"Friend is a four letter word" - Cake

I have been losing friends my entire life.

Morbid much? But still, I remember grade school being a series of lost friendships, failure upon failure to get anyone to actually hang out with me on a regular basis. Each attempt seemed all the more futile: Brent went to a different school, Marc moved away, Mike got cool, etc. High school shifted into high gear the many disappointments as friends became lame, got involved with creepy people, or just realized they were assholes all along.

Or, worse yet, became convinced friendship was the best route to the bed.

Which led to college, land of confused relationships, where things got better and things got worse. And I began to see the pattern all too clearly that friendship was doomed in our American culture. Moving onto graduate school and various workplaces, I have watched my friends become more and more isolated, gaining emotional malfunctions and a deep-seated need for things in the place of human interaction.

Hugs. Movie nights. Making food together or going for walks and talking.

Granted, not everyone. Me and many others have managed to keep building connections anew, mainly by keeping taking classes. WHich has its own disadvantages...

I hate this pattern. I have gotten trapped in it myself. And various studies have been published in recent years documenting its destructive power. As people lose friends, they become more dependant on their spouses and families for support, leading to greater stress on those roles, making it more difficult to stay a good lover or blood-relative. We rely too much on the bonds that are more difficult to be broken, straining and breaking them, all in the name of what?

Greater mobility. The ability to get up and run away from our lives. Only to follow ourselves, like the main characters of so many french new wave films, our problems chasing us in a way that our loved ones cannot.

To keep the job. To rise up a rung. To go to school because there is nowhere else to go. And our traditions die out. Even while we depend on our families and loved ones, we get farther and farther away from them, finding new friends, trying to create new communities instead of sustaining the old ones. And new friends continue to move farther away as we follow larger patterns: money, positions, cultural capital.

Move to the city to find yourself only to realize you were there all along and now you're too far in debt to run back home.

Too far along to even remember your name. That person who watched the sun set and gasped at the wonder of something so massive appearing so simple.

And the stories we tell don't help. TV and movies all tell us to go to the city, to start over, to leave those loser friends who care about us behind, to BECOME. By purchasing, by gaining the right capital, the right titles, the right this or that. CONSUME to find what's valuable. But we cannot buy friends. And once our families leave us, once our spouses drop our dead weight, we will each be alone, staring at computer screens, reaching out to the lonely ones just like us, who we once knew, who we once cared about.

Do we even care about them in that desperation?

So many stories tell us that we don't need friends. They always fade away in the rom coms to make way for the COUPLE to kiss in the sunset. They die at the hands of the monster to make way for the protagonists to win, the couple to again, embrace. They die in superhero movies, in thrillers, in all sorts of films, they move away, they act as wingmen, but they rarely ever get their dues. How many times to movies or books focus on a friendship, a companionship that is not romantic or based on moving closer to someone related by blood or marraige? Not often enough. Considering how important our friends are. Considering the power of a mate in the Australian sense (Oh, Flight of the Conchords!).

I don't know where I'm going with this. I meant to incorporate a ton of articles I've found, movies and books and stories I've read. But I'm so busy lately, drifting from the person i'd like to be. I feel friendships straining.

And then I remember.

(Love does not come hand in hand with despair; friendships are not meant to end so easily. They should not fragment like crystal, delicate with value. The bonds we build are mountain fortresses, ready to weather the harshest elements.)

I remember those moments where it all falls into place. The years melt away and all the bullshit and fuckall doesn't mean anything. Because we're hanging out. Because we've got time. We had time then and we'll have it again.

And when we do, maybe we'll talk about this. But I hope not. I hope we're too busy doing the important shit to think too concretely about abstraction. And I hope I get the time to put something together with more heft than this, with references and examples and videos. But i'm too busy trying to keep all my dishes spinning, all the planets of my person in the right orbit where they will not crash hastily into one another. At least for now.