basically tea time for me. I'm wondering if I should stay awake or take a long dissociative nap until I have to move. I'll leave that for later.

How did I use to write again? oh yeah, I sat there and poured my heart out into the void. Let me try that one again. I've been stalling.

Friends.

Friends are really complicated. I was daydreaming earlier and I wanted to know what it would be like to have friends support you while you're public speaking and I literally felt uncomfortable with the idea of having supportive friends there. I'd rather writhe in pain and suffer for breaths for the longest first five minutes of my life than have a familiar face I can look at in a crowd of judgmental Simons who won't stop (s)cowling.

Oh yeah, I still daydream. I daydream all the time, when my mind is not completely blank, which also happens all the time. It's either a JD situation with puppies and eagles and red tractors in outer space or the deafening but dependable buzz of total white noise. There's something wrong with my brain, I want to give it soup and tell it to take a few days off from being a thinking organ, but I'm pretty sure what I just described is a variation of brain cancer. 

I did not just make a cancer joke. 

How do you make friends as an adult? Do adults even have friends? Everyone is so disconnected these days, the closest thing we get to an emotional breakthrough is an Instagram reaction. I'm craving animated, stimulating people who bake you cakes and take you dancing and boozing when you're down. I don't think these guys exist anymore though, everyone is super depressed.

It's the pandemic, I tell you, it broke something in the collective hive mind. The whole world pretty much lost its ladle by the second year. Man, I wish I recorded my own flights of fancy while the world was dying, but I was too busy trying to hold on to my own sanity and failing.

That's okay though, the best and the most interesting people out there are completely out of their minds. Every genius was cuckoo, and every artist is dysfunctional in more way than they let on. Now, all that's left for me to do is become an artist, or solve a mathematical equation dated in the 11th century.

I don't remember if I wrote about it yesterday or not but there's this language exchange thing happening in the evening that I'm thinking of going to, but I'm scared of being too awkward or running out of conversation starters, or faces. Maybe I'll go, if I'm still awake by that time. 

It's really shitty that every first conversation with an expat is the same. You talk about cultural differences, boast about how you managed to get over them and talk some more about how many people haven't to give yourself a sense of accomplishment and achieve immediate closeness that fouls time itself. But that applies to everyone else too, there are conversation templates that people follow because they're too scared to go off track.

I talked to a friend today that I hadn't talked to in 12 years. Can you believe this? I'm at an age where I can say that, haha! It was nice then he had to take another call and promised to call back then blew me off. I waited for three hours before I gave up and watched something. It reminded me of my old waiting rule...it's pretty straightforward. It goes like this: never wait for anyone or anything.

I've been doing this thing where I look at the positives of everything that happens as well as the negatives, it's been going well and making me feel brighter than usual. I'm betting another year of this and I'll be two inches happier than the next buster. 

Banana just rolled over and looked at me like a crazy person. I guess I'm typing too loudly. I want to get one of them clickety keyboards that gamers rave about so I can type and it sounds like a typewriter. I'll file it in my list of things to buy when I have an income again, next to a gym membership and Muay Thai classes.

Oh yeah, friendships.

Why can't we just exchange sandwiches like we used to back in the day? It's was much simpler back then. What you lack in general length, you gain in emotional fulfillment. Get me one depressed eleven year old!

I have this friend that's been hiding her pregnancy from me. We had a bit of a fight and she found out right after, then I found out by accident from another friend. We eventually made up and had a couple of chats before anyone said anything, I figured she had to be the one to say something first then I remembered who I'm talking to and brought it up. I then asked her why she didn't say anything, and she literally said: I just wanted to know what you would do. Like I'm some sort of Guinea pig she could poke around for hyper casual entertainment. 

This brings me back to a common topic on this blog - why do people enjoy being treated like shit? I was never into that sort of thing, immediate turn off, but people really dig it. Want to make a new friend? Show little interest and treat them like they don't matter, and they'll be all over you. I don't like that. I see it happen all the time, and it baffles me every time.

