Let your star just shine on, bro

Well, I’m thankful that’s all over. It was great, but fuck man, there were dishes in my house until today…We cooked for fifteen people including a very old Englishman with his own bottle of gin, a seven month old and three guys who call themselves the Cobra Skulls. I’d say Thanksgiving was a success. Take that, Indians.
On Friday night, after work, I went with some friends to watch the Cobra Skulls play. They were absolutely great. I was really, really happy after the show and as we went next door to the adjacent bar to spend a few complimentary drink tickets I felt like the night was shaping up perfectly. Then I saw them.
On the stage in all their waterproof boots and cargo pants and dumb sweaters and five string basses and sparse, overthought goatees and floppy knitted hats and fifteen minute songs and irritating smug “jam faces” and hemp chokers and hackey sack calluses and beads and braided belts and dreadlocks and bongos and windchimes and instrumental interludes were a bunch of fucking hippies. HIPPIES! And they were jamming. This is unacceptable, man. Hippies? Now? In this fucking day and age? Haven’t you hippies gotten the Lebowskian memo? The bums lost, man. Besides, there’s just nothing threatening about being a hippy. You know who was a hippy? The guys who started Ben and Jerry’s. That’s a real rebellious and dangerous paradigm you’re forcing on everyone, BRO. Ugh. It’s enough to make me sick.
Okay, so these hippies—they were called, and I’m not kidding, Ultraviolet Hippopotamus. Did you read that shit correctly? Ultraviolet Hippopotamus!!!! ULTRAVIOLET HIPPOPOTAMUS?????????????????? FUCK, MAN!
I was pissed. I was so pissed. Here’s the thing, I’m thirty two. Phony, bullshit wealthy hippies in fancy hiking boots and jeep Cherokees and crappy jam bands are the very thing that got me angry with mainstream culture and into punk rock in the first place. When I was in highschool, the fake hippies were the dominant class. They were the athletes (oh, and they’d just wear the letter jacket and the rasta hat at the same time, like ANYONE could ever believe that shit’s acceptable) they were in the bands that played at all the functions. Hell, in my first band in highschool, we had a bona-fide hippy on the fucking guitar, complete with a poncho! They were everywhere! You couldn’t even throw together a group of dudes to start a punk/funk/pseudo stoner rock band without a hippy being in there. These were the people I vowed to never be. These fake ass hippies made me sick when their band (called Smile High, as though THAT'S somehow okay) rigged the fucking battle of the bands my sophmore year and pretty much stole the prize money from my punk/funk/pseudo stoner rock band, and then, in the same month, held me down and shaved my head with sheepshears at a hockey practice. These were the hippies of the early nineties—entitled rich bully douchebag, aggressive, dicks with a ‘hey bro, I’m just chillin, what’s your beef?’ attitude in their back pockets for when people decided to call them on their completely unacceptable bullshit.
When I started traveling, going on tour, and visiting a large collection of my friends from highschool out in Boulder, I was shocked. The hippies ran the town. Everywhere I went was some dick in two hundred dollar corduroys and a fully loaded SUV ASKING ME FOR CHANGE?!?!?! This was a new low. Now these fucks, who had more money than me were expecting me to bankroll their glass pipe/kind bud fetish? Unacceptable, man. Just unacceptable. (On a bit of a side note, in my experience, these hippies, with their crystally weed and their glass pipes and their dogs on a rope and all that, were as a general rule, SO STINGY with their weed. They were, as per my recollection, mind you, to the last, a bunch of uptight pricks who would rather look at weed [and make you smell it and comment on the ‘red hairs’ or whatever] and tell you all about how great it is and then put it back in a jar than let you try it. This is neither here nor there, just sayin.)

Okay, so that’s out of the way, and we’re back. I’m absolutely furious at Ultraviolet Hippopotamus. AND, these guys are in their early twenties? You know what that means, man? They’re still making hippy jam bands! Didn’t the death of hippy santa, the subsequent disbanding of the Dead, the slowdown and hiatus of Phish, the completely stupid name of the Stringcheese incident and the general realization that these people are a bunch of stinky dildos teach the kids anything? HOW ARE PEOPLE STILL DOING THIS? Anyway, I was through the roof, so I did what any self respecting person would do.
I booed.
I booed the shit out of this band. Over and over and over and over as loud as I possibly could. Their gross merch skank with her hairy armpits and new york slice of a bush was ‘grooving to the energy’ and giving me a dirty look at the same time, so I booed her ass too. Booo! Stupid hippies! Boo!
I guess I kind of see it as when your parents shame you when you do something ridiculously stupid. I was helping these kids out, man. I booed them mercilessly. I was trying to show them the consequences of being so recklessly unacceptable. And you know what they did? They smiled and kept jammin’ bro. How cool is that? They didn’t let the neg vibes harsh their mellow, not for a bit, bro. The groove must go on, bro. The groove must go on. Ugh.
I seriously thought their band was called Electric Rhinoceros, too, or Technicolor Rhinoceros, and that was pissing me off, until I realized that their actual name was so much worse than that. See, though, the thing about an ultraviolet hippopotamus is, he’s not visible to the naked eye. Chew on that, bro.
This is all making me very angry. Let’s just suffice it to say I don’t like hippies. And you didlos in Smile High, if you’re out there, you guys suck too, and regardless of your bullshit shenanigans that cost Gladhand (yes, I know) the BHS battle of the bands title in 92, your dumb hippy ways have only made me stronger. I don’t care how big your parents house was, or how big yours is now. I played real music in fucking Japan, Europe, Australia, Mexico and Cleveland and got paid for it, you fucking fake hippy dicks. Heh.