flâneur

An Existential Guide to: Making Friends

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The first thing you need to know is that friendship is not natural. If you were natural you would be a moss. Moss doesn’t have friends. Moss just spreads, cold and damp and indifferent, and sometimes another moss spreads nearby, and together they make a bog, and then the bog swallows a horse. But you, unfortunately, are not a moss. 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. But making friends - have you tried it? Horrible stuff. It’s like applying for a job, except the application process is permanent and the job doesn’t exist. “So what do you do?” you ask. “What music do you like?” you say. All this hideous bureaucracy of the self, filling in forms with little fragments of p

The first thing you need to know is that friendship is not natural. If you were natural you would be a moss. Moss doesn’t have friends. Moss just spreads, cold and damp and indifferent, and sometimes another moss spreads nearby, and together they make a bog, and then the bog swallows a horse. But you, unfortunately, are not a moss. 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…

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