Yes I watched the Friends Final Episode. Why the heck not. By now you've heard or read a thousand opinions on it, and you may have even watched it yourself. I'm not going to talk about the sitcom, I'm going to talk about the culture of Friends. I'm 25, which means I was 15 when Friends got started, and my formulative years were spent in the shadow of Friends culture.

1994 was the year Friends got started. It's also the year Kurt Cobain was murdered committed suicide and joined the 27 club. Nirvana made a huge impression on my culture, because they were the first ones to say "Hair rock sucks." I've read somewhere that they literally followed Warrant (of Cherry Pie fame) into the studio to make "Nevermind". R.E.M., Soundgarden and their imitators are still a powerful force in the music scene of young folks today, because they try to tell us something real. Methinks the Friends writers think they're telling us something real, but its obvious from the tactics of the last episode that they jumped the shark long ago.

That reality is pain. Most of us don't have parents that are married to each other. Brad Pitt put it so succinctly in Fight Club: "Our fathers are our models for God. If our fathers bailed what does that tell us about God?" The music culture is saturated with pain: Everybody hurts Michael Stipe sometimes and he's losing his religion; Alex Alexis' father gave him a name and then he walked away, Jeff Beck is a loser baby, so why don't you kill him, Eddie Vedder can't find a better man, Jakob Dylan's car is missing a headlight while his heart brakes on 6 th avenue, and Billie Joe Armstrong is a basket case.