I was sitting across the table from my old friend T at a barbecue joint somewhere in Compton, CA. I’d been through the wringer since I last saw her, and I’m sure I wasn’t hiding it well - a breakup, a brush with secret intelligence, a new puppy, and the building of a giant fence that broke my skin and built some biceps.  I was all language, no body, telling tales with hyperbole and humor. I didn’t want to be a drag and admit I was hardly present, that it wasn’t personal. She had been through the wringer in a different way - a cancer diagnosis, a fall down the stairs, fractured knees from jumping off a speaker at a rave. She was fine now, as was I, I guess, but whoa. We built our words beautifully, and they reached across the table and the divide of time, reconnecting us. And then we parted. I got in my car feeling undone. 

Adult friendships take on very formal containers, such as dinners, coffee dates, and hikes. Hikes can feel especially alienating because, once again, language can distance as much as connect. We’ve all seen those lady hikers pumping up the hill, communicating highlights from their compartmentalized lives, like Megyn Kelly reporting the news, practicing bitchy takes on serious matters. I think of true friendship as being connected in space and time, acting together upon the world, and encountering phenomena - oh look, a blue heron. Does that person have a butt implant? I despise my shoes, we must get me a new pair stat - the beat of one moment building upon the next in a way that gathers momentum and drives a narrative. 

We all want to be in a story that we made. True friendship means the day will open its roads to you both, and the night will beckon you both into a mystery. Be like dogs together. Be like teenage girls. Be like “Absolutely Fabulous.”  Be Spies. Be the angels in “Wings of Desire” with a view from the heights. 

The simplest social tweaks can really bring friendship back from the performative realm of simulacra to earth. If you meet up at night for a movie or dinner, make time to go for a walk after or land at a bar. If you go on a hike, suggest stopping by a market and picking up some food to cook at home. Share your favorite songs, yoga stretches, read out loud, or decide to watch a movie in bed together in the middle of the day. Just get out of office hours. Pay attention to transitional and liminal spaces — waiting lines, parking lots, crosswalks, crowds, the moment the dishes are done and the living room waits for you both to fill it — zones where the spirit of things gets in. It’s amazing we have gotten to this point as a collective, that we are actively having to remember how to be friends again. A real friend is someone who you can relax with. Right?! Problem is I’m a hypervigilant, nervous wreck sometimes even with my closest friends, simply because they are human beings. 

I returned to LA and saw my friend T again. Towards the end of my birthday party at Taix French Restaurant, she invited over a crew of strangers and we bar hopped all down Sunset Boulevard, waiting in line to buy ZYN nicotine pouches and talking to strangers at the 7-11, making dancing fools of ourselves in every joint until closing, catching each other’s eyes, telepathically vibing. Maybe friendship isn’t a static identity marker but a kind of verb. It must be in a state of movement and becoming for it to be a thing at all. Sitting in the passenger seat of my friend’s car while she sped through Silverlake, knowing each turn without GPS, blasting The Alan Parsons Project, landed me solidly back in my animal body, where friendship is possible. Been so long, too long, my friend.   

I can’t really keep up the charade of office-hour friendships for very much longer. They break my body to be honest. 

I came because I needed to get out of my head and forget myself for a little while. Instead I became a human Twitter feed and became so self-conscious about it, my only desire is for it to be over. 

The failure to connect is demoralizing, and it compounds over time. Faith withers and loneliness erodes the heart.  

If you do mushrooms, do them with a friend! When you do, you will discover what kind of friend they really are, no judgment. There are many types of friends, old ones, new ones, and ones you hope to make. 

A memory just came to me of when I smoked weed in 10th grade with my friend Barb, and we had such a luxurious lunch at a café in town that we forgot to pay. Halfway back to school, we remembered and knew we had to go back and pay, but there was only so much time, so there was running, and laughing, and such a bodily sense of being outside time and space in our connection together that the memory lands with the vitality of sunshine itself. 

