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Don't be a Moss. The Shadowed Archive on why making friends is both impossible and essential.
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 personality so you can be filed correctly in someone else’s head. And half the time they reject the application. They ghost you. They say “we should hang out sometime,” which, in the language of friendship, means “I hope you die.”
The philosophers didn’t make it easier.
Aristotle: friends are either useful, pleasant, or virtuous. What he didn’t say is that every friend eventually becomes useless, boring, and morally compromised.
Montaigne: “Because it was he, because it was I.” Which is sweet, but also tautological. It means “my friend is my friend because they are my friend,” which is the sort of logic you expect from a dog.
Nietzsche: friends should be arrows you fire into the future, meant to wound you, to test you, to make you stronger. Lovely. Except most of us are just happy if someone answers our texts.
Meanwhile, every self-help book tells you to “just be yourself.” But if you were yourself you wouldn’t need friends. “Yourself” is the exact person who sits alone at 2am scrolling through group photos of people who did not invite you. Yourself is unbearable. Yourself is the reason you need to invent a second self, and then a third, and send those versions out into the world, each of them a trial balloon, a mask, a ghoul, to see which one gets accepted. Friendship is basically the black market trade of masks. You offer one of yours, they offer one of theirs, and if the exchange goes well, you keep bartering until you’ve forgotten what your original face looked like.
Anyway, here is your first existential tip: friendship is impossible, and therefore it must be done. If it were possible, it wouldn’t matter. Only impossibilities have meaning. Only impossibilities are worth doing.
I have a distinct memory of a scene in the 1958 film Auntie Mame in which the young nephew is mixing a martini and says, ‘Stir never shake, bruises the gin.’ Making a martini to the preferences of a guest is an art, and in the past, ordering one usually meant you knew what you were talking about and how you liked it. It was the preferred drink of countless artists and intellectuals who were known for their convivial lives. W. Somerset Maugham, Patricia Highsmith, Ernest Hemingway and Luis Buñuel were all fans, and each had a preferred chemistry for their perfect martini. To be a staunch martini drinker is to put oneself within a lineage that was illustrious, sophisticated and, most of all, interesting. We live in a time when people are desperate for markers of taste and style, when everyone wants to cultivate an image. The martini is an easy entry point: drinking one borrows the sparkle of these glamorous characters for however long it takes them to get to the bottom of the glass. In its original form, a martini is like a Cartier watch. Simply put, it’s glamorous; just the glass recalls past eras of glitz, its shape lending an elegant gesture to even the coarsest hand that cradles it.
Why I find the latest martini craze odd is that, despite the added frills, one thing a martini will always be is strong. We are at a strange juncture when younger generations are drinking less, going out less and, I can only assume, having less fun. Alcohol companies’ growth is flatlining as demand slows. We are also living in a time when our public interactions as private citizens can easily end up online (God forbid a woman lets her hair down once in a while). But the joy of drinking a martini is never knowing exactly when it will hit you. Perhaps this is telling on my own alcohol consumption, but I just don’t think martinis are for dilettantes—they’re serious business! After drinking a couple, all social conventions are going to be thrown out the door. If you’ve ever been at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle in New York past a certain hour, you’ve witnessed the sheen of civility disintegrate. I should know: a man once threw up dangerously close to my Fendi heeled feet in the lobby. The concierge shook their head, having seen this before, and said, ‘One too many martinis.’
That’s why I’m so opposed to the contemporary rise of the mini martini. A martini cannot be microdosed; it goes against the original promise of what a martini does. Ordering one is making a pact with it and yourself. You are entrusting your destiny to a three-ounce glass. It’s a drink for when you’re about to embark on something—you need to make allowances for whatever loose debauchery may consequently unfold.
By Dr. Robert Malone.
