dumb questions to ask friends — and i mean truly dumb

the only friend i have left is dave, and dave only stays because i ask him truly dumb questions. dumb questions to ask friends are not filler. they are the structural beam holding the friendship up, and i would like, on a wednesday, to defend that beam.

writing this from the desk i am supposed to be using to reconcile a quarterly forecast nobody will read. it is 10:38am on a wednesday. the AC over my row of cubicles has been clicking like an offended insect since 9.

so. dumb questions to ask friends. i have been keeping a list, sort of, the same way i keep a list of microwaves i have killed — no system, no paper, just stubborn fondness. dave gets most of them, since 2014. longest contract anybody has signed with me without a lawyer.

dumb questions to ask friends: small, slightly absurd questions with no good answer and no useful purpose, asked of a friend patient enough to entertain them. they are the actual glue of adult friendship. examples: why do we call it heart instead of pump. if you could only eat one shape of pasta. is forest floor a flavor.

DUMB QUESTIONS. ARE NOT. SMALL TALK.

small talk is the questions you already know the answer to. dumb questions to ask friends are the ones where neither of you knows the answer and neither of you ever will, and the conversation does not improve, and you both keep going anyway. that is the love.

what counts, and why dave is the one who gets them

dave works in insurance, fifteen years of the same six forms in slightly different orders. you would think this would make him impatient with stupidity. it has done the opposite. he is now calibrated to absorb a dumb question without flinching. he picks up on the second ring. he says “what” instead of “hello”. he invented that greeting for me.

i ask him, on a monday at 2:18pm, “if you had to pick one shape of pasta forever, penne or rigatoni, knowing one of them is a coward.” i don’t know what i mean by coward. dave knew immediately. dave said rigatoni. forty-second call. i thought about it for three days.

dave is, importantly, the only friend i still have on call. the others had children, or graduate school, or two-car driveways. dave stayed. dave stayed because dumb questions are the easiest currency to keep producing. i think a thing in the kitchen, and i call.

the kitchen, where most of these questions are born

almost every dumb question i have ever asked started in my kitchen. you are doing one boring task with both hands and your brain has nowhere safer to go than into a corner of itself. the freezer hums. the AirPod (one — the other gave up in 2022, binaural is a luxury i no longer afford) is in your ear. the kettle clicks.

and then the question arrives. why do we call it heart instead of pump. if dogs had thumbs, would they still be friendly. does the moon have a smell. it must have a smell. nothing has no smell.

i call. dave says “pump is a worse word, that’s why” or “yes, but they would steal” or “the moon smells like a basement, look it up”. dave does not want me to look it up. dave wants me to call again next monday with a new one.

this is the kitchen where sparky was born. sparky is the fork from the seventh microwave. small black mark down one tine. i keep him in a drawer. dave thinks i am being weird about a fork. dave is correct. he has not asked me to stop.

the IKEA shelf, and the dumb question i should have asked first

two saturdays ago i bought a shelf. you know the store. blue building, swedish vowels, meatballs on the way out. the instructions had been drawn by a man who has never met a human being. by sunday afternoon i had built three quarters of a shelf and a small angry pile of leftover hardware that i believe was load-bearing. it is leaning at a 7-degree angle. i have been calling it “the suggestion of a shelf”.

the dumb question i should have asked dave was: “do you think a man who lives alone and owns one tie can build a six-board shelf with a paper map and a hex key the size of his pinky.” dave would have said “come over after, bring beer, i’ll do half of it.” i did not call. that impression cost me a sunday.

nine examples i have actually used (this is evidence, not a brag)

i went through the call log. i wrote the ones i could remember on a napkin from the place downstairs. the napkin is, somehow, in my pocket at work today.

1. “why do we call it heart instead of pump.” dave: “marketing.” we hung up.
2. “if you could only eat one shape of pasta forever, which one.” dave: rigatoni. coward, allegedly.
3. “is a hot dog a sandwich, in the legal sense.” dave: it is everywhere except in court.
4. “does the spoon do anything that a smaller bowl couldn’t do.” dave: “the spoon is a smaller bowl. redundant.” i wrote that one down.
5. “if i ate one olive every day forever would i become a different kind of person.” dave: yes, a more annoying one.
6. “do trees know what month it is.” dave: trees know everything, they don’t talk about it.
7. “is silence an actual sound or just the absence of one.” dave hung up. dave called back forty seconds later. dave said “no.” this counted as a real answer.
8. “if penguins could fly would they still be considered birds, or would they be promoted.” dave: promoted. correct.
9. “would you eat a chair, hypothetically, and how would you start.” dave: legs first, “for psychological reasons.”

that is the friendship. nine questions on a napkin, fifteen years long. just dave. and the questions.

what dumb questions to ask friends are NOT

they are not “icebreaker questions” off a corporate wellness website. those are scripts. dumb questions are not scripts. they have to come out of a real moment of confusion on a real monday. you can feel the difference inside two seconds.

they are not, also, a way to look quirky on a date. dumb questions are for people who already love you. you cannot use them to make people love you. that is not the direction the current runs in.

they are not, finally, the same as the broader category of dumb i have written about elsewhere. that is a long defense of a long word. dumb questions are a tactic. a shelf-saving one, when you remember to deploy them.

why this matters more than i would normally admit on company time

i have, in my apartment, a shelf 75% built. in my drawer, a fork named sparky. on my phone, dave’s number, listed with no last name. there is only one dave and the universe knows it.

the shelf is what happens when i don’t ask. dave is what happens when i do.

(if you have started keeping a small embarrassing record of your own life — a list, a folder, a napkin — there is a longer post about that exact habit. sibling of this one.)

the shelf will get finished. dave said he’d come over on a saturday. i’ll ask him something on the way in. probably whether bookshelves resent the books they hold. dave will say “obviously.” we will, after that, build the shelf.

the AC has stopped clicking. that is either good or the prelude to a louder problem. twelve minutes before someone notices i have not opened the spreadsheet.

somebody on a podcast — i don’t remember which — said you can measure a friendship by the ratio of useful conversation to useless, and the more useless, the better. couldn’t find the source if you paid me. but i think about it every time dave picks up and says “what”. that ratio is, in our case, mostly useless. that is the brag.

if you want a more serious cousin of this argument, read why dumbness, taken seriously, is its own kind of clarity. and the 1994 road movie about two men driving a small dog-shaped van — that one — is, structurally, two and a half hours of dumb questions asked between friends. that is why it works.

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