The Friendship Experiment

Is it possible to repeat the past?

(Forgive me if I stray from my usual schtick this week. A man gets tired writing about riboflavin and such every week.)

I’m about to participate in a little temporal/sociological/psychological experiment. However, unlike most experiments, this one isn’t designed to reveal any great, hitherto unknown scientific findings. Instead, it’s for personal reasons, personal satisfaction, really.

In short, I want to see if I can resurrect or rekindle the past. In “The Great Gatsby,” Nick Carroway told Gatsby that he can’t repeat the past, but Gatsby replied, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”

I’m hoping he’s right. Maybe I can’t. But I need to try.

Be aware that I’m not trying to hook up with some version of Daisy Buchanan from high school or college. Instead, I want to see if I can recreate the friendship I had with two guys I’ve known longer than anybody, two guys I’d met in Michigan during Junior High and continued to hang around with through college. Back then, a good part of my world revolved around them.

But then I moved away. I just knew I couldn’t live my entire life in Michigan, so I caught a ride to Oklahoma and then hopped on a bus to Albuquerque to live with my brother.

Unfortunately, because of laziness or the type of emotional lethargy common to a lot of men, I didn’t bother to keep in touch with them. I described this emotional lethargy in a previous article:

“..and then I moved away. I didn’t shun them; no reason to. I just left with little ceremony or sentimentality.

“And thus began a lifetime of repeat offenses. I continued to make new friends wherever I lived, but I’d soon get the wander lust again and I’d have to start all over, friend-wise. New Mexico to San Diego. San Diego to Denver. Denver to La Jolla. And most recently, La Jolla back to New Mexico.

“The words, ‘What the fuck, bro?’ uttered by dozens of puzzled and possibly emotionally wounded ex-friends still echo in the canyons that lie between those states.

“I could have maintained contact and I sometimes sorta’ did with a few friends, albeit in an anemic way (via emails and the occasional text), but for whatever reason, I largely let those ‘paths to the houses of friends’ get choked off by lots of invasive weeds.

“Which brings me to today, where I exist in a sparsely populated friend landscape.”

And lo, after all these years, this sparsely populated friend landscape is finally been causing me some remorse. Maybe I’ve got a case of Joni Mitchell-itis:

Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?

Only instead of a big yellow taxi taking away my old man, I was the one who hopped into the taxi.

And statistics and surveys prove that I’m hardly alone. Men suck at friendship. Oh, you may have some “friends,” but they’re probably your wife’s friends’ husbands. Or they’re the parents of the booger-eating kids who play on your kid’s soccer team. You’ve probably heard these stats or stats like them before, but a 2024 study that was conducted by the Survey Center on American Life found that 17% of men have zero friends (and I think that figure is way low), a five-fold increase since 1990.

The question you might ask is this: “What the fuck is so special about having friends? Read a book or watch TV like the rest of us.”

Well, despite having a great wife, I spend long, uninterrupted stints of time in my head and it’s proven to be a lonely place. And never mind all those reports about how having a good social circle is strongly associated with living longer, I just miss having good friends. I miss having a connection with people.

The friends I left behind in La Jolla have largely moved on from me. I might as well be a corpse who, on occasion (I hope), they reminisce about… “Remember the time that son-of-a-bitch…”.

Here in New Mexico, I have one friend I’ve known for 30-some-odd years, but we’ve taken different evolutionary paths since we first met. I honestly believe he could pretty much fulfill his needs for companionship through just about any warm body. One of his friends has Alzheimer’s. He can’t remember a thing that happened more than 20 minutes ago -- has to keep handwritten notes like Guy Pearce in “Memento.”

My friend, or anyone, could literally tell the guy the same story over and over again, even confess to some horrific sins, no matter what (I like to fuck sheep?), and the guy would instantly forget about it. Me? I couldn’t handle it. I’d get no satisfaction. If I liked to fuck sheep, I’d want to engage in ever deepening conversations about why it’s so appealing to me.

It’s like the time I connected with this girl at a bar a decade or so ago. We had a terrific conversation. We revealed truths about ourselves and we discovered new truths about ourselves, only when I saw her the next day, she didn’t remember any of it. Apparently, she was a lot drunker than I thought. Talk about deflating. I could almost feel the satisfaction hissing out of my body. If I hadn’t been carrying a gym bag as ballast, I’d have floated off into the ether.

