🚨 Next Thursday! Join me and Amos Kennedy Jr! 🚨

We will discuss my new book and have shenanigans. It’s free!

This week’s question comes to us anonymously:

Looking around at [gestures] everything, it feels like we’ve all put maintaining friendships on the backburner. This is making me lonely and probably makes other people lonely too. How can we fix this?

TL;DR: Get a dog.

Ok, it may be a little bit more complicated than that. But also, get a dog. Dogs force you to leave your house even when you don’t want to leave your house because if you don’t, they poop in your house. And then you’re not just lonely, but you’re lonely and cleaning up dogshit from your favorite rug, so loneliness turns to sadness and you start spiraling so hard you don’t even notice that your dog has jumped on the couch and is taking a second shit there. Dogs force you to go to the dogpark, where you’ll meet your neighbors and possibly even learn their names. You will absolutely learn their dogs’ names, but even people in the dogpark have a little trouble connecting with one another.

Now, I get that some of you might not want dogs, or can’t have dogs, for a multitude of valid reasons. So we’ll keep going. (Sidenote: some of you may be saying, “But Mike, I have a cat(s)!” That’s nice. Cats are not pets. They’re psychotic sets of knives and razors that live in your home and demand tribute. When a dog shits on your carpet it will look at you like it is well and truly ashamed to have done that to their best friend. When a cat shits in your house it’s because you’ve asked it to, even setting up a special box for it to do so, which at best it will take as a suggestion, shitting somewhere in the vicinity of the litter box and then looking at you like “Clean it up, fuckface!” Then it will slash you with one of the razors attached to its toes. It may sound like I don’t like cats, but that’s not true, I just think lumping cats in the pet category along with dogs does cats justice. And cats would agree.) (Also, I’m allergic to cats.)

I am as far from answering your question as a cart turd is to a litterbox.

Let’s talk about the pandemic instead. (Yay!) And let’s finally acknowledge that the pandemic broke us. Those of us who survived were very lucky to have survived, which is not to say that we survived unscathed. We did not. We spent months avoiding human contact, and then even more months still kind of avoiding human contact, and then years basically still avoiding human contact. And some of us, for reasons that are our own, needed to avoid human contact a little harder and longer than others. The pandemic did things to it, and the fact that we, as a society, mostly decided to pretend it never happened, means that at some level it is still doing things to us. (Also, having a pandemic sandwiched between two slices of fascism makes for a fantastic shit sandwich.)

In April of 2021, I got my first dose of the Covid vaccine. This was thirteen months after the initial lockdown started. Thirteen months of living in a small apartment, with two other people and a small dog that gave us a reason to go outside. If I remember correctly, I then had to wait a month to get my second dose, and another two weeks for vaxmaxxing. And that’s the date I circled in my calendar. That’s the date I could, theoretically, go back outside and “do things.”

When that date rolled around I hopped on the train, still masked, and went to play pinball. Again, still masked. I took it off for a brief second, not really sure if I was being brave or stupid, and then someone started walking in my direction. I freaked out and immediately put it back on. Which is when I realized that it was going to take a while to come back from [gestures] all this. And while the date circled on my calendar certainly meant something, it didn’t fix the fact that I’d withdrawn from society for long enough that I had to relearn a lot of social cues. None the least of which was the very tangible reality that proximity to another human being might lead to death. (And as I am writing this on Pride month, it’s only fair to acknowledge that there are human beings walking amongst us who have been through life-threatening pandemics triggered by human proximity twice in their lifetimes.)

If you are reading this, the pandemic didn’t kill you. But there’s certainly a chance that it broke you. As it did me.

Sometime during the first year of the pandemic, one of my best friends moved away. This was someone I got together with semi-regularly. It was a move he’d been planning before the pandemic. But there were talks of a big goodbye party, ample hanging out before the move, seeing some shows, sharing meals, etc, etc. All of that was replaced by the nightmare logistics of moving three states away in the middle of a pandemic, including discussions about whether going to the bathroom during a long drive would kill you. In the end, even the promise to drive by and honk on his way out of town had to be abandoned because of last minute shenanigans with movers. People just disappeared on you.

When I was a kid, friends just happened. And as I say that as a kid who didn’t have a lot of friends, but there was always a small squad who hung out together after school. You played ball together, you committed minor crimes together, you sat on the stoop together, and you hung out in the basement of the one kid in the group who had an Atari 2600 waiting for your turn to play, you found dead bodies together (that may have been a movie). The expectation was that they would be there for you every day. Giving each other shit, begrudgingly sharing their candy and Atari joysticks, and later—covering for you with your parents when you were somewhere you weren’t supposed to be

(Sidenote: the best thing we were as kids was bored. We complained about being bored so much. And in our boredom, we came up with all sorts of shit to do. Not all of it legal, sure. But all of it was part of the amazing process of the human imagination coming up with things to do to not be bored. It troubles me that kids aren’t allowed/encouraged/etc to be bored anymore. I’m a fan of understimulating children. Let them figure their way out of it. If you leave a kid alone in a room with a large cardboard box they will eventually turn it into a fort, or a spaceship, or a stage. Let kids be bored. It’s so good for them.)

