Be The Guy Who Makes The Plans

The reason doesn’t matter. Thin, inane, made up, that’s not the point. Getting dudes together for a night, a weekend of beer, movie quotes, brobonding. That’s the point, the goal, should be yours, anyway. You can name it what you will. Anniversary Of The Crash Weekend. Mega Men’s Night. Bachelor Party Deus. It’s Been Too Long Hour. No matter how you get them there, the ends justify the means, a few times over. And while people aren’t lazy, per se, they are caught up. This means your job as the ringleader is a pain. You will harangue and repeat, even to your best of friends. You will send at least five emails with proposed dates and beg people to Venmo you back for all the cash you laid out buying the weed, mushrooms, alcohol, burgers, salad stuff, right?

The difficulty of procuring a space and time in which all of your friends can hang out, for an hour or three days, grows exponentially with time. Many of us surrender to this inevitability, dashing behind work, wife, tired, just can’t pull it off, sorry man, next time. So you, the guy who makes things happen, can grow frustrated, understandably, and throw in your towel too. Or, you can be the guy. My brother once told me what it means to be the guy. Not the guy who ties a roman candle to his sack on a dare. Rather, the guy who washes the dishes, who brings the bottle of wine, who rushes to greet a friend’s new girlfriend. The guy who is okay losing out on a few bucks to keep the peace. That’s the guy who plans a gathering. And that’s the guy who mixes his friend groups successfully, too. Nobody has too many friends as an adult. So mix and match, lube them up and let them slide right into a new friendship, an exploration of another person’s beliefs and humor in a sanctified space.

It doesn’t matter what the thing is. Case race, ironman, hockey tournament, dinner theater, lake weekend, Sunday hike, after work beer. As long as you initiate and say yes, I am going to deal with the massive pain in the ass of getting three, five, twenty guys’ schedules lined up, you’ve already won. Effort. Not just receiving a paycheck, even if you phone it in for a week. Effort. I have one friend who invites us over for a weekend every year. He’s a successful lawyer with a townhouse in Brooklyn that is usually filled with a wife and two kids. But once a year, he empties it of its contents, shakes it loose of its inhabitants and leaves only dinosaur steaks and scotch. Everyone loves that weekend yet nobody repeats it in their own image. All the other events during the year emanate from me, my desire to work at these friendships, to keep people mingling and jiving, drinking and not remembering. I’ve got a job and a lady, too. Bills, headaches, a gym membership, but I make it work because it’s important. What happened to having friends? Shouldn’t we be using some of the money we make at our jobs to support our friendships, and thereby, ourselves? Does happiness not come from camaraderie? Are men, united in absurdity, not the engine that coughs out dumb quotes, private jokes and sweet, sweet lapses in judgment?

My uncle once told me that I’ll start to see a shift in my life in my early twenties, moving from speaking about things to doing them. Years later, I still stand on that line, making sure to abide by it. If I find myself texting a friend that I miss them, I quickly follow it up with a we need to hang. If that means a plane ride, so be it. Stamping a date into the calendar, with a ticket attached to it, is a goddamn statement of friendship.

A rabbi once told me that a good friend tells you, Come over any time, but a great friend tells you, Come over this Tuesday at six. The general let’s hang out is a thinly veiled fuck you. We all know it but we drop them anyway like pennies in our friends’ coin trays. Be specific.

People want to huddle around a fire, they want to be told what to do and where to be. You need to create the fire for your friend group. Remember the proposed event names from the first paragraph? That’s the fire. You light it, the signal fire, and they drag themselves out from beneath their craggy expanse of responsibilities, oftentimes coaxed out by a growing wave of Yes, I can make that weekend, I’m looking to get near the fire, to throw a log in. We are all moths, child moths, excited to have something to fly toward, to get too close and feel the singe of a good laugh, a strong, shared realization. The moment you give a weekend a name, a gathering a purpose, it pulls on memories and stokes possibility. It incites thoughts of reverie and camaraderie, two feelings that we had kegs full of when we were kids. The kegs are still there, they just need to be tapped. As the wrangler, it is your job to light and wave the torch, to put the money up and to chase down your friends.