I Don't Have Many Friends Anymore

“Now, let me ask you this: have you thought about driving across the country?” He asked me after I told him I couldn’t fly across the country to attend his wedding. I was completely heartbroken by this question from my former best friend. It was the summer of 2020 when there was no vaccine. Lily was five months pregnant and the CDC kept shifting their recommendations on what was safe for pregnant women. He was doubling down. He went into a spiel, which he must have given like 15 times with other folks by this point, about how they were gonna space the tables out at the party, have masks, and a lot of hand sanitizer. He assured me he talked to his doctor about it. I wasn’t on this call to be convinced though; I was there to let him know that it wasn’t safe to come. That call effectively ended our relationship. I even blocked him from lurking on my social media. I don’t take kindly to people trying to put my family in harms way.

Honestly, I wish the pandemic never happened and I coulda been one of the 18 best men he had in his wedding. For real, that was another huge slap in the face to learn that my best friend had so many other best friends during his wedding planning process. Like it’s wild. The dude, who I held when he was crying at his uncle’s funeral, apparently had like 17 other friendships just like it. It woulda been cool to meet the other best friends and see how gooda friends they were with my former best friend. But no, the virus took that pedestrian form of outrage away from me and just straight up took away my best friend.

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Friendships can die in pretty startling ways I have learned. It turns out the prospect of death via global plague can really show you who is in alignment with your own values. And no, I don’t need to keep people around, no matter our history, if they are trying to create a super spreader event to celebrate their love. Remember that crazy wildfire caused by a gender reveal party that killed a bunch of people? Same thing. That’s the heartbreaking truth of growing beyond the people you grew up with. The pandemic just amplifies all those pedestrian differences you used to overlook and turns them into glaring gulfs that cannot be crossed. 

I’m still mourning that loss. It was the last of friendships from high school to dissolve. It’s a testament to the strength of the relationship that we made it this long. But, as with most relationships, time and space does sever the bond. We grew in different directions into two men with very different views and values. It’s the worst to lose your best friend. 10/10 would not recommend it. You still like all the same things you used to share with them, but just enjoy it on your own now. There is a melancholic joy to those things now, memories of when I still had a best friend. But, as we know well dear reader, all things do die eventually and we are left with the grief and mourning.

I quipped to my therapist recently, “every white dude has let me down,” referencing the multitude of failed father figures and the loss of my best friends from high school. I don’t know how many times I have written that sentence in this project. Do I sound like a broken record? I just won’t settle for less. I saw my mom broken by a lesser man. My father, the guy who would walk 5 feet behind us in the mall, didn’t deserve her, doesn’t deserve me. She willed me to be the person I am today, so I bristle at the man babies I see out and about. They remind me of the failed man baby who would leave post it note to-do lists for my mom. I stopped the generational bullshit and embraced being an equal partner and someone who wasn’t a shit bag. Easy stuff that a lot of dudes have a hard time doing.  I won’t just follow along with a buncha idiot chads to have friends. I would rather just stay in my hermitage with my records, plant friends, and wool.

Alas, its not all perseverance and wisdom. I am mostly just in the midst of the deep gloom of the death of the friendship, even some 3 years on. With my best friend gone, I feel like I am back in that space with no male IRL friends. It’s kinda a shitty place honestly. Like it is truly hard to make friends as you get older. Though I may seem gregarious, my anxiety and general non-interest in people who don’t share my own niche interests makes it super difficult to build friendships. So, I have just surrounding myself with Lily, Juniper, and all my witch friends. I feel safe in my home and with my friends. Those people haven’t let me down, which is really what I need right now. I just need a bit of stability to steady myself against the loss. I am really tired of being letting down by people that don’t inhabit the same reality as me or share my same values. So, it’s nice to have people in my life (mostly femme or non-binary identifying folx), that I share a common conception of the world we live in and the values we want to live by. I guess I’m lucky that gender traitors like me are still allowed in those circles. 

I suppose this is what it means to inhabit my own hedge of gender expression, like we all do whether we want to express it or not. It has been painfully obvious to me for a long time that I just don’t fit into traditionally masculine spaces. From the minute I refused to be a homophobic, mysoginistic idiot and became a fiber crafting magi, I was thrown out the chad club and my members club jacket burned in effigy. So, you will have to excuse me while I just renounce any interest in any of those molds anymore. The last bit of that died away with me when I left tennis behind. Rather, I would like to dispense with the molds themselves all together. I just want to be outside this bullshit system of gender socialization that has imprisoned so many men in this toxic, dumb-headed man-baby syndrome. Let me reiterate: I just want to unzip this gender-coded meat sack that makes me discernible, understandable to society, hang it up somewhere, and walk around as a mass of sinewy tendons, oozing blood, and bones.

