Post-Modern Drunk: DMB!!!11!!1!
I was never really a smooth operator coming out of high school. I didn't date at all until I went off to college, though I had many close female friends who I pined after secretly for years. College was different, though. There were girls everywhere. Pretty ones. It was possible to fall in love a couple of times a day just going to class and walking around campus.
I got to know a couple of them, and dated a little bit--though never the girls I really wanted to date. There were certain girls on campus that I found myself wanting to...well, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with, to, or on these girls, but I know I wanted to do it with, to, or on them. They were beautiful, charming, funny. They also had three further things in common: they were brunettes, they loved Dave Matthews Band, and they didn't want to sleep with me.
The pivotal moment probably came in late April in 1998. One girl, Lauren--who looked like a tall Sandra Bullock or maybe Mary-Louise Parker, came by to see my roommate and said that the new Dave Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets had come out, and they were walking over to Wal-Mart to pick it up, would we like to come along.
So I did.
Walking over to Wal-Mart to buy the new Dave Matthews Band album was about the level of the cultural experience I had going to college in Northwestern Indiana. It's definitely not the stupidest thing I've done because of a woman, either.
I listened to Dave Matthews Band off and on for years afterward. I can even say that I liked it--though I don't understand why anymore--until I went to see my first DMB concert in 2000, at Soldier Field in Chicago. The assemblage of douchebags there, filing Soldier Field to capacity (61.500, according to Wikipedia), was enough to put me off DMB forever, even before the 25 minute long violin solos kicked in, and not all the hot brunettes in the world could keep me enthused.
I still have the CDs, even, somewhere in storage. They're not worth anything, and I can't throw things away.
Addendum: Other bands I started listening to in the hopes that it would get me laid:
Tori Amos
Fiona Apple
Belle & Sebastian
Talking Heads
Second Addendum: Bands I Have Subjected Those I Sleep With To
The Mountain Goats
Menomena
Neutral Milk Hotel
