I Wish I Could Play Guitar

Upon my conception, those dastardly genetic fairies played a very cruel trick on me. Perhaps they had a bad day at the fairy office, or didn't get done with all their TPS reports, but for whatever reason they deemed it necessary to pull a real dick-move on an the unsuspecting fetus occupying my mother's womb (how's that for imagery?). When Martin Alosha Robinson II was birthed in the fine town of Columbia, Missouri, out came a child who loved nothing in the world as much as he loved music. At the same time, out came a child who was completely incapable of carrying any semblance of a musical tune, horrifyingly unable to schematically grasp music in its simplest form. I'm not talking about two different babies.

Although music in most all forms appeals to me, to unspeakable lengths, my true passion is rock. Rock is a very broad term, an all-encompassing mega-genre. When it began, rock was Elvis Presley knocking down barriers to the thrumming of guitar with his arousing hip-thrusts. Later, it was the Beatles popping ecstasy like aspirin plucking their acoustic guitars like foreign objects and on their better days upstaging Mr. Christ. Now, rock can be just about anything. Like a weird, dysfunctional family with overbearing parents, rock and roll has ceased to be a recognizable name and has instead diverged into bizarre, likely completely unrecognizable subgenres if not for the fact that they all carry their parents' trademark cleft lip. (that was a WAY better analogy in my head) 

Tool and Phish thrash their guitar and scream obscenity laden somethings at the top of their lungs. Blink 182 and Sum 41 mix hard rock ideals with poppy vocals, melodic guitar hooks and catchy choruses. Neutral Milk Hotel and Pavement combine intentionally shaky, too-cool-to-sing-conventionally mumblings with non-sequitur lyrics and confusing unaligned guitar strumming. Although I am more taken with some of the aforementioned sub-genres than others, they are all tolerable in their own capacity. They are united, however, by the guitar. I love the guitar.

I've tried to learn the guitar. It's not happening. Not only is it way more work than I will probably ever bring myself to accomplish solely on the empty fumes of self-motivation, but I can't do it. My hands fumble clumsily over the strings and my muscle memory fails me every time I attempt to deftly switch chords. If I one day by some miracle figured out how to play a song that doesn't begin with "Smoke" and end with "Water", it'd be pointless anyway because I'd have to carry around an aptly-voiced singer on my back at all times if I wished to put together any sort of performance. I do have a pretty big backpack...

Boo. I seriously want to play guitar.