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By that I mean, they won't believe me if I tell them that I'm really sort of a shy person - and even worse, they won't believe me if I tell them that I wasn't, and never have been, the model boy-next-door type. The first type are the biggest pests as far as I'm concerned. Because they're hung-up on fame and the rest of it, they think you are exactly the person they've built-up in their minds from the image they've gotten of you somewhere. When you try to explain to them that you are really not the hippest person in the world - that, in fact, you are shy about meeting people - they think you're lying. They want you to perform all the time. Of course, I feel sorry for them. Any person who has so little in her own life that she has to live on the fame of someone else is pretty tragic. What I mean is, each person has a value of his or her own as a person ... and when they start getting hung on the fame of others, instead of their own worth, they're giving up that much of themselves. The second type is a bit easier for me to understand. By that I mean, it's easier for me to understand some bird saying to herself: "Peter is |
nice, just like that boy down the block who I like." After all, that is the image that The Hermits try to project ... that we are not dirty, nasty or anything like that. However, the fact of the matter is that we're not exactly innocent, either! After all, none of us - and by that I mean every popular rock group - got to be where we are without seeing some of the dirt of life. And, for my part, I don't think it's hurt us any. By that I mean, I think it's foolish to think that the world is always going to be nice to you just because you have some high-blown idea of how you're going to be nice to it. Life, to me, is a very real thing - and I prefer to take it as it comes, sometimes nice and sometimes nasty. I feel sorry for the boy-next-door types, too. Although not half so sorry as I do for the others I mentioned. That's not because I like them better, but because I honestly believe they have more going for them. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's somehow less hurtful to people to be nice than nasty. So it doesn't strike me so bad that someone should want to believe in innocence. To sum it all up, I really feel that I'd like to be accepted as myself - and not just an image. Like most people in the world, I have my nice and my nasty moments, and they're both part of me. In short, the birds who bug me most are the ones who forget I'm Peter and not Herman.
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