Honestly, this is what experiencing wave after wave of personal, societal, and relationship death does to a person. You sorta get this distance from these masks or skin suits (i.e., the social constructions we riff off of when performing our gender, race, sexuality, religion, class) that we put on everyday. It gets even wackier when you purposefully put those old skin suits in vats of acid to never be used again. That’s what I did with me ole chad mask when I lost my members club jacket. I just let it melt away like a cheap wax figurine and die a horrible, unremarkable death. Now, I look back and all that’s left are little flickers of memories in a pool of opaque wax. You can’t see much any more in that wax; that version of me is so far away in an alternate dimension that I can no longer reach. I took different branches on the decision tree to become the wierdo I am today. 

Ok, since chad Jim (I jokingly refer to myself as Jim in the third person for my own chuckles) is just a buncha wax in an alternate dimension, I have had to find new ways to move my meat sack, because I still really enjoy exerting myself. I have started gardening this year at a record early date. Usually, I wait until it’s like 90 and an incinerator outside, because I have used the spring to attempt to play competitive old man tennis. This year, since I canceled my tennis membership to the local club, I got all sorts of spare body-movin’, body-movin’ - we be body movin’ time for the garden. Glob, it is so much more pleasant to clean plant beds when it’s 65-70 degrees. I’m just proud of myself I guess. For the longest time, I used tennis as a crutch to keep my OCD manageable.  Now that I have real mental health tools and set boundaries with my dad, I can just build up my medicinal, food, divination, and dye garden a little bit more each year. That’s a reality that I could not even fathom would be possible 5 or 6 years ago. You gotta die a little bit each day to make way for these new expansive, skillful versions of yourself to come through. 

Its taken me so long to get here. I used to struggle with this simple statement from Wm. S. Coperthwaite, a writer in the lineage of American transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, in regards to sports:

For a long time, this was almost impossible for me to truly live up to this statements radical demand, because I needed tennis to keep my overactive OCD mind busy. I needed to get all caught up in the drama of winning and losing so as to not lose myself in labrinythe of my own mind. With exposure therapy, I truly touched my own deepest personal hells and found deliverance in those flames. I found a way to give up sport and just use my energy to wheel Juniper around, run errands, and tend to my garden. Well, it was also sorta forced, because my legs gave out on me after decades of running them into the ground. But the reasons for the shift are immaterial, I did the work, got off the literal hamster wheel, and “got back to the garden.”

:knocks at your door: “hello, do you have a moment for me to tell you that Kentucky blue grass is the bane of my existence.” Yeah, ok, I hate grass. Like, the future I want to live into over the next five years is ripping all my grass out and just having all plant beds thriving. I just want to have even more plant friends to nuzzle. I want to know how to mix my plants in the beds appropriately to ensure the longevity of the soil. I would really like a Chamisa bush also. I would literally just sit with that bush in the early evening light and talk to it like an old friend. That’s the dream, even though Chamisa is considered invasive here. We are both virgos that bloom in September, so we just the best of odd kin. 

The more immediate work, which I have discussed in past weeks, is working with my nettle seedlings. I am a novice at seed germination. I don’t really seek out any guides either. I am not really interested in being an expert or master in this regard either. I enjoy reveling in the mystery of the dirt, water, sun, and air. Everyday, I excitedly go to my little peet moss beds to see how they have progressed. Its a devotional offering to the great cycles that we are all immersed in. Its no different than replacing the water and rose water on my altars and acknowledging sacred death, my goddesses, and my mom each day. I just show up to the discipline of that work and observe things as I go along. The big update this past week was the seeds germinated and I am working with the little sprouts as best I can. Tending to those little sprouts is the ultimate test of gentleness. I most water them with the utmost care to ensure their safety in their newborn phase. It really feels the same way it was with Juniper as a newborn. I have already failed in this regard, so I show up everyday trying to be more gentle to them than the day before.

Welp, that’s all I got for now, I gotta get out into the garden. Enjoy this stirring Boards of Canada song as a way to sonically “Reach for the Dead” in your own life:

Until next time, dear reader,

James

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