My heart remembers J, who was sitting by my fireplace that I am looking at right now, both of us tripping on a lot of mushrooms. He tells me that he grew up in the orange groves of rural Florida. I see it, this urban sophisticate gay man revitalizing art criticism worldwide with his sight and talent, and I’m literally in the orange grove with him, smelling it; he’s not wearing shoes. It’s so impossibly beautiful. I will look at oranges and think of him more often than not. Later, we say prayers at the kitchen table with beeswax candles for friends and family, and we both get stuck on his brother being a Dentist, and my ex, who passed away, her Dad was a Dentist. Isn’t being a Dentist such a strange thing to be? A hard thing to carry, really, for those close to Dentists. You can’t really explain it unless you’ve been there. I tend to have a whole schtick when I do mushrooms with other people in my house. I went into this ceremony with the intention of ditching all schtick and just hanging out with a friend I wanted to get to know better. I wanted him to see me unguarded, with my wounds visible, my problems unresolved, because no one had seen me, really, in a very long time. 

My friend P passed through on her way to California to begin a many-year-long retreat, part of her journey to becoming a Buddhist nun. We decided to do mushrooms because that’s what connected us at the start of our friendship. We were silent for hours. She chanted a bit. I just needed to sit next to her in a place beyond language. When I think of her, I think of her there, quiet by the fireplace I am looking at right now, and I feel her warm animal presence radiating the rewards of a rigorous practice. Both of us are on the spectrum and never bereft of a long monologue full of genius detail on topics we love, and we love so many things, we can talk ourselves blue in the face. The mushrooms gifted us silence. Silence built the friendship. 

There’s C, who is always able to conjure a relational talisman between us when we trip, whether it be the lemurs in Mount Shasta, the Buffalo on the cover of David Wojnarowicz’s book, or a particular failed dance move that shattered all previous reality constructs, sending them hurling into full real-time novelty emergence. We are dead serious inquiry on mushrooms together. We are artists with questions. We are old friends with history. We like to have fun and be ourselves.  We will gossip. We have our own opinions on style. Only with friends can you be a bitchy gay for real.  We have developed a talent for allowing our creative talismans to weave us in and out of synchronicity, epiphanies forged through sophisticated shared pattern recognition. 

There are a few things to consider when choosing a friend to trip with. If you’re really experienced and they’ve never tripped before, they might turn you into their trip sitter. If this happens, just be their trip sitter. Some of our friends are grandiose narcissists, and we love them anyway. They can actually be really fun to trip with, picture Ariana Grande realizing she’s an actual elf, not a fairy. But this might come with an emotional toll. You may wake up the next day feeling like you just donated a kidney.

In considering a friend to trip with, I suggest picking the person you feel the most relaxed around, period. If they’re going through a major crisis, it might not be the right time. Same goes for you. What you want is to be able to get out of your suffocating brain and relentless interiority enough to actually have something that can be called a real experience of the world with another person whom you love. 

I won’t discount the real temptation to take mushrooms to deepen a friendship that is just beginning. This has gone wrong a couple times in my past.  A trip with a couple who wanted a threesome comes to mind. But still, let’s be honest, the thought of taking mushrooms with a stranger with hopes of becoming friends is very enticing. I am editing right now in a café in Truth or Consequences, NM, and there’s a person over 70 I’ve seen around here, of unknown gender, with incredible French braids, bright eyes and muscled calves, and I want to know them so much more; I really do. They asked me what I was writing, and I told them.  They said, “I’ll do mushrooms with you.” We exchanged numbers. I will be back down here next month. I will take mushrooms with them, I have a feeling. 

I’ll be bold and suggest I have a failsafe protocol for a friendship ceremony. First, don’t call it a ceremony. Second, take any grandiosity down more than just a couple notches. Third, be a little bit dumb. Don’t read each other’s beads or try to figure out each other’s problems. Hang out at home together, and at some point, take a walk around your neighborhood or town, fully tripping balls. Return home and eat something delicious. You both will know what to do next, I promise. 

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

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