Don’t meet your heroes.  Otherwise, meet them, hopefully they blow smoke in your face.  Hopefully they refuse your selfie and steal your girlfriend.  It wouldn’t be their fault.  More their duty.  They’re saving you.  Saving you from a lifetime of grueling lukewarm mimicry.  Saving you from yourself.

    It’s an impossible thing, to idolize anyone.  It’s the first step in many pitiful steps toward devastation.  Toward failure.  Learn from them.  Do your impersonations early, and then maybe it’s best to lean toward hatred.  Mock them in your music.  Curse them and sweat and bleed on their memorabilia.  Remember when they didn’t shake your hand or sign your t-shirt.  Even if they did, remember it so that they didn’t.  Remember that they had bad breath and head lice and untied shoes.

    All this time, you were played.  Played like a lousy pupped.  The hero was a drunk.  The hero was a villain and a slob and an strong-armed ape with his women.  And you thought they were made of gold.  You dreamed and hoped and cried about them.  Prayed to live up to what they’d accomplished.  The perfection.  It was impossibly perfect.  Too good to be human.  Skill of unattainable levels.  All those days, tracing their lines.  Building up and up and up.

    Until you finally realized.  They’re awful.  They’re eyes are sunken in with guilt and terror and mistakes.  They’re cracks are puttied sloppily, like the walls in an old motel room.  They’ve got cilantro in their teeth.  Their mother’s call them the wrong name.  They got Cs on their report cards and spankings from their fathers.

    All of it, once infallible, now distinctly human.  Flawed thoroughly.  Up close, the brush strokes are imperfect.  Distinct errors in their ways.  Cracked foundations.  Cracked makeup.  Cracked.  The whole thing brutally cracked.

    This is important.  An important distinction.  However it arrives, it is a necessary derailment.  A glitch in the ideological world.  Essential for advancement.  If not for these terrible, horrifying flaws, you’d be right in their wake.  Forever at the mercy of their dust and their rut.

    That only goes away when your hero dies.  When your hero spits in your face or gets accused of rape or drinks himself to death or blows his beloved brain into the ceiling fan.  Crushing as it may be, this is when you come into your own.  When you can see clearly, into the forest.  Off the paved road.  Out of the ravine that they spent all of their time carving.

    Their trail is littered with bodies.  All of them grasping at something etherial.  Something too perfectand slippery to hold.  Everyone of of the followers succumbing to the same hard death.  Everyone of them, like you, a plagiarist, an impersonator, a dull calf, suckling at an elusive teat.  

    Meanwhile, the idol is dissolving.  Spinning their wheels, just out of reach.  Dying their own death.  Suffering in their own frigid, frightening conditions.  The chase comes to a disastrous end.  A high-speed pursuit.  Ending in a ball of fire and pedestrians.  If you’re lucky, you’ll be too far behind, in space or years, to feel the impact.  Far enough behind to remain a bystander and not a casualty.

    The best thing that ever happened was the death of your hero.  Exposed and naked for long enough to see the truth.  They were never perfect.  They were never the gentle color you painted them.  Nothing about them was so smooth or decadent.  They were assholes.  They were bumbling idiots.  Mistake makers.  Fools.  Clowns.  Fuck-ups.  

    The whole time — they were everything you hated about yourself.  You were following a trail of smoke from a dying engine.    

    But once you’ve realized this — you’re free.