The feelings that I have about this guy kind of perplex me. After all, he is a good friend, but when I really think about it, there isn’t much history between us. We kind of knew each other in junior high, but then I left for a few years, moved out of state. I eventually started coming back for summers and holiday parties and got to know this guy again. He and I are good friends now and I would do anything I can to ever help him out, but when I stop to think, this strength of friendship based on so little time spent together somewhat surprises me.

Then I realized that I can’t help being friends with people. None of us can. We need people like we need oxygen, food, and high-speed Internet connections. If we don’t have them, we wish we did and all we can think about is how to get them.

You all know the story: 12-20 billion years ago, a little spot of nothing blew up into a whole lot of something else. By and by, about 6 billion years ago, there came to be a certain rock floating around a certain ball of burning gas in a certain arm of a certain galaxy, all pretty much in the middle of nowhere. About 2 billion years after this, life appeared on this rock. All sorts of life swarmed all over the rock, fucking and eating mostly. It so developed that one peculiar form of life we call primates started hanging around on the ground a lot. This is about where my story picks up (there is a point, I swear!).

As these early apes began to come out of the trees, they ran into problems. More accurately, problems began to run into them, usually after stalking them for a while. While it would have been nice to have extra sets of eyes and better sniffers and all, that takes too long to evolve. So much easier to make friends with somebody. They can help keep an eye out for you as well as come to your rescue when you need it. Those who made friends and were good friends did better in life and had kids who in turn were good friends and all. By and by through the wonderful process of evolution, we ended up with a species of "people" (strangely we don’t considers ourselves apes anymore….) with innate tendencies to be friends with each other.

As a young kid in a grade school class of about 25-30 kids (Hell, my hometown had an official population of only around 70), I assumed a role near the bottom of the hierarchy that inevitably develops out of a group of social apes, especially males. You may be familiar with the drinking game "asshole" (or maybe presidents and assholes): Everyone sits in a rank order wherein anyone with a higher rank can make anyone with a lower rank drink whenever they want. Obviously the President has no one above him/her and never has to drink and the Asshole has no below but is below everyone so he/she never gets to give orders and is always catching shit from everyone. My life in grade school was like this sometimes, only we never drank and I wasn’t at the very bottom. There were just a couple kids who incessantly picked on me and gave me this complex about doubting myself and my value as a person.

It was so confusing for me because I thought I was a pretty good friend to have. Since some of these guys who picked on me were also my friends, I had a weird world where my friends would rank me out every other day. I learned to value the real friends I had, friends that I have until this day and will have until I die. But I also learned the value of being a friend. I learned how to recognize what makes a person a good friend and I know how to be a good friend. If anything, I may be too good a friend at times, to the point of being annoying about it.

The group of friends that I have right now are family. They are not like family, they are family. We have all been through tough times; you can grow up in North Idaho and not go through tough times. We are friends because we know the value of having and being friends. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for these guys (but there are some I won’t lend money too!) and I know they are there when I need them, either to go drinking with or to talk shit about the world with. My life has more meaning to me when I have close friends like this.

Although the friend who has started heroin and I don’t have a lot of history, he is my friend and I am his. We are friends because we both know the value of friendship and enjoy upholding those values for the other. This is a guy that got stabbed twice in the back by an ex-girlfriend but checked out of intensive care to come testify at the court hearings of another friend. We look out for each other.

That is why I am scared as shit that he may have finally taken a step down a path that he won’t be able to come back from. From what I hear, heroin is a fucking tough monkey to get off your back. I’ve seen him crawl out of a stiff meth habit and know that he is pretty intelligent, in spite of all the dumb-as-fuck shit he gets into. He has only been loving the needle for a month or so now, and some friends are on the intervention path to get him out of the scene ASAP. Who knows what the future holds for him? I feel somber at the thought that he may never kick the heroin habit and that it will color our relationship forever, in effect destroying the life we had. But I will always stand by him as best I can, because that's what friends do.

I didn’t really know where I was going as I wrote this, but I think I was trying to make a point about the value of friendship and how much we need it. Not to get too gushy on you all, but take time to appreciate your friends. Tell them how much they mean. Always look out for them because they are looking out for you. If you have a friend you haven’t heard from in a long time but still think about from time to time, go find them and get in touch. I’m sure they think about you too and would like to hear from you.

And although you, the Asylum whores, will never be as close to me as my flesh-and-blood cohorts from the lead lined valleys of Idaho are, you are also friends. You are here for me to vent my anger, to hear my pleas, to answer my questions, to respond to my posts. You help to fill the social void that exists when you live 7000 miles away from your friends. Thank you.

I hope I didn't take on a depressing or whiny note here, but dammit, people. Love one another and your friends.

That’s all that life is: family and friends. Without them, you ain’t got shit.