If I had a time machine, I would cash in my 401k and my IRA, buy the best guitar I could afford, and warp back to 1987...

KILGORE TROUT: Hello, 13-year-old Kilgore. Quit playing Lode Runner for a minute and take this. You're going to learn to play guitar.

YOUNG KILGORE: But I have to finish my trigonometry homework.

KT: Never mind that. You're going to flunk out of college anyway, so you might as well learn something that will enable me... erm, you... well, us... to soak my/your/our sorrows in empty sex with drunk college chicks. You think the Law of Cosines is going to get you laid?

YK: I'm not going to have sex with any drunk college chicks. I'm going to wait until marriage.

KT: Christ, I forgot about that. I should have come back before Mom gave you Preparing for Adolescence by Dr. James C. Dobson. (Grabs Young Kilgore by shirt front.) Now, you listen to me, goddammit! Everything you read in that book was lies, you got it? Lies, I tell you! Do you know how much sex that book cost us?

YK: No.

KT: You know that cute girl in English class you keep staring at? With the flat chest and the hook nose and the long skirts? She's going to beg you to fuck her when you're 17, but you're going to put it off till you're 20. Twenty!

YK: (Dumbfounded)

KT: Three years of hot sex we threw away. (Clenches fists, raises eyes to the heavens.) Curse you, Dr. James C. Dobson!

YK: If we're going to be with her, why do we need the guitar and the drunk college chicks?

KT: Well, it's not going to work out. And then there's going to be a Sahara-sized dry spell, and believe me, you'll be happy to fill your bed with drunk college chicks.

YK: I don't know...

KT: Listen. Do you want to be thirty years old, sitting alone in your apartment on a Saturday night, posting bitter essays to the Internet about your sexual frustrations? Or do you want to be playing lead guitar for a band called Monkey Cunt and having three-ways in the ladies' rooms of back-alley clubs?

YK: What's the Internet?

KT: It's a place where you're going to be spending way too much time if you don't pick up that guitar.

[Feel free to write your own ending. I'm going to bed.]

+posted by Lawrence @ 5/22/2004 11:57:00 PM