Thank you for the heartfelt post Minuteman,
I think all of us can relate to both sides of that coin: wanting and not wanting friends.
Funeral is right in stating that we need friends.
But a worthwhile add-on to this, which is often forgotten:
It is Not always better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all. 
I myself find that as I get older it is harder to make new friends, when we are younger there is a common goal of exploration/discovery of life and its facets, which groups and binds us. While the more you know of 'the magician's tricks' the less we are motivated to discover more. And discovery, learning is one of the most equalizing actions we can undertake, even sometimes uniting NT an ND's. So my best advice is to, within a hobby/activity/theme/topic that stil holds mystery to you, search for peers you can befriend this way, the shared goal of discovery, will help to circumvent your sometimes present, sometimes not motivation to socialize. in psychology 101 i think they call this task-driven socialization... 
kind regards,
Kada