24 years is almost my whole life

I don't remember not loving John Lennon. As far back as I can remember I have idolized the man. Remember now, at seven I couldn't tell Michale Jackson and Prince apart, but I knew who John Lennon was. At ten years old I was calling the local top 40 station to request "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." At 12, when our choir teacher assigned us composer reports and everybody else was turning in reports on Beethoven, Mozart and Maurice Starr (shut up, I was 12 in 1990), I turned in this huge paper on John Lennon. I read Catcher in the Rye when I was 14 because Mark David Chapman declared it his bible and I wanted to know how Chapman could interperet a work of fiction (an incredible book, but still) as a message to kill a Beatle. My summer reading when I was 15 was The Lives of John Lennon, a book that was subject to being repeatedly flung across the room because it would upset me. I was the kid who, when everybody else was doodling the name of their crush in their notebook, was figuring out how to replicate Lennon's self portrait (the one that appears on the cover of the Imagine soundtrack). So yeah, I'm a fan. I used to wonder what the world would be like if Mark David Chapman hadn't succeeded. I wonder if our world would be this messed up or if it would simply be messed up in a different way. I wonder what he'd have to say about things like The Swift Boat guys and Farenheit 9/11. I wonder if he would be making fun of Britney Spears and whether or not he would like Eminem, and if he would have recorded anything with Nirvana. See, the thing is, as much as I wish he was still around--because he isn't, we still get to have our hero. We will always know John Lennon as that brilliant tortured revolutionary who wrote songs simply for himself but inspired all of us to get up and do something, even if it wasn't something he would have agreed with. Because he is gone, he's never had to sell out completely, unwittingly choke on his own message or fade away. He is still a strong voice of dissent, encouraging us to act and create and live, but to do so on our own terms. It's a lot to think about. Oh well, off to bed!