(An unrelated picture of Norway’s Mortiis and I)

On a tour of Europe in February of this year, I received the most touchingly sincere, heart breakingly heartfelt fan letter ever written by anyone ever. While reading it, with my hands trembling in gratitude and my lips gently quivering in appreciation, two big blue teardrops, the likes of which I’d never seen before, rolled tenderly down upon my flushed red face-cheeks in perfect symmetry, before falling perfectly onto the page of adoring words before me.

Just prior to entering Norway, our traveling party was detained for 7 hours at customs while they searched our van looking for some sort of memento by which to remember me by, but were disappointed when all that turned up was a couple of grams of marijuana, samples of Xanax and some pills of Adderall in a ziploc baggie. No 8×12 promotional photos to hang in their offices? Boy, did we get a lecture! Before letting us go, they tried (unsuccessfully) to prepare us for just how huge we were in Norway!

When we arrived at the venue, it was Beatlemania all over again. The promoter came right up to me and hand delivered a letter postmarked from a tiny town in the Norwegian countryside, by someone named Svein Arne Lie. I was touched that someone would go to the mind-meltingly difficult trouble to write me, (*ME*, you guys) little old me…a personalized fan letter. I opened it immediately and I was touched even harder.

(Click to enlarge then click back to get back because I don’t know how to make it open in a new window)

Now, I’d encountered this sort of unrelenting adoration before, most memorably in Rennes, France when a middle age couple who were clearly lifelong fans, had camped out at the venue hours before we’d arrived, and were carrying with them multiple photos of us and notepads that they emphatically demanded we fill up with our famousy john hancocks. That made me cry a little bit too, but this man in Norway- he went above and beyond. Not only did Svein bother to write his letter in English rather than in his mother tongue, but he went to the painstaking pain to make photocopy after photocopy after photocopy of the letter to ensure that it would make the long, personal voyage to Oslo, rainstorms be damned. And get this: he signed it THREE times! To top it off, the last two signatures were in pen and ink, to make sure beyond the shadow of a doubt, it was a personal letter! Wow.

For some reason, the letter was dated May 2008 (with an “8″ re-drawn [and then photocopied] over a “7″), even though he was sending it to me in February 2009. I suspect this was to make it clear he had been meaning to send this letter to me many times, but his nerves got the better of him each time, and he shoved it back in his drawer, shamefully. Included with the letter was a return-address envelope to send back as many autographs I could possibly stuff into it. Did I ever!

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