It’s Hard to Find a Friend

Erick Anderson - Aka AfroKeys at the Blues Saloon 08/16/22

It’s hard to make friends period end of paragraph. It’s hard to find a friend is also a great record.

It’s harder to make friends when you’re grown up. I do think it’s harder for men to make friends with men. It’s harder to make friends once you got kids unless you make friends with the other people that have kids your age. And it’s a grand coincidence when you like the people your kids go to school with, it happens, but it’s a grand coincidence.

By my count I’ve made about five serious friends since having kids who aren’t also my neighbors or friends I met through daycare. One of those friends is Erick Anderson aka Afrokeys. I got to step out and celebrate Erick’s birthday last night and see him in his element, playing incredible keyboard. It warmed my heart.

We’re St. Paul musicians a certain age so we’ve crossed paths in small ways for years. We even played a couple gigs back together in maybe 2010-2012 both with Dessa and with my solo project. But we weren’t friends. In the early pandemic the universe brought us together. Basketball brought us together. Agreeing that a big national tour of Sam Cooke’s music curated and led by Har Mar Superstar was a problematic venture brought us together. And we were living blocks apart from one another for much of the pandemic. We slipped into some kind of rhythm where a fair amount of Friday nights turned into a bonfire gathering in my backyard. We had a nice rotating cast; neighbors, members of Heiruspecs, Nina Moini and a couple other folks. It felt like a little bonfire salon where a lot of people peed outside due to COVID cautions.

But some nights it was just Erick and I. And we’d listen to different records, or different radio stations and talk about different things with varying levels of seriousness. Adulthood struggles, parenting struggles, adulthood joys, parenting joys. We started playing ping-pong once I got a ping-pong table. I believe I beat him enough at ping-pong that he encouraged me to play pickleball where he routinely kicks my ass. My last night on The Current I was on until midnight and there was a snow storm. Erick and his girlfriend Camolly were one of few people nice enough to make the trek out and raise a glass. I bet this sounds wildly mundane to you. Middle age dudes doing middle age things. But, something about the friendship being at the center of it is what I love. We are only loosely in the same “circle”, we’ve both done a lot of hip-hop music, but we don’t share a group of close friends. We didn’t meet through our kids or through our partners. We don’t run into each other. But we go out of our way to hang, to play pickleball, to get some drinks, to go out to each other’s birthdays.

I spent most of my driving time yesterday listening to a podcast from the Ezra Klein show (he had a sub host, Roge Karma). It was maddening. It was about working from home, the end of the office, the monitored “knowledge” worker. I found the podcast interesting and I became grateful for so many aspects of my job. I thought I wanted to be one of the latte fancy folks using fifteen types of software to better organize the parameters of what the locus of the organization is. I don’t. I want dirty hands from picking records, playing bass and passing out trivia sheets. I don’t feel monitored minute by minute here at Jazz88. I feel like there are very high expectations placed on me to modernize and streamline how we discover, feature and promote new music. There are expectations for me to improve ratings and I can imagine catching an earful if ratings took a nosedive. This is a long way of saying, I will be judged by my results here at Jazz88. Do listeners appreciate the new music we are presenting? Are people continuing to listen to the radio in the afternoon? As the music director are you connecting with artists and labels and establishing a good network in the jazz world? These inquiries that are focused results mean that from minute to minute I feel free to do my work in the way that fits me. I love what I do, I think I do a damn good job at it. If the results say otherwise, I can work with that, I can change based on that rubric. But if my employer was measuring keystrokes, stuffing the calendar with meaningless meetings cause it looks good. . .I’d lose it. I don’t get paid per word, I don’t get paid per post. I get paid to make a great product, whether it be our music library, our label relations or my hosting on the Afternoon Cruise. What a lot of knowledge workers do is B.S. And it’s not that they themselves are B.S., it’s that the system is. They have to masquerade around with empty meetings and stack up mountains of inefficient hours. They do that to feed a system that requires it. I don’t bring much work home. I listen to Jazz88 and other radio stations all the time, I pursue new music, I think about how to synthesize my experiences as a music lover, musician and human being into good moments on the radio. But if you send an email to me at 10pm you’re getting a response the next day. I want my life. I want my children to see me. I’ve got a job where I miss their early evening hours, setting the table, walking the dog, doing a project, maybe practicing the clarinet. I miss all that. When I do get home I don’t want to have my nose in my inbox. I want to live a life that includes work without excluding the rest of life. I’ve gotten better work/life balance during the pandemic and it sounds like a lot of you haven’t. But my journey towards living a life outside of work started before 2020. One person that got me off the workaholic program was Radio Man Brian Oake. He came into the Current with such impressive work credentials I figured he was a work-all-the-time-guy but he made it very clear that he had some pretty firm borders. He didn’t have work email on his phone, he wasn’t defined by his job. It was impressive to see somebody who is so definitively RADIO MAN in this town not be defined by it himself. It inspired me to know that one needs a friend group, an identity, a passion that exists outside of your workplace.

There was a really important part of the podcast; the host asked about workers who will miss going into the office because they want to see their friends, they want to have human connection. This is a reasonable concern but one of the guests pointed out, “that’s not what jobs are! Jobs are transactional”. I’m an entrepreneur, I own a business, I do want Trivia Mafia to be more than just a blood sucking business. When we have kickball leagues and holiday parties it’s because I DON’T want Trivia Mafia to be purely transactional. I want people to be paid fairly for their work and I want them to be also treated as awesome friends who deserve parties and kickball. But, work is fundamentally transactional. You should have a life outside of work. And it sounds like a lot of people don’t. I’ve got a demanding job that doesn’t eat up every waking hour of my life. I have time for friends, I have time for bonfires, I have time for some travel, I have time for my children, I have time for my neighbor, I have time for pickleball, I have time to make a blog. It shouldn’t be, but this is uncommon. I’m glad in this world I’ve made time for friends and my friends have made time for me. I don’t think it’s healthy to just see the people you work with and your family. And I think that podcast is right, it’s not your job’s job to make sure you have a social life. . .they can help, but if they are your answer to all non familial contact, that’s on you.

It’s hard to make a friend. It’s hard to keep a friend. It’s hard to do that in Minnesota cause according to recent arrivals, nobody every reaches out for the second time. It’s hard to do friendship in 2022. But I’m thankful for my friends and I’m glad I got to see Erick behind the organ last night on his birthday.