Philosophizer September 25th, 2009 07:27PM  
The song begins by asking the MGMT fan if they could find a place (beach) where you could just do kids stuff (make and play with paint). The answer for VanWyngarden involves looking back in time, to look back upon our memories when we were all young. It continues by reminiscing his youth because he wants to tell us about what they called "the Weekend Wars."
But first... When it picks up the pitch and slows down the words, I see someone taking psychedelic drugs. "Instant battle plans" decorate the sidewalk with colors that challenge the fear and laws against taking such intense substances. "Mental mystics" can be seen as the hallucination of a warped & twisted, stripped-down car, which can only be done by amplifying your mind to embrace colorful lights, majestic sounds (good music), and love again without any strings attached. Psychedelics either prepare you for a weekend of war or put you in it; probably the later, since uppers make you even happier than your fondest childhood memory. Somewhere within your mental trip, you remember your childhood because it was the only other thing generating this much happiness inside yourself.
Then the intensity and rhythm increases, becoming more energetic and hip sounding. Suddenly, we are introduced to the idea of our parents. Children obviously need their parents but are also "cursed" to have them, for they make them try all sorts of things and do things that seem like daunting or impossible tasks, when all you want to do is have fun. You end up messing up the place or breaking a rule or 2 (such as not wanting to clean it up right away), which gets ya grounded (like you "couldn't use (your) computer..." Stuff only ever got boring when it seemed like things slowed down; in this case, you were grounded for making a mess and not wanting to clean it up. But when you thought about the weekend in your room or something, it ended your boredom, and the ideas happily ran upon your imagination.
The following stanza seems to come full circle by bringing the listener back to the present. It focuses on the relationship between man & woman and how that can affect people metaphorically. Losing love in any person or form can be as devastating as losing a limb (100 years to grow an arm). Then you'd escape your lost companion by driving to Arizona out along the horizon into the sunset. While driving, you realize you may have a torn heart with conflicting desires (continue to love or not) and life's troubles (love lost), so you think to yourself: "Screw It, I'm still a Weekend Warrior."
MGMT explains why in the last part: He's cursed to become a father, he's only one sound or voice out of many many / that when he speaks / there's no point in trying to win out over everybody else, so he sings (like is doing now) / he doesn't know where to begin the song, but he will write one for us nonetheless so he can sing it to us later, like he is doing now in the present within the song.

The lyrics defy the normal rules of conventional speech, even most songs. It literally jumps from one concept to another to fast-forward through life. Typically weekends are the most active days of the week in various cultural and social settings around the world. For MGMT, their weekends were so amazing that they had to write a song about how cool they are to everybody. In that song, the message would summarize to something like this: your fondest memories make you a better person so hold onto those of then and make some more now.