I don't want to dwell on this too much, because it's not worth it, but friendships are about as straightforward as a wet spaghetti. Try to logic your way out of it and someone will eventually say one spaghet is still a line, it's just taking the long way round. If they're a little smarter, they'll tell you the shortest distance between two dots is another dot if you can time travel. 

It's really hard to make friends when you're older, you want to hold on to your old friendships no matter how shitty they are because you know for a fact that by the time you meet someone else and get past their weird defenses, survive your first fight and earn your first secret, that's another three years out of your life that you're not getting back to make another friend. These things should really be scheduled, you know. You want to work on them as much as you work on that Spotify playlist you play at parties, time the drop and all that.

What do people want out of friendships anyway? I know what I want. I want stimulating company, understanding and gestures of love. It's pretty simple. And it's nowhere to be found within a thousand mile radius. Vapid conversations, mass sent memes and a lot of likes is what you get instead.

It's starting to get dark in this bitch. Peace out.

Of Howling Emptiness and Mud Slides of the Soul

I've never been on a mud slide. I've also never sat on a fountain. When I was young, I didn't have access to a green space. It was just my grandmother's house, and the occasional times I opened the door as a kid and walked out only to be escorted back home by the baker down the road. I don't know where I was going, even back then I had the urge to leave, run, escape. 

Open the door and just go.

But where do I go? 

Growing up makes you forget a lot of things, like how to make friends or how to get out of bed. There's a mud slide in my soul and my heart can't stop going on it, sliding down to my stomach and back up again. This weird pain, that traveling pain. What is that? Is it a bug? Is it a lovebug? It's cuffing season after all. I'm not into anyone though, and no one is into me.

Life is an expanse of endless vacuum that rides along space and time. 

The dogs left. No one fed them, and I didn't feed them enough. I hadn't seen them in a few months when I noticed the howling I'd come to depend on was no longer there. I miss them most during the night, when that thing in my chest starts beating at me to do something, anything!

Sometimes, it really does feel like my heart is beating out of my chest, or that it's trying to leave my chest in any case. I bet it has nowhere to go either. It's mine after all, how could it want something that I don't know about?

But it does. It does want something and I have no idea what that thing is. I've been out of a job for nearly a year now and that kind of space leaves room for unidentified objects to fester. It's not for lack of looking too. Lack of luck, though, yes, I believe. I've never been lucky. It runs in the family.

I don't want to sit here and lick my wounds. It's been ages since I logged on to write, but it's all the words that are swirling in my head right about now. I'm just dumping them here to see what forms. Maybe I can make sense of it regurgitated.

It's been rough, but I've been finding ways to make things beautiful, like I always do. It's something inside me, a generator, maybe that's what's whirring off tune. I'm listening to this LoFi Harry Potter mix and it's making me feel like Christmas. It's not even Halloween yet. Not that either matter without company, or do they?

Company.

Company.

I don't enjoy most of the company I get these days, and it's few and far in between. I guess the word for it is loneliness. I've been lonely lately, but people aren't filling it. Not enough conversation, not enough stimulation. I had a crowd a long time ago but they're all gone to their own places in the world, tangible and ethereal. 

Making friends when you're 30 is like waiting to fall in a ditch, only it's the 21st century and there aren't any of those anymore. I'm pretty sure I'm getting the worst of it because it's in my mind. If I was one of those "age is just a number" crowds I wouldn't be suffering as much. Or maybe everyone is suffering and no one is saying out loud. People tend to do that in large numbers and it's just a terrible idea. They also tend to do the opposite in large numbers and it's an equally terrible idea. There's no way out, really.

I'm having a bit of slump, just in case that wasn't clear by now. I feel discouraged most of the time, it feels like everything is so predictable. I was on a yacht with some friends last week and there were so many people I could talk to, but instead I chose to sit there and watch the water. It felt like the more dependable thing to do. The water is a memory I can look back on. The conversations, not so much. A few years of friendship and then it's gone, and I'm left here starting over and over and over again.

It's Groundhog's day, every day is more of the same.

I'll pick this up another time when I have brighter metaphors in me. So long, internet.