Anyhow, aside from my indiscriminating friend, I have several local acquaintances. I know a semi-retired doctor who I break bread with occasionally, but we’ve yet to truly traverse the friendship/buddyship chasm and our conversations are largely restricted to medicine and politics.

I also have embryonic friendships with a few people who work at my coffee shop/hangout, but ultimately, I don’ know how tenable these friendships might be. One guy, a chef, is in his late thirties and he shares my interests in guy stuff -- guy movies, guy TV shows, Instagram babes, and scathing political memes.

Another guy, a barista, is 30 and we share a love of literature, poetry, and “The Talking Heads.” The third is another barista, this one female and 22 years old, whose face is festooned with metal piercings and elaborate eyeliners and has jet black hair with contrasting blond bangs. I don’t know if she’s goth or emo or a blend, but she’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.

She brings me souvenirs from her trips with her family, texts me photos, and she routinely throws a free muffin my way. I’m not sure exactly what this Doc Martin wearing woman and I share, but there’s some innate joy in having a Platonic relationship with someone so chronologically new.

You see the problem? I’m not 22, 30, or 37. I could easily be the father of any one of them. Hell, I could be the grandfather of the 22-year-old. The age difference doesn’t bother me so much because, frankly, I’m more attuned to their wavelengths than I am to most of the white, golf-worshipping alte kockers (look it up) I know, but I have no idea if they can get past that chronological gap.

But that’s the extent of my circle – broken in many spots as it is – of current friends.

Hence the experiment I alluded to in the opening paragraphs. It’s my version of “Gatsby” or “The Big Chill,” the 1983 Lawrence Kasdan movie where a group of baby boomers who attended the University of Michigan reunite years later after one of their group commits suicide.

Like the movie, I’m going to reunite with my old friends and see what happens. We’ve rented a large cabin on the Leelanau peninsula that overlooks the Grand Traverse Bay. (If the front of your hand represents Michigan, it’s where Lake Michigan infiltrates a break in the land between the tips of the pinkie finger and the ring finger.) I doubt if there’ll be a Mary Kay Place there who wants me to impregnate her, but that’s not what I’m looking for. My goal is a connection through good conversation.

I imagine the banter will come easy enough but I can only take so much banter. Even intellectual discussions have their limitations; as much as I crave such conversations, they ultimately prove to be unsatisfying.

So here’s my opportunity to not only recreate the past, but to improve upon it.

What I want is meaningful conversation, two or three people talking about what matters to them -- what brings them joy, what brings them pain. You know, the good stuff, the gooey cheese that’s hidden away in the center of the giant meatball. That way, I hopefully learn something important about them and in the process learn something important about myself.

I want to sit with them on a park bench watching some ducks and if need be, pull out the Robin Williams speech to Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting”:

“I can’t learn anything from you that I can’t read in some fucking book. Unless you want to talk about who you are, then I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that, do you Sport? You’re too terrified of what you might say.”

French philosopher Simone Weil thought the most important question you could ask someone is “What are you going through?” That question, when asked with genuine concern and a willingness to actually listen, not only takes you to a place ordinary friendships rarely ascend to, but Weil also saw it as crucial for personal growth and ethical development – a twofer if there ever was one.

That’s the kind of shit I want to get into. And maybe they’ll struggle to answer that kind of stuff. I’ve spent years studying mental and emotional development and how to build strong relationships (which is kind of ironic, given that I haven’t found anyone with which to build such relationships), but the bulk of men, lacking such specific training, just ain’t good dance partners. i.e., they don’t know how to reciprocate.

Again, as I said in a previous article:

“The salient point here is that you can’t forge strong or satisfying relationships without some goddam intellectual intimacy or vulnerability. It’s not necessarily that men don’t want to talk about things, it’s just that they feel squirrely talking to men about touchy-feely stuff. As such, they usually seek emotional support from their beleaguered wives who, after a point, wish that the hamster they married would find a welcoming ear somewhere else.”

So I beat on, boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the friendship past. Wish me luck with my experiment.

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