First, picture your friend in a super funky hat. Like, the funkiest hat you can fathom. Imagine a court jester’s hat made entirely of live prawns. Then picture that absolutely bonkers hat atop your friend’s sweaty, bulbous head while they pour their heart out to you. Since this exercise requires nearly all of your mental stamina, it's an exceptional way to tune out your dear friend’s incessant prattle of, “something something my nutritionist slept with my wife and is now blackmailing me for ransom yada yada.”
Test the vitality of your brain’s grid-mapping cells by devising an elaborate escape route. I mean, you’d never need to escape from the welcome company of a dear friend, but it never hurts to be prepared! With this exercise, you won’t register a single syllable of your dear friend droning on about the innumerable debts his whore of a wife has run up all over town! Like, did someone say Snoozeville!?
Keep your body occupied by tending to your many festering wounds—after all, they’re beginning to crust! Stopping the floods of oozing pus seeping from your likely infected gashes will become priority numero uno! As you secure the final layer of heavy-duty wound dressing, you'll find yourself pondering on the frailty of human flesh, how no being on earth can escape the cruel promise of their own eventual demise—we all must shuffle off this mortal coil one day.
While your friend blabbers on, now telling the droll and frankly, unoriginal sob story of, “I caught my wife sucking the toe of an old grifter named Garth wah wah wah,” keep yourself busy by employing your acute visual skills. Survey your surroundings to deduce which of the nearest objects could inflict the maximum amount of blunt force trauma on your dear friend should it (god forbid!) come to hand-to-hand combat. Keep your eyes peeled for anything constructed of obsidian!
Replay a fond memory in your mind’s eye. I recommend recalling a time when your dear friend wasn’t being such a fucking buzzkill, as this will also help stifle your growing urge to roundhouse kick them. Why not harken back to that time you slept with your dear friend’s wife? Remember? It was your friend’s birthday? The night they said that you were the brother they never had? Then your friend passed out after one too many vodka crans (which you spiked with Clorox) and you slept with the love of their life? Ring a bell? Good times!
Make a mental list of excuses you can weaponize for the next time your dear friend (who is inching closer into acquaintance territory with every breath) wants to hang out. You may be trapped in the unrelenting clutches of emotional intimacy for now, but a badass pimp like you won't make the same mistake twice! After exhausting this last exercise, your friend will have certainly ceased his tiresome drivel. They will likely be well into the next phase of throwing themselves at your feet and sobbing like a filthy little leper child. But hey! At least they’re done yammering!