This High School Rock Band Is The Pinnacle Of Our Sad Lives

Todd, I can’t believe you’re fifteen minutes late for practice. We need to take this band more seriously. People say life gets better after high school, but in our case they’re wrong. The peak of our dismal lives is right now, at Thunderfoot practice drinking Fanta in my mom’s damp basement. 

I just know it! 

Hayden, in twenty years when you’re unhappily married with three kids living in a suburb of Cleveland, you’re going to look back at doing a guitar solo at Tessa Carville’s graduation party as the zenith of your bleak existence.  You’ll take your guitar with you everywhere from PTA meetings to subdivision barbecues, hoping that someone will ask you to play a few chords so you can feel something, anything. They never will!

Lots of great bands met in high school.  But guys, we’re no Radiohead. We’ve never played a show without someone forgetting an instrument.  This is the most creatively fulfilled any of us will ever be. And no one is taking it seriously!    

Zelda, this isn’t the last time you’ll be the badass frontwoman of a rock band. You’ll lead Swim Clubb to moderate success on the alt-rock charts until you’re kicked out of the band for refusing to give the drummer a blowjob leading to your eventual overdose death at age thirty-one. So, cherish this experience right here, right now, standing under my dad’s poster of Playboy Playmate August 1994 Maria Checa singing our best song Homework is for Pussies. 

Didn’t it feel amazing when we got a standing ovation at Michael Stampmiller’s 15th birthday? I bet you would have appreciated it more if you knew it would be the last time over fifty people approved of you at the same time. 

And none of you will fill out the Doodle I sent to schedule a weekly practice?

Todd, remember that day when the school let us play at the football pep rally and quarterback Riley Miller patted you on the back and said, “Nice one.” That was the moment you realized you’re gay. In twenty-five years you’ll be a closeted Indiana Congressman who can only cum in his wife when he imagines that touch.  This is the last time you’ll be in a room with people that love you unconditionally. 

And you show up fifteen minutes late?

And me, Petey? I’ll need these memories more than any of us. When all of you go to college, I’ll stay right here in my parents’ basement working at Pizza Hut and trying to recreate this magic.  I’ll join other bands, but none of them will live up to the imagined glory of Thunderfoot. Remembering this tiny summer of artistic freedom will be the only joy I’m capable of experiencing. In thirty years, I’ll die alone from obesity-related heart disease right here on this Chintz sofa. No one will mourn me! 

And you all refuse to pitch in $10 each to buy a new amp?   

Our lives will be a pointless cycle of work and stress and sadness that will only cease with the sweet respite of the grave. So let’s pick up these instruments and poorly play our little hearts out until we break up in two months when Hayden gets accepted to Stanford.  

This is the best time of our lives! And it’s not even that good! Rock n’ roll!