the Tommy|Zor era

NEWSFLASH!

Friends are important.

Since my very youngest years, the only commodities that were worth keeping around have been video games and friends. Instead of giving you a deep Carl Jung-ian speech about the human condition, I’m going to list the reasons why friends are great. Keep in mind this has no particular order and is being st-t-t-t-t-t-r-reamed f-f-f-rom my b-b-brain (NOW BUFFERING…PLEASE WAIT)

• -Who else is going to prevent you from drinking that entire 24 of beer by yourself on a weekday?
• -A real friend won’t let you buy a Mac no matter how much you like the shiny stuff
• -A good friend will identify a good pair of D cups from across the mall, seemingly through solid objects in the way and alert you to their location
• -A real friend knows exactly when to use a high-five instead of a fist bump
• A good friend comes over with beer but leaves you the empties so you can get that massive deposit money back
• -Who else is going to get you a condom stapled to a birthday card?
• -A good friend will shoot down your stupid ideas, then use them for themselves and deem them brilliant
• -Half of the good music you listen to was from the ideas of friends
• -Your movie collection is awfully similar to your friends’, and you damn well know all of them own a copy of Aliens and Fight Club
• -A good friend will always convince you that your every problem is because of someone else
• -A real friend will laugh at you if you use your bike for any reason
• -Real friends help make you better than you could ever be on your own. For example, you’ll wash your white shirts, a friend will bleach them and save you the $9.77 for three new shirts, then use that money for Vietnamese food
• -A real friend will convince you not to buy that 28-pack of AAA batteries at Costco
• -In a large group of friends, someone’s going to eat those Swedish Berries candies and help finally get rid of them (it’s been 5 weeks, dude)
• -”A man cannot beat Gunstar Heroes on his own…”
• -One word: Road Trip!
• -A real friend will fairly share website advertising revenue 90/10 and that still only amounts to giving you a quarter
• -A true friend is a master Pornocchio – someone who lies and embellishes their sex stories for your entertainment
• -A true friend is someone you can share a Taco Bell family pack with and still breathe afterward
• -Friends don’t let friends pop their collar
• -A good friend will back-quote you when you’re being hypocritical, then high-five you for being ‘dynamic’
• -Friends always chip in the $0.72 required to change your combo from blah to fucking magnificent
• -A true friend will let you drive their car again, even after you almost broke off the engine mounts last time and stalled it 5 times trying to get it moving up a 10-degree incline hill
• -A good friend re-tells your stories and leaves out the embarrassing bits and enhances the bra size of the subject every time
• -The phone call ratio of a good friend is 90% worthless chitchat to 10% important drama
• -A good friend sleeps with their phone (unless that 2am ringing is against the girl they’re sleeping beside)
• -Friends BBQ for their other friends and never once complain about how overcooked the chicken is
• -Friends only laugh about your dreams to be a rapper behind your back
• -1 in every 5 friends is a terrible driver, and yet they do the most friend driving duty of anyone in the group
• -As children, you have as many friends as you need to play the latest videogames without buying them yourself
• -Friends get job interview opportunities for other friends
• -A good friend will tell you when it’s time to finally ditch those 2003 Nikes you’re convinced are still presentable
• -A true friend will only tell you when your website article is good, and never mention it when they think one sucks
• -A real friend won’t put an artificial limit on how many pieces of cold cuts you can put on a sandwich made at their place
• -A real friend doesn’t offer you Coke when they know you’re a Pepsi man. They’d rather offer you a drink from the garden hose in November
• -A real friend won’t have Coke in their house because friends don’t let friends buy inferior products
• -A true friend knows how you like your steak done and overcooks it anyway to protect you from exotic meat diseases
• -It is a friend’s duty to tell their friends that their handwriting is terrible
• -If you have to ask a friend to be a job or passport reference, you’ve done something wrong in life
• -A real friend doesn’t piss all over someone’s toilet seat without cleaning it afterward
• -A good friend will know when you try to pass off those pair of pants from high school as a new item
• -Among friends, you take turns being the designated driver, sometimes multiple times in a single day
• -You might be the black sheep of your friends because you don’t know every Mitch Hedberg joke, but you will fix that this summer
• -You know that a horrible prank to do to a friend is installing iTunes on a friend’s computer. A true friend will always question why iTunes is a 75MB download and a 200MB install to FUCKING PLAY MUSIC FILES THAT DOSAMP DID IN 1995 AND WAS 112KB!!!
• -A real friend has most of the same gadgets you do, and you wonder how the rest of the world lives without a modded Xbox. I mean, do people really watch downloaded videos on their computer monitor?
• -A true friend hands you ice cream in the actual container and gives you a spoon
• -A real friend will always try to twist off the beer cap when it’s not a twist-off, just to show you how much smarter they are vs. your request for a bottle opener
• -You could easily see living with all your friends inside a mansion, and interchanging your live-in girlfriends just for the hell of it
• -You’re 27 years old and still play show-and-tell, but now it’s with landscaping and laundry appliances
• -Even during the recession, you make sure the beers-to-friends ratio is above 6:1
• -You don’t know your friends’ actual house address, but could get there blind and drunk anyway
• -One friend in the group has a pickup truck, van, or access to one just in case someone needs something moved or delivered
• -Real friends let their friends feel up each other’s girlfriends, because that is acceptable
• -…and last, but not least, real friends are there when you need them, and around even more when you don’t!

So yeah, friends can be pretty important. I won’t even get into the concept and benefits of opposite-sex friends, because quite frankly I’m stupid, but I’m not crazy. Men and women can be friends in the same way that your furnace can technically run at the same time as your air conditioner does. You pay, pay, pay, and nothing good will ever come of it.

But besides that, friends are the best thing you can ever have. Well, besides beer and a pair of D cups within reach.