This Week's Irrelevant Rant
by Mikel Jolet | 00.00.0000

It's Friday. I can tell it's Friday because Guided by Voices announced their plans for a new album today. Something they do just about every Friday. And I'm thinking the same thing I always think when I hear anything about Guided by Voices: I just don't drink enough. I think, "Life is passing me by, like this big traveling carnival of hash pipes, topless girls, oral sex, lip-piercings, and acid trips--led bravely by Robert Pollard, the pied piper of aging debauchery, and I just don't get any of it."

If I drank more, I'd understand. If I just smoked pot or did heavy drugs or went to raves, I'd get it. My generation has an ethos and it's not going to be found in the dark room where I sit and write all day. It's out there: in the desert, the club, the house party--that gray volkswagen bathed in blue light driving through the dense forest, the windy road twisting around the dark mountain, "Pink Moon" playing in the background for the four twenty-somethings in the car who've figured out the true meaning of their evening won't be found at that noisy party by the cliff, but out there, on that road, with Nick Drake and the blue light. And I'm pretty sure they're all high. They look high.

I'm 28. White. Male. College-educated. I'm supposed to like Guided by Voices. Just like I'm supposed to like drugs. I am the target market for both. My friends who like Guided by Voices all drink daily and approach my distaste for the music with the same sort of half-slung pot-induced rambling given to me at the Grateful Dead concert I attended in 1995 in San Francisco when a whirling nineteen-year-old dervish responded to my consternation over why so many seemingly rational people would idolize the likewise half-slung ramblings of a certain overage, overweight, overwrought Jerry Garcia (who, like Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices, wrote, like, a hundred songs a day) by saying, "Duuuude, it's Jerry, man. You don't have to understand it. You just have to feel it."

Well I'm sorry people, but I need adjectives. Verbs. Nouns. Complete thoughts. And music is not some party trick where you get more points for writing a bunch of songs real fast. Someone explain it to me. Oh wait, you're all too high.

This is how things get done in the world. Freud took more cocaine than Ozzie Ozbourne. The Romans had an entire God devoted to wine. The Druids took ergot. Shammans took acid. Shit, I'm Jewish and I'm required to drink at Passover. Jesus hit the bottle. Cheif Seattle--peyote. St. Augustine--fructose. Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes--absinthe. I'll bet the Neanderthals spun around in circles at parties. George W. snorted coke and then quit, and look where that got us. We were better off when he was a crack head. This is no accident.

Jerry Garcia knew this and it's how he wrote those nine million songs.

The Druids knew this and it's how they built Stonehenge. Those stones were heavy. Don't tell me someone didn't hit a bong made of tree bark before coming up with that idea: "Dude, let's totally build like this big rock formation and not say why."

Robert Pollard knows this and it's why he's getting laid--right now, as you read this--despite the fact he's 43 years old with bad skin and a beer belly.

I'm in great shape. I haven't had a drink in weeks. I don't smoke pot. And I'm not getting laid right now.

God, I hate Guided By Voices. I need a drink.