As you get older, hanging out takes a little more work than when we were kids. There’s planning involved. There’s responsibilities and obligations to work around. Maybe we have our own kids, and they’re the priority. But every once in a while, you find a magical afternoon where you’re both free, and you find yourselves sitting at a bar, or across each other at a picnic table, or sharing a meal, or a pinball machine, and it all comes flooding back. The easy chats, the light-hearted arguments about which band sold out when, the rekindling of old memories, and more recently an “in memorium” of friends who’ve passed.

The pandemic, sandwiched between two slices of fascism, has really fucked with our ability to maintain friendships. But it wasn’t alone in that. As society turned house-bound, a lot of the things we couldn’t go to decided that they could come to us instead. Meals were being delivered. Household goods were being delivered. Clothes were being delivered. Cat litter, for that razor-wielding beast in your house, was being delivered. And for a while, this was necessary. (I’d also like to acknowledge that for some people, for reasons that are their own, this remains necessary.) And slowly, having things come to us, went from being a necessity to a preference. I know this because as I bike home through The Mission—a neighborhood that has every flavor of restaurant at every price point, and in abundance—I will pass dozens of delivery scooters dropping off food at apartments that are less than twenty feet from clusters of restaurants.

And the greatest sin of all might be a tech industry that’s exploiting your loneliness by offering you friends that don’t exist. If a tech company can pull the plug on your relationship with a software update, it’s not a relationship. And if you are promising broken, lonely people that you can deliver software solace that doesn’t require them to leave their house, you’ve jettisoned your own humanity.

If you are lonely inside, go outside. People are interesting. And most of them are outside.

In December of 2020, while still locked down in my house, I received news that a friend of mine had died, also locked down in his house. He was my age. (This is becoming more and more common.) We have kids the same age. And we used to hang out together, on the regular, when our kids were young. But I moved away. And the promises to stay in touch, which were heartfelt on both sides, eventually waned. We talked less and less as time went on. Eventually, getting to the point where we hadn’t talked in a while. Not for a good reason, mind you. Just time. And lack of effort. But there’s never enough effort to contact the dead.

Yesterday, I received word that Om Malik had died. (Again, my age.) I hadn’t talked to Om in a long time. But we’d had enough conversations over the years that I really enjoyed chatting with him. We didn’t agree on everything, which made the conversations more fun. One of the things I remember about Om was that he had a certain glint in his eye and a slight smirk if he was about to say something that was going to piss me off. He wanted me to know it was coming. He wanted me to appreciate that he knew it was coming. Then he’d say it, and sit back, waiting for the reaction he knew was coming. He was a good egg. And I’m sad we lost touch. I’m even sadder the opportunity to make up for it is gone.

At some point while reading this, I bet a name popped into your head. Maybe someone you haven’t hung out with in a while. Maybe someone you just hung out with and wanna do it again. Maybe someone who moved away and you haven’t seen in a minute. You should reach out. Text. Call. Whatever. And here I’ll tell you the secret: make it simple. Don’t overcomplicate that shit.

“Wanna do dinner tomorrow?” is better than scheduling something far off in the future, which gives you both too much time to flake on.

“I’m going to see Backrooms tomorrow. Wanna come?” is better than a vague plan about seeing a movie sometime in the future.

“Been missing you. Wanna catch up?” is a wonderful thing to text a friend.

Might they say no? Of course. But they might also say yes. We’re broken. We gotta keep shit simple. No complex planning. No calendar bullshit. No ranges of dates. No pencilling shit in. We are very much in “Get in loser. We’re doing crimes.” territory.

Stop reading and text someone you care about. Now.

🙋 Got a question you need answered? Ask it!

📓 My new book, How to die (& otherstories), is full of essays like this. Some are depressing! But also, some are not. Honestly, I think most are not.

💸 If you’re enjoying this newsletter, and can spare $2/mo, it helps me keep doing it.

📄 This essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates is long, and every word of it absolutely brilliant. I encourage you to read it.

🍉 Please donate what you can to the children of Palestine. It’s a genocide. We’re funding it.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please donate what you can to Trans Lifeline. And if there is a trans person in your life please remind them they are loved.