Congratulations on Learning Guitar!

You’ll notice we didn’t say “to play guitar” in the title above. That’s not a mistake. You’re going to learn guitar tomorrow. Not how to play it. Because playing an instrument insinuates that you’ll use it to produce music and express yourself in the world. What you’re going to be doing is a lot less like that and a lot more like “spending eighty dollars for an untuneable piece of shit at a used music shop.”

When you bring it back to your dorm room you’ll open up the “my first chords” teach yourself how to play guitar book and awkwardly place your hand over the fret. You’ll give the instrument a few strums, producing a horrible sound with each of them. You’ll start to hate yourself a little with each pluck of a gnarled and spiteful string, wondering what kind of gypsy curse forced this guitar into your hands.

After a few minutes of lazy plucking your mind will be on fire, the book the last of your thoughts. You’ll think only of how to destroy the guitar, how to remove it from your life. That, of course, will be when the co-ed comes in.

She’ll be blonde, or brunette, of medium build and height. She’ll be made up but not an aggressively trampy way. Just a semi-trampy way, the way that makes you think she’ll give it up if you seem kind of interesting just so she can tell the story to her friends who she doesn’t really like but spends time with anyways because that’s what you do as a freshman at college.

She’ll sit on the side of your bed and stroke the sheets.

“Keep playing,” she’ll say in an unaccented American voice, and you will comply. You will understand the power of the guitar. And when she slides her hand inside your pants you’ll understand why you were drawn to this horrible instrument. It will be the most magical five minutes of your life, until your roommate walks in and starts yelling at you, beginning a seven month campaign of psychological and sexual warfare between two previously civil people.

Congratulations Learning Guitar!