Damn You, Meg White.

Heroes are for suckers.

Or at least that's what one of my own heroes, gonzo music journalist Lester Bangs, once said. After my own personal savior and hero, Jack White (of the White Stripes), ruined all of my hopes and dreams (slight exaggeration) this past fall, I can see where Lester is coming from. Kind of. My irritated, brazen, beligerant side can anyway.

So what happened to make me turn my back for nearly two weeks on the pinnacle of genius of modern music that is Jack White?

His bandmate and big sister Meg broke the myth.

You see, the White Stripes are all about screen porches, lemonade, broken guitars, and old record players. At least in my pathetic fantasy they are. They are immune to these scary modern times of "invisible music" as Jack puts it (mp3s and the age of the download), Britney Spears meltdowns, and T-Mobile Sidekicks. Their music creates a cocoon of childlike wonderment and old-man wisdom. They truely are timeless. But during their tour to promote Icky Thump this year, Meg started to have panic attacks so severe that she couldn't travel. Panic brought on by the hecticness of jet planes and press releases (and maybe drugs, who knows). She broke that old world persona of the White Stripes. And she broke my dreams of going to an open admission White Stripes show in Chicago, being right up at the front, and being asked to sing "St. James Infirmary" with her and Jack, and then obviously being whisked away to their old time 1800s cottage in Nashville where I would hang out with Loretta Lynn and become a taxidermist. Because THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED if Meg hadn't gotten afraid of planes or whatever.

After I saw the news in a White Stripes bulletin on Myspace (the irony is killing me), I wept. And I couldn't listen to them for two weeks. Which is an un-Godly amount of time for me. I listen to them daily, and all of a sudden I couldn't hear a cut from their new record without slamming a fist through a wall. I still can't listen to their live concert stuff out of grief of not seeing them this fall (I've seen them twice before but I just KNEW this would be the concert where Jack would let me join the band).

Thinking about it, I realize it isn't Jack's fault. He didn't cancel the tour. I'm sure he would think I was the most beautiful little snowflake if I did get to see them. And in my mind he's always represented "the White Stripes myth" better than Meg anyways. So I've gone on to surely disappoint Lester Bangs and hero-ize the White Stripes. But it still kind of ruined my life.