I.

“There are a lot of freaks on the Internet,” says Person Who Is On The Internet.

“Yeah!” agrees Person Who Is Also On The Internet, perhaps even more vehemently than the first. “I don’t trust anyone online!”

If you are a Person On The Internet, chances are you have either overheard or engaged in such a conversation in the last fifteen years, and hopefully by now you have realized that the Internet is not any better or worse than the world offline, but merely a reflection: In one corner, you have Nigerian e-mail scams; in the other, Bernie Madoff. In one corner, you have people with fake or outdated pictures on their OKCupid profiles; in the other, you meet a hipster girl at a Girl Talk show who steals your cell phone and turns out to be a wanted criminal. There are freaks on the Internet, but have you actually left your house lately?

II.

I was thinking about my best friend Rob the other day. He’s been my number-one confidante, advisor, and defender for almost twenty years now, and although we met before the Internet was actually a thing, our friendship still didn’t have a conventional start: We became friends over the phone.

Technically, we “met” somewhere first. But this meeting was so inconsequential that neither of us actually remember when it was, where it was, or how — and why! — we wound up exchanging phone numbers. So all of my earliest memories of Rob were on the phone: Him in New Jersey, me in New York. Him navigating the course of his life following the death of his mother, me navigating the course of my life following the death of my teenage best friend Chris. Him dealing with repressed feelings of abuse as a child, me making a clean break from my abusive family home. We spent hours on the phone, at least every other day, for something like six months.

In June of 1992, when I didn’t have anywhere else to live, Rob asked me to move in with him and his dad in Edison, New Jersey. When I showed up at his door, I thought, I don’t really know this person! He was a voice, a technological possibility, a phantom friend. But after a bag of Ruffles and a half-hour of Yo! MTV Raps, I realized he was actually just like me. We were both Persons Who Were On The Telephone.

There are a lot of freaks on the phone.

III.

Steven and I had never even talked on the phone when I told him he could come spend the weekend at my apartment. That’s not weird to me: In something like fifteen years of touring with bands, I’ve slept on the floors of literally hundreds of total strangers — most of whom I’d never see again, and many of whom I would have probably liked less on the Internet than in real life. But I’m not sure that there’s a “wrong” way to make friends, and even if there is, I still think I must be doing something right. Steven is as good a human being as I imagined, a storyteller and a listener, a self-aware and good-humored person, and as it turns out, an amazingly gracious guest who can play along when I am half-drunkenly trying to match him up with other single men at G Lounge.

I am sure that when he showed up at my door on Friday afternoon, he thought, I don’t really know this person! But that’s the kind of tension that makes life fun. Every interesting feeling we get is from not knowing; there’s no real pleasure in predictability. The pleasure is in taking a chance.

I worry sometimes that people use Tumblr as the new virtual form of friend-collecting, where followers and likes and Tumblarity (R.I.P.) don’t ever lead to anything more than followers and likes and letters to David Karp demanding that he reinstate Tumblarity. It would be nothing short of a colossal missed opportunity: I’d like to think that when I’m done here, when my ethernet cables are all packed up and “Nervous Acid” goes back to just being a Bobby Konders song, that I’ll still have someone to call.

Steven, for one, is in my phonebook now. I don’t care how he got there, but I’m happy for it.