If you are a cook at Coney Island, and you buy a guitar in a pawn shop before work one day, most likely Sam the dishwasher will come out of the back and tell you you’re in the band.

When you tell him you’ve never played guitar before in your life, most likely he will say its punk rock, you don’t need to know how to play. Then he will say he can teach you.

After a month of practicing in a humid storage unit, most likely you will play your first gig in a two-story apartment, and the floor will bounce with the mass of the mosh pit.

When they ask you to take a solo, most likely you will simply turn your guitar toward your amp and feedback for 5 minutes.

After the show, most likely 5 drunk college students will come up and tell you it was the best solo they ever heard.

If your kind of shy, most likely you will have your first-you know-with one of the waitresses at Coney Island who has just started noticing you since you are in the band.

Most likely you will revel in your newfound underground popularity and fail your college history class which starts at 8 in the morning.

You will play a number of gigs around town until summer, when most likely you will go to upstate New York and visit an ashram where they tell you to remember two things: God and your death.

When you come back down to Florida, you will play one more gig and most likely take it as an omen to leave the band when someone urinates on the drums in the middle of your solo.

Years later, when you pick up the guitar again, in earnest, and start writing songs, most likely you will try to look up Sam to show him you have kept with it and to thank him.

When someone tells you, Sam died while scuba diving in an underwater cave, most likely you will feel how fragile the whole thing is, and you will remember what they said at the ashram.