It's Hopper

so here's the email I sent:
"Hi Henry, no need to reply to this one either, i'm like a newsletter...

It's only May and there have been too many deaths that have occurred thus far in 2010.

Dennis Copper died.

You probably were already alerted about it, but...i hope that my emails won't be of such somber news from now on, like this one and my previous one with Dio was.

I hope your tour is going fine, best wishes from Romania. Since we're on the topic of Dennis Copper...i thought i could do worse than send a "ramonified" version of "Blue Velvet" which i recorded by myself some years ago, maybe 17 years old. I enclosed it just so i don't send the email bearing only the bad news about Dennis Copper."

and here's Henry's reply:
"It's Hopper.

Henry"


Holy shit. that laid into me really hard. i have an exam tomorrow and instead of continuing to study, i just stared blankly at the screen for almost 2 hours, thinking about this! WOW! This helped me realize what my exact relationship with Henry Rollins is: i think i'm obsessed with him. From just those 2 lines, those 3 words, those two proper nouns and one preposition....i felt exactly like i felt after the break-up with a certain someone that i was almost obsessed with and ended the relationship for no reason. Of course the context isn't the same, but my reaction was. And i realize that everytime i get an email from him...i always clench my teeth a bit, because i know it will be laconic, terse and cold - even when it's friendly. I looked up to him so much that i put everything that has to do with him on a pedestal. I am what I am today much because of him. In good and bad. In fact, most of the music i make now, has been influenced by stuff HE turned me onto along the years...so i basically make a lot of my music to impress HIM, like when a son is trying to make his dad proud that he learned something from him; a feeling i only READ about, but that's another story. I can expand on this analogy so much, because Henry was also like a father figure for me for such a long time, still continues to be, i partly grew up under his shadow. I owe a lot to him and anything he addresses directly to me has a HUGE impact.

So what i'm saying is....this email is a real eye-opener. It's a drag to fear everytime you open an email from someone you actually looked up to your whole life. It's hard to get a reaction that someone would get after doing something severely wrong, after embarrassing someone, after insulting someone. It's a drag to be put in place by someone you appreciate. It's a drag to be thought of as the ultimate idiot for just one simple mistake (i was actually a fan of Cop - i'm sorry - Hopper too, regardless of Henry). It's a drag to know you failed in the eyes of someone you always wanted to win for. It's a drag to get the total antithesis as a reply to a positive and passionate message you were trying to get across. It's a drag to be given the thumbs down before you even had the chance to prove yourself in front of someone. It's a drag to be like someone you look up to, and exactly that person to treat you like the last manner you wanna be treated in. It's a REAL drag to have your heart beat increase everytime you write a message thinking "i bet he'll put me down again...i should either watch my phrasing very carefully (which i always do anyway...even when i write him 3 rows - which you all know is really hard for me to achieve especially for someone that means as much as he does to me - i read and edit those words over and over until i can look at them bearing HIS mentality and judging them from HIS perspective) or not send it at all. And i wanna refrain for doing so but...it's so weird. It's weird to be someone's biggest fan yet to fear to address him directly, thinking that there's always a consequence.

It's a drag to give all you have good to give, and receive exactly the opposite in return. It cracks your face open, that's how hard it hits you. This doesn't mean i'll start to boycott him or anything, i'm still his biggest fan but knowing that he thinks i'm just another idiot when even i can admit he would probably find me quite interesting and similar to him,...if i managed to get him to think that...nothing is worse. For me. besides family. But at least i'm used with that. At least with family i'm obliged to be a fan...and quite often they make it easy. But when a peer makes you feel like a retarded unwanted child...

...then you KNOW that person has something special and arouses your interest even further. What a great ability to lay into people this hard. I rarely let people let me down even if they do the most malicious shit in the universe...but this is what happens when the elements of "obsession" or at least "appreciation" are inserted. I learned my lesson. But i'll probably repeat the same mistake because in this aspect...i have a disturbingly weak character. Shit. It's been three hours already. I guess he's like in the Chuck Norris jokes for me. Or like God for the christians. What if god would come down and say "i made you all just to mock you, you pieces of shit, you're a joke, how could you take yourselves seriously? You're all nothing and the more you inhale the air i provided you with, the more you shrink in my eyes, the more i wanna squash you all and make meat cloth patches out of your guts and wipe my ass with it." That's kind of what i interpreted from reading that.

I'm still a fan, but from now on...it'll just be weird. Everytime he'll say something i appreciate in an interview or on the radio show or anything that has to do with him...i'll get even madder...because i should've kept my mouth shut in the first place and i would've never known that from a certain point after hating certain people, it's inevitable you become a misanthrope. and 40 years of misanthropy on someone's shoulder...makes me appreciate the ART that he lays into people. Imagine how good at it he is. Imagine how good he is, when others think of me as callous and then just out of three words he wrote to me, i posted the longest thing on here thus far. Imagine how weak and naive i am and how cold and strong he is. Imagine how far i still have to go...

The bar was just raised.

Picture by me in 2007. me as in Matei. It's matei.