As I ponder the waxing moon in contemplative solemnity, free of any obligations either vocational or especially social on this Friday evening with nothing to attend and certainly nothing to attend with anyone, my record player excitedly hums my third go around of Forty Six & 2. Though the masterful musical gambits and ceaselessly complex polyrhythmic, ethereal, incantatory bardic gems that Tool (and no one else, save for perhaps Mozart) consistently lets loose from their unrivaled canon are company enough for a connoisseur of all things fine such as myself, I cannot help but be left befuddled as to the state of my communal isolation. I know that some corn-fed rubes and untold numbers of the uneducated rabble of simpletons that dictate our national dialectic would contend that there are plenty of other bands, artists, and various other stewards of Apollonian pursuits whose body of work is equally as thoughtful, complex, and intentional as that of Tool.
To that, I would posit this immutable query: if that were the case, if Tool is just one of many artists whose work belongs in the uppermost echelon of your regard, then why, over the course of the past six months since my recent discovery of Tool, would all of my friends, in systemic and calculable fashion slowly but surely stop talking to me?
I am certainly well-read and conscientious enough to ascertain that my relentless intellectual caterwauling extolling the unparalleled virtuosity of Tool’s albums and the fact that only a mind such as the one that rests serenely atop my shoulders and seemingly mine alone could even begin to comprehend is deterring to many. After all, even I could advocate on behalf of the devil momentarily to empathize with this sordid lot. It’s easy to imagine that it must be jarring, even aggravating for non-Tool fans to, I envision, take breaks from eating their fifth can of Hormel chili at lunchtime from their jobs at the steel mill before going home to their dilapidated shanty towns next to the city dump, only to have an erudite gentleman like me barge into their third world hovels to insist that they listen to Lateralus at full volume lest they be counted forevermore amongst those in that eternal grey twilight of those whose insatiable fetishization of the status quo has led them to the likes of lesser balladeering. However, I remain firm footed in the face of such a squall of mediocrity.
It certainly can’t be the fact that my entire being is repellent to the point of causing active, palpable discomfort, and it certainly can’t be that I’m riddled with a host of other unlikable qualities that would cause any reasonable person to head to the nearest exist at the mere mention of the possibility of my presence. It’s most definitely not that I’m conspicuously absent when the checks are brought at mealtime, that I haven’t bought deodorant since Obama was president, that I correct grammar in comment threads, that I refer to women as ‘females’ in normal conversation, or that I casually fart in crowded rooms and refer to it as “perfectly natural.”
No, the only plausible reason that I can deduce to explain my solitude is that Tool is, perhaps only rivaled by the wheel, the greatest invention of humankind, and the people simply don’t want to hear the truth.